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       WEB-SITE TRACKING

Have you ever thought of yourself as an Internet voyeur?
  

Well, peeking in-on who and when, people visit your web site, is not
nasty, illegal or bad; But rather, it's a necessity, in order to properly
manage your web site!

Today; Tracking web site visitors and maintaining logs of all web page /
site visits, does not only make sense, it's a security and knowledge base
must!

Today, Tracking visitors who visit your site, is necessary for a multitude
of reasons, some of which I list below:

1) In the infancy days of your site, you can access the number of hits
   to your site, and the interrest shown for each page or area of the site.
   You can even see how long anyone spends on any given page or product
   evaluation!
   Whether you are promoting, selling or publishing on your site, you will
   come to appreciate the power of site tracking software! Later on, as
   you build-up your tracking skills and perfect your site using
   the knowledge that you obtained while being a voyeur at your own site.
   Your appreciation will grow for site monitoring and tracking software.

2) If any security breeches occur, you will know who was last at your site.
   The site hits tracker I have installed on my UNIX server, keeps track of
   the URL of each and everyone who comes to my site, and where they came
   from. Also, on the HTML / CGI pages,  i have installed page tracking
   code, so I can review, graph, do statistical analysis and so on, with
   each person who visits.

3) To monitor the presence on Search Engine Scooters, Sniffers, Spiders,
   Crawlers and the like. This is helpfull, so you know you are or will soon
   be indexed on that particular search engine's database. Many times you
   submit your new web site, page, sub-page, or product update, and the
   particular search engine / database is having one or another problem and
   your site never is actually updated or added! Without those web site
   tracking tools, you would not know that you should re-submit or parhaps
   move on to another web search engine database that actually does work!

4) You can also monitor your own time or an employees time spent testing
   out your site and keep records of dates, times, and pages visited and
   tested! It could also be used for inventory purposes in an electronic
   shopping cart situation (although in a limited way).

5) Since the site monitor should also provide you with the "keywords
   search list" that the visitor used to find you. You now have a tool
   to understand what people are looking for. Also you obviously know
   what your site provides. Therefore, you are now in the position to
   improve or modify your site, to match what people are hunting for,
   or scale down your keyword list, so as not to be overly exagerating
   your actual site content. This can easily be done at first when you
   choose "keywords" which great techno-babbling terms, but whose meaning
   is really unclear by definition!
   As time goes on, you will begin to modify your site so as to attract
   the right type of audience or consumer. You will begin to see that by
   modifying your Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta KeyWords as well
   as the content of your site, to match that which best sets your site,
   products, services or information you provide -- appart -- from other
   similar sites, and allows your target audience, to find you first;
   amongest search engine results; rather than somewhere down that crazy
   Internet river of millions of users! This affords you the opportunity,
   to come clean and either provide what you advertise in a concise manner
   or down-play your web site promotion, so as not to be an offensive
   Internet web site.
Handy Internet tool to Monitor your Internet site hits!
 "AXS" Free Site Tracking Software! 

Handy Internet site to find out where (geographically) your hit came from:
IP Address to Latitude/Longitude

       WEB-SITE SECURITY



To begin with, all UNIX boxes as they are collectively called (regardless
of the specifics of the UNIX flavors or Internet Server software they run:
ie. Apachy Server) utilize 2 main controls over File and Directory access!

1) File and Directory Access Control Attributes (called Permissions
   attributes in UNIX) which are associated with each and every
   file, directory, user, and group of users on any one system.

2) Special files in certain directories (usually cgi-bin but not absolute)
   which control the access of that directory. Those files are usually
   (but as above not absolute), called .htaccess and .htpasswd. Within
   those files, we can specify who (groups of people or specific person(s))
   is allowed to access those directories at all!
2b) Some isps' don't allow .htaccess for security reasons, and if you want
   to redirect visitors you can use the metarefresh tag at the top of you
   web page along with the other META TAGS. Here is an example:

   META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="1; URL=http://www.vif.com/users/chris-m/ubb"

   naturally a < < and > > symbol is placed at the beginning and end
   of the string. the "1" is the number number of seconds to delay before
   the refresh takes place and the URL= is the redirect location

This is the basis of security on any ISP server on the Internet, and also
the way we can (hopefully) prevent unauthorized access to our personnel
private info on any web site.

Are those directories really as secure as we expect they are?
how do people penitrate those arguably secure places?
how do you prevent access to certain files?
how do you auto redirect from an old version of your web site pages
to another page or site location?

The answer to the above and other UNIX HTTPd Server questions as they
pertain to webmasters, can be found below!