Browser environments for testing

• November 20, 2008
• James Skemp

In a previous post I mentioned using virtual machines for testing. Here's the three virtual machines that I feel cover the most options for browser testing (on Windows):  Current versions Looking at the top 10 browsers for this site, using data from Google Analytics, we have; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, Opera, Playstation 3, Konqueror, SeaMonkey, and Camino. Of those, Internet Explorer and Firefox, obviously, account for the largest amount of traffic, at about 86% of all visits.

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Wowsa - what happened to Google Analytics? (November 2008 edition)

• November 11, 2008
• James Skemp

Google has done it again. Logging in this evening, I immediately noticed the change to Google Analytics. Now you can see, when you first log in, the visits, average time, bounce rate, completed goals, and % change (default visits) for your sites. It's weird in that it shows a number of rows, and not sites (which effectively means half as many sites as I expect, as each of my sites has two rows), but it's very interesting.

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Log Parser script: Percent of status codes across all hits/requests

• October 1, 2007
• James Skemp

Note: This article was written using Log Parser 2.2. Therefore, while it may work for a different version, it may not. The following SQL can be used by Log Parser to generate a chart with the total requests (for a day, month, or year) and what percent each status code is of those requests. An example chart can be found at the end of this article. First, I assume that the below is put in the same directory as the logs you would like to parse.

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How to ensure that performance counters continue after a restart

• September 19, 2007
• James Skemp

A few days ago my server was restarted in the early morning hours. I had been logging network and processor usage using Windows built-in performance monitoring, but when the server restarted, the logs did not. A bit of research later, it appears that there is a way to have Windows restart the logging after a system restart. To enable this, it seems you just need to have the log stop after a certain amount of time (for example, after x hours, or x days).

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Using Log Parser to find users accounts used to log into an FTP site

• September 13, 2007
• James Skemp

The following Log Parser query can be used on FTP log files in order to determine what user names were used to login, or attempt to login, to an FTP site. logparser "select cs-uri-stem, count(cs-method) from ex*.log where cs-method like '%USER' group by cs-uri-stem order by count(cs-method),cs-uri-stem"  This assumes that you've added Log Parser to your path, and that you're running this from your log file directory. This query will tell you what ip addresses successfully logged into your FTP site.

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Log Parser queries to find 400 and 500 http status codes

• September 9, 2007
• James Skemp

Note: This article was written using Log Parser 2.2. Therefore, while it may work for a different version, it may not. In a previous article, I discussed how to use Log Parser to find 404 errors in IIS log files. This time, I've made it a little broader, by giving some queries to find all 400 codes, and all 500 codes, through log files. There may be a better way to find these codes (instead of my IN statement), but a standard LIKE doesn't seem to work.

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Find 404 errors using Log Parser

• August 4, 2007
• James Skemp

Note: This article was written using Log Parser 2.2. Therefore, while it may work for a different version, it may not. The following code will generate a listing of calls that generated a 404 error. logparser "SELECT cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query, date, sc-status, cs(Referer) INTO 404report.txt FROM ex*.log WHERE sc-status = 404 ORDER BY date, cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query" This assumes that you've currently got a command line open in the folder containing your IIS logs, and that you are logging the above information, as well as that logparser is setup in your PATH line.

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Log file analysis of our Windows-based, Apache, Web sites

• February 20, 2006
• James Skemp

In our previous articles, we walked through installing Apache to a Windows XP home computer.  This time, we'll be setting up our log files for analysis, and installing a way to view the log file information. Log files are created by Web sites to track page views and visitors.  For example, if we go to a page on one of our local Web sites with Firefox, like http://website.localhost/, it adds the following lines to a file called access.

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StrivingLife.net network popularity

• October 7, 2005
• James Skemp

As I said this morning, site popularity can be determined by how many people are viewing the content, and how many people are using the content.

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Network popularity

• October 7, 2005
• James Skemp

On Wednesday I said I was going to talk about how popular the various sites are. I didn't get to that on Thursday, so I'll be discussing that today.

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