I've been lurking for only a short while but feel qualified
to answer your question. The only field in the log files
that you would have a prayer of collecting this information
is the referer[sic] field. Unfortunately it is up to the
individual UA (User Agent - most commonly a common browser,
but it could be a PDA, WebTV etc.) how and when to complete
this field. At the very least Netscape Navigator 4.5 makes
no distinction in the logs between typing the URL in
directly and selecting the URL from a BookMarks list -
results may vary with brand & version of browser.
In short, no.
You could, however divine some useful information from the
logs by looking at the status message in response to the
'get' - below are portions of a log file from my server. In
the first set of lines the '200' status message indicates OK
and the number that follows is the number of bytes
transferred. In the second set the status read '304' which
essentially means no need to send the file, I have one in
cache that's OK, thus no byte count '-'.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 3392
"GET /images/balloon1a.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 34154
"GET /images/balloon1b.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 16448
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 304 -
"GET /images/balloon1b.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 -
"GET /images/balloon1a.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 -
This bit of detective work could be used to differentiate
first time visitors from repeat visitors with some
limitations revolving around users clearing their cache and
the page itself being statically vs. dynamically generated
and AOLs infamous chameleon like IP addresses and caching
proxies.
Hope that helps...
--
dana adams - creative director
http://www.studiowerks.com
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Received on Thu Mar 11 1999 - 14:14:34 CST
