Timeline export

[datateam]

Hi

I wanted to know if it is somehow possible to export the timeline data?
It is so that one of my customer wants to know what user is visiting what sites and when (2 of the users are suspected to play more in the internet as working which I already can confirm but I need it in a readable way - Printscreens are not so good)
I must say I'm no SQL person or programmer so... If I need to run a script or so it's ok but more...

Thanks in advance

[adrien]

Hi

Firstly, a word of caution. It's not really safe to use the timeline as a deciding factor for whether someone is spending time on a site or not.

Many sites have refresh or long polling mechanisms in them. If someone opened a page in one browser window, then left the page and worked diligently all day, then that browser window could be making requests regularly, which would show up in timeline as one long block of surfing on that site, when in reality the user wasn't spending any time or attention on that site.

To figure out whether someone is actually surfing round a site, reading it, giving it their attention etc, you would need to look through the logs for the requests made on this site to see if they were regular refreshes, or actual requests to other pages.

Also, the timeline data (the blocks) are opened when someone accesses a site, and closed after a timeout of no longer making requests to that site. This is because of the nature of HTTP and websites, the requests take a short time to load a page, and the reading of the page takes a lot longer, during which time the browser may not be making any more requests. To avoid having many times as many blocks, and not much useful information in timeline, we had to compromise, and have a timeout window where we consider the user to still be on the page / site for a duration even after the last request, and if a new request is received in that window of time, we keep the block open and extend it. The default for this I believe is 5 or 10 minutes. So a 5 minute refresh would keep a block open in timeline continously.

To truly see what a user was doing on a website, you'd need something running on the client computer to watch it. We considered a browser plugin for this, but there are a lot of difficulties with that approach.

As for exporting or reporting, you should be able to open the data in excel, or other database apps via the ODBC driver (will need to run the 32 bit version of the app). It depends on the database you're using for timeline. The default SQLite database can be opened by any database app that supports ODBC or something like SQLite Browser.

Regards

Adrien de Croy

[MattP]

Hi,

The Timeline data is stored in a database file, so you can extract data from it using SQL queries.

WWW Proxy information is also stored in the W3C usage log, so you could use a third party log analyser like Proxy Inspector or Sawmill Log Analyser to generate reports based on the log files.

Matt