Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Logging by Script and Database

If your site uses a database manager, you could sidestep this cumbersome procedure by writing scripts on the fly to log everything you want to know about your visitors, reading data about them from the environment variables, and recording their choices as they work through the site. Depending on your needs, it can be much easier to log the data directly than to mine it out of the log files. For instance, one of the authors (PL) has a medical encyclopedia web site (www.Medic-Planet.com). Simple Perl scripts write database records to keep track of the following:

• How often each article has been read

• How visitors got to it

• How often search engine spiders visit and who they are

• How often visitors click through the many links on the site and where they go

Having stored this useful information in the database manager, it is then not hard to write a script, accessed via an SSL connection (see Chapter 11), which can only be accessed by the site management to generate HTML reports with totals and statistics that illuminate marketing problems.