Contemplate Reporter

1.0b

27 May 2003
The Reporter now includes a new way to view your site traffic: a Flash-based, real-time display. From the bottom of the Reporter's month menu, click Real-Time Display under Other Views, and a Flash (.swf) movie will open in a new window. That movie will poll your reporter/data file every few seconds and display the number of new hits on a continuously updated line chart. You can change the time period for the data polling by changing the real-time update interval setting in preferences.ini. The real-time display requires the Flash 6 plug-in.

1.0

29 Aug 2003
The Reporter now properly displays the time and date of the last hit on the months page. Previously, it would show the time and date of the last hit from the first month in the list.

The real-time display window now opens properly in Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Previously, the window opened with a file not found error.

The get_setting function now contains an extra line to ensure that Contemplate will evaluate a setting of "0" in the preferences file as false in every language. The ASP version was evaluating "0" as true, resulting in some preference settings not taking effect.

A few visible and internal uses of the term "extractor," an earlier name for the Assembler compontent of Contemplate, have been changed to "assembler."

1.0.1

30 Oct 2003
If you're using Apache's mod_rewrite or other software to rewrite dynamic URLs, you no longer need to use "assembled" as the string that triggers the rewrite. If you wish to use a different string, you can open each of the server-side scripts included with your version of Contemplate, look for the $URL_rewriting_flag variable definition, and change it in the script. (This setting is not available in the preferences file because the scripts need it in order to read the preferences file.)

Previously, the PHP and Perl versions of the Reporter were not properly sorting date entries in the All Dates view. All versions of the Reporter now sort the All Dates view by date.

1.0.2

21 Nov 2003
The $URL_rewrite_flag variable is now properly declared as a global in PHP functions. This problem primarily affected the Flattener and only affected the PHP version of Contemplate.

1.0.3

18 May 2004
No changes were made to the Reporter in this release.

1.0.4

06 Aug 2004
IP addresses in all the Reporter views now include links to an ARIN WHOIS lookup, so that you can easily check the owner of an IP address and find out more about your visitors. Also, page names in the Reporter views include links to the corresponding page in your site.

1.1.0

10 Dec 2004
The log site traffic option in preferences.ini is now set to 0 by default in new Contemplate downloads, since leaving this on caused problems for some webmasters who weren't ready to use it. When you're ready to use Contemplate to log your site traffic, just change this value to 1.

Reporter.php now runs without warning messages if you've lowered your PHP error reporting level to show warnings. All internal variables are properly initialized to enable this change.

We've changed one instance of getYear() to getFullYear() in reporter.asp to improve Y2K compatibility.

1.1.1

19 May 2005
The Raw Logs link on the Months page has pointed to the wrong location since the previous version. It now points to the correct location: ../data/reporter.

1.2.0

19 Dec 2005
Contemplate now has the ability to link page views from the same visitor and provide data on visitors, visits, visit durations, and entry and exit pages. You can enable this option by including the following line in your preferences.ini file:

use cookies to track visitors: 1

With this option enabled, the Assembler will assign each website visitor a randomly-generated visitor ID and save it in a cookie on the visitor's computer. It will then include the visitor ID in each page view record so the Reporter can link them together. The Reporter will automatically display this additional data when the option is enabled. Please note that with this option enabled, the Reporter will not be able to process data that was generated before it was enabled. Therefore, the option is disabled by default so you can plan your transition to the new functionality.

The Reporter will consider a group of page views by the same visitor with no more than 30 minutes between any consecutive page views as a "visit." To change the 30-minute limit to a different value, you can include this line in your preferences.ini file, and change the 30 to your preferred value:

minutes until visit expires: 30

Contemplate determines visits when you view a report, not when it logs the page view, so you can change this value at any time and view the effects on your reports retroactively.

You can now exclude site traffic coming from particular hosts from your traffic reports. For example, you might wish to exclude traffic from your own company to get a more accurate picture of your site's public users. To exclude traffic from hosts, include the setting "exclude traffic from hosts" in your preferences.ini file, followed by a comma-delimited list of strings that identify the hosts you wish to exclude. For example, the following line will exclude traffic from any host in the mycompany.com domain, or traffic without a hostname but with the IP address of 111.112.113.114:

exclude traffic from host: mycompany.com, 111.112.113.114

The Reporter still logs traffic from these hosts, it just doesn't include them in the report. This means you can change your preference setting at any time without losing any traffic data.

The list of top-level domains has been updated with the latest changes from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. This prevents error messages when your traffic reports contain newer domains that weren't in the old list.

Two typos that caused occasional error messages in all three versions of the Reporter have been corrected.

1.2.1

01 Mar 2006
Contemplate now tracks visitors with more meaningful ID codes. Instead of simply using a random string, the Assembler assigns each new visitor a random string plus a time stamp. The Reporter will then display a portion of the visitor's user agent and the time of the user's first visit, to help give you a sense of who your visitors are. (A visitor's host would be more useful to see at this point, but a visitor's host might change between visits and create confusing report data.) The Reporter will continue to display the original random string for visitors whose first visit occurred before you installed this update.

If you've enabled the "use cookies to track visitors" option introduced in version 1.2.0, you've found that the Reporter no longer processes your previous data files. This update improves compatibility with your previous data files if you can make an adjustment to those files. If you add a field to every row of your data files, with the text "(visitors not tracked)" where the visitor ID would normally appear, the Reporter will process those files but will not display the new visitor tracking information for the files that contain that string.

If you're using a search-and-replace tool that supports regular expressions, you can update your previous data files by searching for this expression:

([^\t]+)\t([^\r]+)\r

and replacing it with this expression:

\1\t(visitors not tracked)\t\2\r

The Inspector pages now wrap long referrers and other values to minimize horizontal scrolling. The amount of wrapping is determined by the "maximum column width" setting in preferences.ini.

1.2.2

01 Mar 2007
Contemplate relies on several environment variables to find files on different kinds of servers, and it used to use the "OS" environment variable to decide which additional environment variables it could look for. However, the "OS" environment variable itself is not available on all servers. Contemplate now simply tries a couple different environment variables, and shows error messages if at least one of the required variables is not present.

1.2.3

04 Nov 2008
The Reporter no longer displays "undefined variable" errors if your server uses strict error checking and you are filtering traffic by host.

1.2.4

30 Nov 2009
No changes were made to the Reporter in this release.

1.3.0

1 Dec 2009
No changes were made to the Reporter in this release.