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Back to Hitslink

For several years I used Hitslink to monitor visitor activity on the sites that I managed but I abandoned them last year because they were no longer relevant to those sites and it was too early for this one.

I had a quick look round this morning and was tempted by Hitsville but decided that it is just too twee. The log analysis set up that comes with the webspace was OK to get us going and some aspects like the failure analysis are still going to be relevant. But now that the site structure is much more complex and there are significant development possibilities we need to get a better handle on visitors experience of the site.

Histlink is a hosted application that relies on embedded code on all the pages of the site you want to monitor. They provide an application which pastes it into your current pages. For the PHP part of the site I just installed it in the footer file that is incorporated into each page on the fly by the server. So it was all set up in a matter of minutes and it is near realtime. So I have seen my own test visit and spotted the visitor who searched on 'listen to paganini caprice' on Yahoo and came and selected the campanella streaming sample. I had almost forgotten how entertaining this can be.

Now we are going to skip to the last of the Debussy's Children's Corner Suite - the Golliwog's Cakewalk as our lofi streaming sample of the day.

We'll feature the new Ragtime tunes next week together with highlights from Hitslink.

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