Nihuo Newsletter

Table of Contents

1. Broken Links
2. Stolen Object
3. Web Server Issues

I. Broken Links Broken links occur when web pages are deleted or moved but the link to the old address still exists. When a user clicks on the broken link, the page cannot be found, so a 404 error page is displayed. This looks bad and frustrates customers, so you want to fix them as soon as possible. To help you maintain your site, Nihuo Web Log Analyzer has the 404 Errors report that show which pages on your site failed and the referrer that was associated with it. You can use this report to quickly find and fix the links.

Two entries you will often see near the top of your 404 Errors report are /robots.txt and /favicon.ico.

The robots.txt file is something that well-behaved robots or spiders check to see what parts of your site they are allowed to index. You can find complete details on how to set up your site with robots.txt inhttp://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 introduced a new technique to allow you to customize the icon that your visitors see when they save links to your
site. IE 5 and later (and now Konqueror and perhaps other browsers) look for a file called favicon.ico on your web server when the user bookmarks a page on your site or saves a link to it on her computer. IE looks first at the root of your site (/favicon.ico) then in the directory
where the page is located. If you create an icon in the root of your site it will be applied to all pages. If you have one in a particular directory, then each directory can have its own icon. You can find complete details on how to set up your site with favicon.ico in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon.

404 Errors report is under Errors > 404 Errors.

II. Stolen Object Graphics and other non-page files that you have on your site are something you have put effort and time (and perhaps money) into developing to represent your business or service. They are indicative of your brand or service and are a valuable part of the consistent image your present to your customers. The way the Web works, however, it is not very hard for another site to simply include a reference to these files from your site in their pages. The HTML can tell a visitor’s browser to retrieve graphics or other files from anywhere else on the Web, not just the same site the page is on. When this happens, the visitors at the other site may have no idea that the files belong to you. In Nihuo Web Log Analyzer the files are referred to as ‘Stolen Object’ and Nihuo Web Log Analyzer has the Stolen Object report to help you diagnose this behavior.

If you have setup an agreement with partner web sites to allow them to include references to your graphics and other files in their site (for example, linking to your logo to promote your product or linking to your advertisements to host on their sites) Nihuo Web Log Analyzer will not
recognize this and these will show up in the Stolen Object report.

The Domains Stolen Object report only shows you when other sites include references to graphics or other non-page files on your site. If a malicious user really wants to steal your files without you knowing she can simply save the file to her computer and copy it to her web site.
Saving a file produces the same request that viewing it in the first place does (in fact web browsers just make a copy of the file they have
already cached, so you never get a request for the ‘save’ action if the file was already viewed.) This behavior is effectively impossible to detect.

Stolen Object report is under Resources Accessed > Stolen Object.

III. Web Server Issues

Many server issues are best diagnosed with network and process monitoring tools. There are a number of good ones available for all platforms, both commercial and free. However, some server diagostic information can be gathered from your web site logs using Nihuo Web Log Analyzer.

1. Bandwidth Usage

Your web site probably has a limited available bandwidth for connecting with visitors. There may be times, say during a promotion or a product release, when your bandwidth usage is well above normal. Most service providers will allow you to ‘burst’ well beyond your average usage to handle times such as these. However, if your monthly usage typically exceeds your contractual allowance, you could be paying more for connection than you need to be. The solution to this is to either increase your contract quota with your provider or determine where the bandwidth is being consumed and alter the site to reduce the amount of bandwidth required to present the information you need.

2. Server Attack

Server attacks are worm or virus attacks as well as unauthorized users trying to gain access to protected directories. A common server attack is a request to the “cmd.exe” file caused by the Nimda or the Code Red virus present on a Windows machine. If the machine is on a local network, you can find out which machine it is on and inform the network administrator. If this file was requested from the Internet, you can do a DNS lookup through the program or do a Whois lookup (using www.allwhois.com or www.arin.net ) to find out who this comes from. If you can find out where the request came from, you can inform the originator of the virus on their server. These requests usually cause many 404 (File Not Found) errors in your log files. If you find successful accesses to the file cmd.exe on your Windows Server, your server is probably infected.

Server Attack report is under Server Attack > Server Attack.

3. Loading Time

Everyone knows how annoying it can be having to deal with websites that take forever to load. There are recent researches, in fact, confirming that 75% of the Internet users do not return to sites that take longer than four seconds to load.

In order to minimize loading time for fast user experiences, you need find out which page waste most time of your server.

If your web server is IIS, please ensure export time-taken field in your
log files.

If your web server is apache, Here’s a simple trick to track time taken data:

1. Please add “%T” ( time-taken ) into your log format string.e.g.
   LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-agent}i\” %T” timetakenlog

   CustomLog log/access_log timetakenlog

2. Launch Nihuo Web Log Analyzer
3. Right click the project and select Edit from menu
4. Select Format page
5. Select Apache/NCSA custom log as Log file format
6. Click Custom button
7. Input %h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-agent}i\” %T
   
8. Click OK button
9. Analyze

Loading time report is under Resources Accessed > Time Taken.