ART MATRIX - LIGHTLINK
                                            PO 880 Ithaca, NY 14851-0880
                                            (607) 277-0959      Voice
                                            (607) 277-8913      Fax
                                            (607) 277-5026      Modems
                                            homer@lightlink.com E-mail
                                            jes@lightlink.com   E-mail
 
                                            01/03/03 1:53pm
 
     WEB HIT STATISTICS

     Lightlink provides rudimentary text only web hit statistics,
based on the raw data from the raw web hit files.

     RAW WEB HITS

     Each night the web server logs are sorted and any hits that came
into your web page are collected in a file named date.raw.  These are
available for download if you wish to run through other web hit
analysis programs.

     If you have advertised your web page as

     http://www.lightlink.com/yourusername

     then the web hits will be at:
 
     ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/home/www/logs/yourusername

     If you have advertised your web page as

     http://www.yourdomainname.com

     then the web hits will be at:
 
     3.) ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/home/www/logs/yourdomainname.com

     Raw web hits are kept only for a week or so, and are not backed
up or archived, so if you don't download them, once they are gone,
they are gone.

     SUMMARY WEB HITS

     The SUMMARY WEB HITS page gives a quick but almost useless glance
at how many hits you got each day and the total bandwidth used during
that day.  This does not tell you how many people hit your page, but
how many hits happened to your site in toto.  If a call to a page
generates 50 hits while loading gifs and jpgs etc, that will show as
50 hits.

     DETAILED WEB HIT STATISTICS

     This is probably the most useful of all the web hit pages.  It
shows accumulated stats starting from the beginning of the month.

     Hits are sorted by

     1.) Which page was hit upon,
     2.) Which IP hits came from,
     3.) Where pages were linked from.

     1.) is probably not too useful, as most people will hit upon your
home page and then wander around in it.  It may show you which pages
are the most popular, and got the most hits, but beyond that is not of
much use.  Remember people usually have to hit upon your home page
before they can get to any inner page, so your home page will probably
show the most hits to it by default.

     2.) will show you how many hits came from each distinct IP number
out on the internet.  Assuming that each IP number is one person
hitting on your page, the number of LINES in this display will show
you approximately how many different people hit upon your page during
the month.  
 
     There is no way to find out WHO is hitting upon your page,
only what IP they had at the time.  
 
     The mapping between one IP number and one user is not perfect.
 
     IP's can be shared across multiple dialup users through out a day
so it is conceivable that more than one user came in through the same
IP.
 
     One user can also dial in more than once a day and get a
different IP each time, so it is also conceivable that multiple IP
numbers came from the same person.

     But in general, the more distinct IP numbers in this display, the
more distinct people have visited your web page.

     3.) will show you where the person found your page from.  If they
typed it in directly, then it will show the URL they used to find you.
But if they found you using a search engine or some other link on the
internet, it will show you where that link was and allow you to go
directly back to it to see what they saw before they hit on your page.
This is very useful for determining where people are finding out about
your home page and what their browsing experience was just prior to
hitting on your home page.

     Homer