pagedot

Dotty is this great and very magical program that can take a description of a annotated graph in ASCII text and churn out a reasonably well layed out picture of that graph, labels and all. It is a great example of how the phone company can do good.

Most web servers spit out log files in a standard "common" log format showing what browser from what host requested what URL and in what order. Now, imagine you are a web master with a site that gets a zillion hits and you would like to understand better how your visitors are using your site. That's where pagedot comes in.

pagedot takes a web server log and generates a directed graph (in annotated ASCII text format) showing how many people went from one URL to some other URL. Each URL is a node in the graph. The edges between the URL carry labels showing how often users go from one node to the next. All you need to do is run the graph description through dotty and you get a picture that gives you a birds eye view of your most important pages.

It is no substitute for proper web site sign design or usability studies, but it can reveal some surprising facts about how your web site is being used.

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