The Working Life - Part II

The other success I had today (well, now it's yesterday) is I finally got our website tracking to work.

It's fairly important in the web business to know how much traffic your sites are receiving. Now it's common for bloggers to be fairly paranoid about how much site traffic they get - me especially - but in the internet business world it can be crucial, especially when your job depends on putting out a popular and well-designed product for the world.

One of the best indicators is your traffic levels. I use a product called Webtrends, which is pretty much the industry standard for this sort of thing. It reads the log files that are created and added to during every user session on our sites, and assembles them into easily interpreted reports for the huddled masses, like me. Not only does it catch the basics like hits, page views and user sessions, it also detects trends in traffic through the site, dead ends, bad forms, countries of origin and a hundred other things.

My copy of Webtrends quit working in June, and I've been futzing over it ever since.

You know, the whole deal - hood up, parts all over the ground, my hands covered in grease. I even thought about wearing overalls to work but it clashed with the dress code.

The problem, as far as I could figure out, was I would set up all the paramaters and START the report.. It would chug along for a few moments, then just stop. Just stop. No helpful error messages, no nothing.

So yesterday I found an error reporting section of the application I hadn't noticed before, examined it and found out that it was unable to create the report files on the network drive I'd specified. The network drive it had always been able to create them on. A drive I have full access to, being that it's our Intranet drive and I'm responsible for it. Apparently there were some changes made on the drive by our IS department, and the rights were altered slightly.

Okeedokee. One little change....

I switched the destination drive from the network to my PC's hard drive - and if I don't have access to it, I'm in deeper trouble than I thought...

But lo and hebold, it's chugging along swimmingly. Huzzah!!

Wait.

Did I say June...? I have six months of tracking to catch up on. For 32 websites.

Crap. Wait, was that another email?