Documentation: Chapter 5
Common Tasks
This chapter explains how to perform common administrative tasks and how to use some of the advanced features of FlashStats.
How do I register my copy of FlashStats?
Simply purchase a license to FlashStats from the Maximized Software web site. You will receive a registration key and password after successfully purchasing a license. In most cases you should receive your key and password immediately.
When you receive the key and password, open your FlashStats configuration file (FlashStats.ini or flashstats.conf, located in the same directory as the FlashStats binary executable, which is usually your CGI directory). Find the lines that look like this:
Key=
Password=
Simply add your key and password after the equal sign on each line as appropriate, then save and close the configuration file.
Note: the key and password are both case-sensitive, so you need to be sure to enter them exactly as provided. You might find it easiest to use your computer's Copy and Paste feature in order to prevent any typos.
How do I add a User Account?
To add a user account, you need to add a user account definition line to the FlashStats configuration file. A user account definition line begins with the text user=. See Chapter 3 for details on the format of user account definitions.
How do I use a custom log file format?
FlashStats can recognize most common log file formats. If you are using a non-standard format then you can tell FlashStats how to parse it by using the LogFormat= parameter. Please refer to Chapter 9 for full details.
How do I let users analyze only their own subdirectories?
This section assumes that you have several web sites whose data is being written to the same log file, and the web sites all have their own top-level subdirectories (ie, folders). For example, let's assume that you are an ISP and your home page is http://www.domain.com. You host web sites for ABC Corp and XYZ Corp, with home pages of http://www.abc.com and http://www.xyz.com. On a UNIX system you may have directories such as:
/usr/www/websites/~abc/
/usr/www/websites/~xyz/
Incidentally, it doesn't matter whether your customer websites are known as http://www.abc.com or as http://www.domain.com/abc/ -- this discussion applies equally to both configurations (with one exception, noted below).
Assuming this type of setup, the default operation of FlashStats would show totals for all directories, thus mixing the two company's statistics. While this may be a useful report for the ISP webmaster every now and then, it is likely that you will want each customer to only be able to see their own site's data.
One way to do this is instruct your customers to enter /abc/ or /xyx/ in the Page to Analyze field in the Report Request Form. If they enter these values then they will only see requests for documents in their own directories. But this requires the customer to enter the correct value and leaves open the possibility that they could still look at the other company's data. FlashStats provides a better solution.
The solution is to create a separate FlashStats user account for each customer. For example, you could create a user account named abc and another named xyz. You can limit each user account to their own top-level subdirectory. This will prevent one customer from seeing another customer's data. (You can continue to have a top-level ISP account that sees all hits, if so desired.)
FlashStats comes with at least one user account already defined. For Windows and UNIX systems the user account is named is sample. For Macintosh systems there are two sample user accounts: WebStar and QuidProQuo. User accounts are defined in the FlashStats configuration file, which is named FlashStats.ini for Windows and Mac systems and is named FlashStats.conf for UNIX systems. The FlashStats configuration file is in the same directory as the FlashStats binary FlashStats.exe, FlashStats.acgi, or flashstats.cgi). You can edit the configuration file with any standard text editor.
Open the FlashStats configuration file and move down to the end of the file. You'll see a line that looks something like this:
user=sample;password=;url=http://www.domain.com;logs=something
Note that the line consists of key=value parameters, separated by semicolons. Also note that the line begins with the user=UserAccountName parameter, and that all parameters are on one line. This is very important: all parameters must be on one long line or else FlashStats will not work correctly. Do not wrap long lines!
Make a duplicate of this line. Change the username to the name of a new user account. Let's create an account named abc in this example. Then change the value of the url= parameter to indicate the URL that a web surfer would type to get to your customer's home page. This will usually be something like http://www.abc.com or http://www.domain.com/abc/.
Next, change the value of the title= parameter if desired. This text simply prints at the top of resulting FlashStats reports, so it can be any descriptive text that you desire.
The logs= parameter should have a value that points to the web site's log files. Read the description of the logs parameter in Chapter 4 for more details.
You may have additional parameters on the user account line, such as accesslog=. In additional, some parameters are optional, such as password= and title=.
Now we're ready to make the most important change. We're going to add the find= parameter to the user account definition. Simply add it to the end of the line, separated from the other parameters with a semicolon. Use a value equal to the customer's top-level subdirectory, such as /abc/ or /xyz/.
That's all it takes. You should now have a user account definition that looks something like this:
user=abc;password=;url=http://www.abc.com;logs=something;find=/abc/
Now create another account for your XYZ customer, changing the parameters as appropriate.
After you've done this and saved the configuration file, tell your customers to enter their FlashStats user account name (abc or xyz) in the User field of the FlashStats Report Request Form. Your customer will only see results applying to their own top-level subdirectory.
Incidentally, if the ABC web site is accessed via a URL like http://www.domain.com/abc/ rather than http://www.abc.com as assumed above, then the only thing you have to do differently is to set the url= parameter accordingly.
Version 1.5 -- Last update: 2/8/01
