Stories By Mary Eisenhart
Hearts Online--A Publishing Adventure
Nancy Capulet not only met her future spouse online, she wrote and self-published a book of online-dating advice. In the process, she got the book out months before a conventional publisher could deliver, enjoyed creative control--and also found out that self-publishing is a lot of work.
Reva Basch, online-research maven and author of the recent Researching Online For Dummies, offers insights into the rapidly changing digital-information landscape, and offers advice on finding what you want to know efficently.
garage.com CEO Guy Kawasaki on the business of starting up startups
For Salon
Domain name sales fuel economic reinvention of island kingdom.
How Palm Beat Microsoft: An Interview with Donna Dubinsky
Social Engineering, Web-Style: An Interview with Cliff Figallo
Archives
Interview with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, November 12, 1987
Interview with John Walker, Autodesk co-founder, March 26, 1992
Interview with Auto-By-Tel founder Pete Ellis, from MicroTimes Issue #179 (1998)
Copyright © 1999 by Mary Eisenhart. All rights reserved.
The Macintosh Website--Do-It-Yourself
Version
Making Sense of Your Traffic Logs With Funnel Web
By Mary Eisenhart
This site, which hosts www.valleypeople.com, www.yoyow.com, and www.virtualeditors.com, runs on a PowerMacintosh 8600 connected to a DSL line from DNAI. The web server software is WebSTAR 3.0.2 from StarNine.
Generally speaking, this setup is a great testimonial to the Mac's fabled ease of use, inasmuch as I'm able to run a web server, mail server, etc., with a complete lack of the technical background that's considered necessary for that sort of thing. (The downside occurs when I can't tell what the manual's talking about because I lack the theoretical foundation, but some combination of knowledgeable friends and tolerant tech support usually solves the problem.) For a small or home-based business, there's a lot to be said for running one's own web server ; with DSL and wireless prices falling in many areas, and increasingly friendly software offering good functionality for the price, barriers to entry are declining.
The following article is the first in a sporadic series on useful tools for the do-it-yourself entrepreneur-cum-webmaster. Because of my own setup, these will tend to be Macintosh products or, as in the case of the products discussed here, multiplatform products reviewed on the Macintosh.--ME
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Whether your site gets a few visits a day or a few million, you've probably found yourself staring at your site's traffic logs, which unfortunately have a tendency to look something like this, a format for which your brain is not optimized.
You'd like to know how much traffic you're getting, where it's coming from, where it's going. Perhaps you sell advertising on your site, and your clients want to know which pages get the most traffic (or, for example, which pages get the most traffic from Linux users). Maybe your client wants to see justhow many people saw his ad banner, and where they came from. Maybe you just redesigned your site and want to confirm that your visitors find it easy to navigate, or you want to see if your own media blitz has driven prospective customers your way.
Until fairly recently, if your server was a Mac, your best option for log analysis was a freeware application called Analog. Available on various platforms, it does a good job of making your log's information accessible, and it has the significant advantage of being free. However, Mac users, and most particularly Mac users who have never dabbled in command-line interfaces, may find its requirement for editing .config files in text editors a bit formidable, and its documentation opaque.
"You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to analyze what's happening with your website. You should just point and click," says Dr. Darren Williams of Active Concepts, the Australian startup responsible for Funnel Web, a commercial and considerably more accessible log analysis product. Just over two years ago, Williams was director of the biomedical multimedia unit at the University of Melbourne, overseeing a department that was heavily involved in online course development. To enable the course developer to gauge the materials' effectiveness, a program that became Funnel Web traced and analyzed the progress of students through the coursework, noting, for example, when they completed each lesson.
While teachers hailed this innovative approach to discerning when a student was genuinely having trouble with the material and when he hadn't cracked a virtual book, Williams and his colleagues immediately realized that the product had broader applications, and, in October 1997, launched Active Concepts to develop and market Funnel Web. Today, about 10% of the software's users come from the academic world, while commercial customers include NASA, Apple, and IDG UK.
Funnel Web ($249) and FunnelWeb Professional ($499)(various "crossgrades" and upgrade pricing offers available) come in Macintosh (7.1 or above) and Windows 95/98/NT, with Linux and FreeBSD versions shipping this month, closely followed by Solaris and Mac OS X Server versions.
Currently Funnel Web's users are divided roughly 50-50 between the Mac and Windows platforms. As it migrates into other, often more crowded markets, Williams acknowledges that it faces formidable competition from entrenched vendors, but adds that he'd rather be David than Goliath: "Most of the competitors are too large and not focused on our area.We think we can do it better than most people because we have a very good engineering team," which is constantly focused on improving Funnel Web's performance.
For purposes of this review I used the Professional version, although traffic on this site is presently too light to take advantage of many of its features, such as real-time monitoring and tracing mean paths. Both versions have a fast DNS resolution feature, and offer a high level of configurability in a point-and-click interface.
Configuring log analysis in FunnelWeb utilizes a point-and-click interface to specify the information you want to know and the format in which it should appear. Here, for example, we're analyzing only lines in which the extension .html appears, excluding visits from the webmaster from the analysis, and examining traffic from May 1999.
As a result, once you've mastered the software itself (for which there's extensive online documentation) it's easy to slice-and-dice your log data to answer any number of questions. For instance, see the sample report , generated from this site's May 1999 logs. In this case,t hefilters were set to count traffic on the whole site, but only accesses to .html files. It would be easy, for example, to analyze only traffic originating in Singapore, only visitors from government sites, or only users of English-language browsers, as well as traffic within a particular writer's directory.
(Privacy advocates will rejoice to learn that Williams and his team consciously did not give Funnel Web the ability to identify a particular user, even when it's technically possible. Check the log sample and sample report for examples of the type of information we're getting here.)
Whether your site is in your home office or your ISP's premises, your logs are a valuable tool for gauging its effectiveness. Funnel Web enhances your access to that information without requiring you to take a class first.