> There's gold in > them thar logs that cannot be recognized by a graph or bar chart. >[...] there must be a better > way to see if and when a few importation visitors stopped by, and > something about what they did while they were here. (to whatever > extent possible.)

and earlier:

> > > One improvement might be tab or comma delimited format so > > > that the fields > > > could be put into columns. Or database fields. > > > Maybe the columns could be sorted...

ok, this is what I do, sometimes.

I open a log file with NoteTab Pro (a MUST: 20$ at www.notetab.ch, and the Lite version is free and still incredibly powerful/useful)

NoteTab can sort your log entries - and this would already give you IP numbers in order (kind of - 199.145.201.99 would be presented before 64.95.104.77). At this point you would be able to spot requests coming from the same domain/IP range

To import the logs into a spreadsheet: with NoteTab again, I do a search & replace on the entire file for some unique sequence of characters. Let's take a typical log entry:

208.19.16.210 - - [03/Apr/2001:10:35:09 -0400] "GET /butterfly.html HTTP/1.0" 200 4894 "http://www.google.com/search?q=butterfly+sardinia" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 95)"

I want to be able to sort the log file by IP, date and file requested. I think this would be more or less what you need, right? To *cut* the line in three blocks, I tell NoteTab to S&R the following: every space-space-space[ (the sequence between IP and date) with space|space-space-space[ (I'm simply inserting a space + | between IP and date)

At this point, any spreadsheet/database would let me import the text file and ask for a column identifier: I choose the | and I get a nice two-block table that I can sort either by IP or date

If I need the third block (requested file) I run another S&R before importing. Something like search for "GET / and replace with "GET | /

Once cut and imported, you can get rid of all the unwanted columns and make the remaining info more readable.

Is always better to work on a copy of your logs, because even if you can export back as text, some extra garbage gets added and Analog would not recognize your log anymore, without some cleaning up.

I agree with you: reading raw logs can be very useful. And Jeremy is right too, of course; you need time to do it...

hope this helps

ciao

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