Follow
Follow 1.x is now a deprecated version; see the Follow 2 pages for the current
version.
Ever wonder how people used your Web site? If they were ignoring
your navigation, and were using 'back' and 'forward' to skip around
because they were too confused?
Do you need to track authenticated users (like students doing
work online) through your site?
Follow is a session-based logfile analysis tool; with it, you
can improve your site by tracking how people use it. Take a look at
a sample output and have a look at the Readme to see how.
Currently, Follow uses Perl
5 or greater, and has only been tested on Unix (although users
have reported that it works well with Windows). It expects input in
Common Logfile Format (combined with Access and Referer stats, if
you wish) and outputs to plain text or HTML.
Follow is free for individual use; please contact me if you wish
to use Follow or its code for commercial use (i.e, reselling,
incorporating it into a product or service). See the license for more details.
Downloading Follow
Follow is available in a tarred, gzipped archive. To unpack it
under Unix, move it to the desired directory and type
$ gzip -d follow-1.51.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf follow-1.51.tar
The README is included in the package, and is mirrored here. I'd love to hear what you think of Follow;
drop me a line!
About this Version
Suggestions and bug reports should go to Mark Nottingham.
Version 1.51
- Fixed month (months started at 0-- duh...)
Version 1.5
- Times out sessions from a client after a preset period.
- Logfile parsing is more tolerant (regex instead of split).
- Allows limiting by IP address in addition to hostname.
- Follow.cgi handles CGI errors better.
- Reports day of access for each session.
- Better sorting.
- Includes accesses from proxies if they're authenticated.
- General code and efficiency improvements.
Version 1.0
- Added support for identification by identd and .htaccess style
user authorisation.
- You can now click to off-site referers from the HTML
output.
- Added a CGI wrapper script for controlling follow from the
Web.
Version 0.91
- Time-based sorting sucks less efficiency-wise.
- Follow now excludes image files, instead of specifically
looking for other files.
Version 0.9
- The -l flag limits the timeframe of analysis; with it you can
output records from only the last six hours, for instance.
- The -s flag sorts sessions in reverse-cronological order,
instead of the default alphabetical host listing.
5/12/97