Visitors
========

The 'visitors' tool, at http://www.hping.org/visitors/ can be used
to process web logs and provide a great analysis of the paths that
are commonly used to access a site. The descriptions of the paths
are generated in graphviz format, for use with 'dot'.
I found that these weren't always appropriate for the site, so I
made some modifications. Initially I used sed:

  sed -i s/rankdir=LR/rankdir=TB/ $OUTDIR/visitors.dot
     Changes the ordering to be vertical, rather than horizontal.
     This looks better for sites which are linear, rather than
     all stemming from a root node.

  sed -i 's!\("/riscos[^ ]*"\)\( \[.*\)!\1\2\n\1 [color="#ffddff"]!' \
         $OUTDIR/visitors.dot
     Make all the nodes in the '/riscos' section of the site a
     pink, rather than the default blue. This makes it easier to
     locate different parts of the site.

  sed -i 's!\("/riscos/ramble/\([^ ]*\)"\)\( \[.*\)!\1\3\n\1 [color="#ffddff" label="\2"]!' \
         $OUTDIR/visitors.dot
     Make all the nodes in the '/risos/ramble/' section of the
     site coloured pink, and change their text to only use the
     tail of the path. This reduces the amount of space used by
     those parts of the site.

However, these replacements became a little unwieldy as more were
added, and I wanted more control over the graphs.

widen-lines.pl
  Performs any of the above operations, and also allows you to
  make the lines thicker based on how common the paths are. This
  makes the common paths thicken up, and so look much clearer
  in the graph. Additionally it is possible to use the 'weighted'
  option for graphviz, which forces the higher weights (the
  common lines) to be more linear than the other lines. This can
  force a complex graph to have simpler lines.

original.{png,dot}
processed.{png,dot}
  An graph produced by visitors, and its associated PNG generated from
  the graph file by 'dot', and the same graph after processing by the
  widen-lines.pl script. Specifically the following command:

    ./widen-lines.pl -toptobottom \
                     -colour /riscos/=#ffddff \
                     -label '/riscos/ramble/(.*)=$1' \
                     -i visitors.dot

-- 
Justin Fletcher