Counters

[JQ Johnson]

--Roy Tennant writes: 

> Every Web server software of which I'm familiar records a number of 
> statistics.

This used to be true, and was made even more relevant by an informal
agreement among server authors to use a common log format.  The common log
format meant that you could often use the same analysis tool on different web
servers (especially if the tool was written in a portable language like C or
Perl).

However, it's becoming less true as the web becomes a more complex place. 
Most personal web servers such as the one bundled with MacOS 8 don't by
default (or don't at all) generate usage logs.  And many of the embedded web
servers (e.g. database servers) don't generate per-hit log statistics.  To
take a web server near and dear to the hearts of many on this list, consider
the III web server used in Innopac catalogs!  Quick:  how many people from
off-campus accessed the main page in YOUR III system last month?

Roy's comments apply to the most popular general purpose web servers (Apache,
Netscape, Microsoft IIS, WebSTAR, etc.).  The comment certainly applies, for
instance, to the web server at the site that asked about statistics (running
a very old 0.8 version of Apache).  Those are the servers that typically host
the kinds of static web pages indexed by the search engines.   But the
proportion of all web pages hosted on other web servers is probably rising.

JQ Johnson                      office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  e-mail: jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       voice: 1-541-346-1746
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          fax: 1-541-346-3485