Producing Site Reports
Who gets site reports
The BU Web server is configured so that all departmental (not personal) sites
on www.bu.edu receive both a site statistics report and a broken
links report. You don't need to make a special request or have a
minimum amount of content for these reports to be created. As soon
as your site contains an index.html file, reports will be generated
for it automatically.
How they're generated
Statistics reports are generated by two programs, Analog
5.1 and ReportMagic
2.10. Analog takes the log file data and processes it according to its configuration
parameters. For example, one step of the process is to pull out every entry
in the log that relates to each top-level directory, so the stats contain information
only about that site's usage.
The end result of running the Analog program is a complete set of data for
each directory. However, it's not presented in a very user-friendly way. So,
as a second step ReportMagic converts the statistical data into readable, easy-to-understand
reports. These reports, in the form of web pages, are then copied to an output
directory that is web-accessible.
Broken link reports are generated by Linklint,
a program that finds and tests links on web sites. Linklint uses a technique
called recursion to locate all the pages and files in a site (starting from
a top page specified by its configuration file). Linklint checks each file and
pulls out the links in it, creating additional lists of files to check. The
process continues until one of the mechanisms to stop recursion, such as checking
only local links, goes into effect.
When checking an individual page, Linklint follows a set of rules for what
constitutes a valid link tag. It checks the following types of tags:
<a href="link" name="name">
<applet code="link" codebase="base">
<area href="link">
<bgsound src="link">
<body background="link">
<embed src="link">
<form action="link">
<frame src="link">
<img src="link" lowsrc="link"
dynsrc="link" usemap="name">
<input src="link">
<map name="name">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="..."
href="link">
<script src="link">
It ignores text inside of comment tags, script tags, and any tags that aren't
contained in the list above. It does check links inside image maps, and is not
case sensitive when checking the validity of link tags. As a result, it generates
a very complete list of links to check.
When they're generated
Statistics reports are generated on the 3rd of every month, and broken link
reports are generated on the 2nd.
Where to find them
Site reports are placed in the directory http://www.bu.edu/reports/
. Each site on www.bu.edu has a directory in this location corresponding
to its directory name. For example, the WebCentral
site (http://www.bu.edu/webcentral/) has a site reports directory
at http://www.bu.edu/reports/webcentral/.
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