Summary Manual - Overview

Overview

You already have a web site. Congratulations. Now you want to know if anyone is visiting your web site. Not just that, you want to know what countries they are from, how long they look at your pages, how often they come back, and how they found your site in the first place.

After the first few months you may also want to know how much bandwidth you are using, so you will know when to upgrade your internet connection. You will want to find bad links on your own pages so you can fix them and trace bad links into your site from the outside so you can ask other people to fix them. You want to know when the server was down over the weekend, and what keywords people are using at the search engines to find your site.

Business is booming, you need to know which ad campaign was responsible, which pages cause people to leave, which movie file is tying up all your bandwidth, and what browsers your visitors are running. Did Bill, in marketing, ever visit the protected ad campaign site you built just for him? What link just brought six thousand visitors to your site?

You have a lot of questions, Summary has a lot of answers. There are 110 different reports to choose from. Reports can be sorted on a column simply by clicking on the column header. Many reports let you "drill down" to obtain more detailed information. The reports are also user configurable, with a total of 91 different columns, 33 sort orders, and 20 different filtering options.

Web servers write log files. Every time a user visits your site, the user 'requests' information. The log file contains a list of every request made to your web site. It is full of hidden information, and it is also huge and totally boring. Summary processes that log file and extracts the data into meaningful information. Summary provides answers to your questions using a web browser interface you already know how to use.

Summary vs. Summary Pro

Summary can operate in three modes (or versions), Unregistered, Summary, and Summary Pro. When first installed it will come up in Unregistered mode. To switch to one of the other modes you must enter a registration code which you get either by registering your copy or by getting a 30 day demo registration code. The 30 day demo registration codes activate the full functionality of the corresponding version, for 30 days from when you get them.

The Unregistered version will display the "Unregistered" message on every page and does not allow multiple sets of reports for virtual domains or any of the other Summary and Summary Pro features listed below.

A registered copy of Summary enables an option to process logs automatically every N hours, and allows up to three sets of reports for virtual domains.

A registered copy of Summary Pro provides all the functionality of Summary plus:

Up to 500 sets of reports for virtual domains
Emailing of reports
Custom HTML headers and footers, including removing the Summary.Net logo

The ability to write the first few pages of each report to static HTML files
A 'modem speed' proxy server - experience your web site as viewed through a typical 56K modem connection
Spreadsheet formatted versions of the reports - export your statistics to your favorite spreadsheet for easy graph creation
Text formatted versions of the reports
Search feature - searches the raw log files
Subsets of the Requests Report showing only items on a user configurable list

Summary Pro is designed for people with many different domains (or virtual servers), people who host sites for others, or people who want several different sub-sets of their web site reported on separately. Most people with a single web site will do just fine with Summary.

Quick Start | Overview | Registering | Configuration
Javascript Code Installation | Virtual Domain Configuration | Questions
Reports | Log Formats and Servers | Frequently Asked Questions | Glossary