Measuring Web Statistics for Arbitrary Groups of Documents
The statistics page for kintespace.com has more than what most of us get from an Internet Hosting Service, its default statistics reports. This is because almost all Internet Hosting Services provide statistics for metrics on two extremes: either hit counts for the entire web site or hit counts for single documents. One way around this problem might be to divide a web site into sub-domains and then most Hosts will provide you with reports on each sub-domain—however this solution most likely creates the problem of aggregating all of these sub-domain reports into a single report. With these problems, all solutions point to something similar to the technology that produced the statistics page for kintespace.com. This page is located here:
http://kintespace.com/khits.html
This page is not composed by hand with a tool like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. This page is produced by an ASP page (since it was first written in 1998 before the .NET revolution and the peak of PHP popularity), SQL Server and an HTML template. This publishing model is quite conservative. It is the edit-dynamic-publish-static model that will should quickly make sense to people who have worked in corporate environments dominated by Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server and data entry people since the mid-1990s.
At bottom, this statistics page writes itself. It is independent of the Hosting Service displaying the page. Apart from the home page, all of the pages at kintespace.com are created under this portable model. Generating static pages also allows those brave souls who can manage web sites by hand to take them over using their Dreamweaver- or FrontPage-like environment. Again, this happens not infrequently in corporate environments during political infighting among factions. In many cases, the technical people on a web project can get yanked out of the project by a marauding executive. This edit-dynamic-publish-static model goes a long way to avoid explaining the importance of a database to the victims of a politically savvy marauder!
This year forward, I intend to upgrade this system using .NET technology, XML and Web Services.