Cosmetic changes...

quote:Originally posted by TechStud
Chad,

I like to look at a table which have descriptive headers. Although most of this stuff is self explanitory, I still wanted to see headers over the columns. So, I have moded the 'Class.asp' file a bit to add header cells over all the Reports. For example, on the "Page Views By Page" report, I added ...
[code]
##. Page Views Percent Percent Graph
1. /index.asp 10 50.00% [XXXXXXXXXXXX]
2. /home.asp 9 45.67% [XXXXXXXXX]
[/code]

... and on the "User Agents" report :
[code]
# User Agent (Full Source) User Agent Views Percent Percent Graph
1. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705) Internet Explorer 6 2 28.57% [XXXXXXXXXXX] [/code]

I can send you the file if you wish... just let me know.

TechStud,
www.TechStud.com

TechStud,

I personally customized my v 1.2 script a lot to accomodate different needs I had. The addition of the headers would definitely be a plus.

If you could share this addition with the people of this forum, that would be greatly appreciated, at least by me that's for sure.

Regards.

Daniel,

I don't know what happened... for some reason I never saw this reply. Oh well... If anyone cares to know how or what I did to modify MT v1.3, have a look [url="http://www.techstud.com/pages/MT_v13_Headers.asp"]here[/url].

(I chose NOT to post the mod here, only cause it is rather long. Instead, follow the link over to my server where you will find the instructions in detail)

TechStud,
www.TechStud.com

TechStud,

Only 3 months has elapsed between my last reply and yours, so that's not a problem. ;) (Just kidding).

Just for clarification, are your instructions for the version 1.3 beta of the very last one Chad put online ?

I still have zip files of both, but if you can tell me, that would save me some time.

Also, over the last 3 months, I applied an industrial amount of modifications to the MetaTraffic scripts and database, so if I want to add and/or apply the mods you mentioned, this will be a tad time consuming, but can always be done whenever I have some spare time.

I'm rather surprised about the changes I did to my DB and how small it stays over the time. On my test version, I'm close to 30,000 records, and still under 6MB in size the for Access DB. Not too bad.

Anyhow, thanks for the reply. As they say, better late than never!

Regards.

quote:Originally posted by Daniel
TechStud,

Only 3 months has elapsed between my last reply and yours, so that's not a problem. ;) (Just kidding).

Just for clarification, are your instructions for the version 1.3 beta of the very last one Chad put online ?

I still have zip files of both, but if you can tell me, that would save me some time.

First of all... Sorry about the late reply! Ya, I can't believe that it was 3 months ago. Time flies! Anyway, I was tied up doing other things over the summer and never got back here often. When I did, I didn't go through the whole forum to notice that this message had a reply! Sorry... my bad! :oops:

Second, I am not sure I quite understand your question... 'Just for clarification.... Chad put online?' Can you elaberate a bit more please?

quote:Originally posted by Daniel
Also, over the last 3 months, I applied an industrial amount of modifications to the MetaTraffic scripts and database, so if I want to add and/or apply the mods you mentioned, this will be a tad time consuming, but can always be done whenever I have some spare time.

I'm rather surprised about the changes I did to my DB and how small it stays over the time. On my test version, I'm close to 30,000 records, and still under 6MB in size the for Access DB. Not too bad.

Anyhow, thanks for the reply. As they say, better late than never!

Regards.

WOW! That is fantastic! I would really be interested in those mods of yours. I don't have quite as many records as you at the moment, but it would be nice to have optimization. How is the size of the code in comparrison to the smaller sized DB?

I realize that your reduced DB size is due to you using Access 97 DB... do you think your mods will produce the same results on Access 2000 DB's?

Well... that's it for now.
(At least you don't have to wait 3 months for this reply! :D hehe)

TechStud,
www.TechStud.com

quote:Originally posted by TechStud
I realize that your reduced DB size is due to you using Access 97 DB... do you think your mods will produce the same results on Access 2000 DB's?

Daniel's size gain was more than moving to Access 97. I posted yesterday that the move to Access 97 only gets you 35% of your database back max. He is about 65% or 70% less than the default database size.

You can get a little space back by turning on Unicode compression on the referrer* fields in Access 2000, but the really big gains come from normalizing the database (splitting similar data into a table of their own). Chad is looking into something similar for v2.0, I believe.

