Re: [seul-edu] web usage analysis for each user

[James Oden <joden@eworld.wox.org>]

> 
> file and provides a breakdown of cached and uncached downloads for each user. 
> I was interested in adding the data from this file to each user's desktop, so 
> they can see how their usage is going. 
> 
Their are various approaches you can take, but I think all of the easy 
one's involve using apache to make the report available over your intranet.
Can the program produce a report only giving one students information?
If not it is not hard to craft a perl thingie that will further parse the 
script.  Also, you don't have to, but you probably want the thing to 
generate html; again if the first program does not, you can create something
in perl to convert the first program's output to html.

The next thing you need to answer is do you want the thing to work in real time,
or give you up to the hour/15min reports.  If it is in real time, you will have
trigger the creation of the report via a CGI-BIN script, which isn't hard, but 
if you have never worked with CGI-BIN programs in can be daunting at first.
If the pages are genrated on some schedule then, you just plop a cron job
into crontab for root that generates individual web pages for each student.

The last thing you need to worry about (or perhaps the first) is access control.
If you just uses HTTP basic auth with apache you can write a simple redirector
script that will automatically redirect the student to his or her page.  If you
are generating his/her page on the fly then redirection becomes unnecessary, 
but the same information basic auth will give your script will be sufficient.
Their are other ways to handle the authentication issues, with varying levels
of difficulty.

> It would also be useful to consider printer use in similar way.
As long as you know what programs get usage information about the print
subsystem, then you can wrap these in perl scripts to produce HTML reports.
Its essentially the same solution as above.

...james