Good day,

Tech, as far as I know, there are 2 v1.3 files, out of which 1 is available from this site. Version 1.3 Beta is the immediate ancestor to the version 1.3 currently available now for download which has few modifications/corrections applied to version 1.3 beta. The last version was released by the end of July if I recall well, whereas the last beta was released early July.

There is a clear indication in the comments of most of the scripts indicating that MetaTraffic was no longer free or something like that, so you might consider looking at them and confirming if the line numbers are matching the actual v1.3 "class.asp" file. If they don't, then obviously they are based on the beta version.

As far as the A2K vs A97 size comparaisons are concerned, this might be valid if the data is not normalized. If the data is not or barely normalized, obviously the built-in A2K optimization can induce a significant gain as there is a lot of information impacted by the so called optimisation. On the other hand, the ratio of the gain in size will get less significant as the normalization level increases, for obvious reasons.

I don't know yet how much bigger the database would get when converted to A2K, but I can ensure you that this will not range in the high values as mentioned in some other posts. Using a very pessimistic approach, I would expect a 15%-20% increase in size, but I'm pretty confident it will not even get that high.

Also, if I remove the indexes, I will still gain even more. I must admit, I'm using quite extensively, which benifits the logging and reporting aspects of the tool in a pleasant way :D.

As far as the 3 months delay is concerned, I wasn't making an issue out of it. I was more under the impression that you forgot about it since I saw few post from you afterwards, but none in this particular topic. So I perhaps wrongly concluded "he might have changed his mind about it."

You've put up a very clear procedure on the link you provided, which nullifies the 3 months delay quite nicely. ;)

The size of the code obviously increased quite substantially, however the code loaded for logging decreased drastically. So the increase of the code is mainly related to the reporting section, since I added reports and few "bells and whistles", along with a more extensible filtering schema for the reports.

I was thinking of putting my MetaTraffic setup on a free ASP hosting service, so that people could look at the changes I did. Exchanging links between us would be nice too, allowing to discuss / comment / suggest different things.

Before putting it on a free hosting service, I will check how much space I would need to put it up. If this is not too big, I might consider a "guest" environment, allowing full access. If the people screw up with the data, then I will simply replace the DB with the live one.

If other people are willing to do something similar, please raise your hand!

I really appreciate the interest you're showing in regards to the mods I did to my DB and scripts, however I must respect the license aggreements, and not re-distribute the product in a modified state.

We'll wait for Chad to give us a little sign of life, and see what are his plans in regards to MetaTraffic. I don't want to create frictions specially knowing that after all, he's the initial developper and as such, he has full rights over it.

So long...

Good day,

As a quick update here's some stats :

29,892 Records - A97 : 5,820,416 Bytes, A2K : 6,189,056 Bytes

Unicode compression enabled on text fields for A2K.

As you can see, the increase is 360KB (368,640 bytes), which is a little more than 6%, is far from the pessimistic 15%-20% and the mammouth 35% ! That low value of 6%, which will still decrease as the database grows, is simply resulting from the normalization.

Higher ratios in size differences between versions will be induced either because the respective databases can't be normalized anymore, or there is a lot of normalization to do. By looking at the database/tables structures, either situations can easily be identified.

Hope this will help to demistify the fact that A97 is WAY better at using disk storage resources.

Regards.

Just a quick reply, Daniel...

The version I am using, has the following in the upper right corner:

MetaTraffic v1.3
(Non-Commercial / Shareware)

So, I do believe that this the the latest one, not the beta. I also agree with your statements about the mods and such. Sounds good. I also run a FORUM on my site, which I am willing to donate to the cause, in order to "discuss / comment / suggest different things" (or anything else).

Also, the only reason why I put up the mod I did, is cause it doesn't directly affect the operation of the code and logging features. It is more a Cosmetic MOD more than anything. But as you can see, it is quite a bit of work just to do that...

Well, anyway... I have to run. TTYS.

TechStud,
www.TechStud.com

Thanks for the update,

You're absolutely right, Cosmetic changes can be applied with minimal impact, if any, on the functionality of the product.

On my end, I went far beyond the cosmetic aspect of the thing, as I modified more than substantially the database structure, which cascaded to a modification of the SQL statements used for the reporting, the code for the logging, and so on.

I also have extra statistical fields that are still not being populated as I didn't have the time to add the extra code.

One day I'll have everything in place, meantime things will develop slowly but surely.

Bye for now.