Hi Guys,
I developed a website a while back and my client wants to track user usage of the website. Basically he wants to know: who logged-in, when, what pages he visited and when he left. Is there an example of such idea somewhere, a third party application or do I have to start from scratch.

Dosn't have to be too complex, the simpler the better.

The website is in Classic ASP.

Thanks for any ideas leading to a fruitfull headscratch and eureka moment.

Cheers to all.

Javier

simplest way would be to install google analytics for overview stats, but if its specific stats your measuring against individual users then it depends on what you track...

a quick method allowing good flexibility would be to create a table called user_stats...

then add columns ..

intUser (your unique user reference from your users table)
datAction (a date and time stamp for the action)

...then perhaps a text field for the action type say..."PAGE VIEW", or "USER LOGIN"...(these could be put into a lookup table and referenced by id but text will do..)

then another text field for action details ... for the PAGE VIEW action this field may contain something like "/articles/myarticle.asp"

then just write a wee function ...something like ...

private function userTracking(intUser,strAction,strDetail)
myConnection.execute("INSERT INTO user_stats(intUser,datAction,strAction,strDetails) VALUES (" & intUser & ",NOW(),'" & strAction & "',." & strDetails & "');")
end function

call it whenever you like e.g. in every page header..

userTracking(session("intUser"),"PAGE VIEW",request.servervariables("SCRIPT_NAME")

then you can do all kinds of stats reporting by processing and grouping this data...

just an idea,

I agree with Andrew, I did something like this and assigned an event number, eg login, upgrade etc.
The one that I found more troublesome is log out, if the user actually logs out it's easy to record, but when they just navigate away you are left with a clean-up job that needs to look how long it was since their last activity - it starts to get messy

Quote

I agree with Andrew, I did something like this and assigned an event number, eg login, upgrade etc.
The one that I found more troublesome is log out, if the user actually logs out it's easy to record, but when they just navigate away you are left with a clean-up job that needs to look how long it was since their last activity - it starts to get messy

Yes...logout...lol nightmare...easier with other technologies though, e.g. .net....

But if you are measuring login time, and page view time then the last page view + average visit page view duration (time between views) would be a fair assumption of user departure time. lots can be worked out form the page views...

Cheers
A

Thanks Guys. I was so busy completing a project that I forgot to comeback. However, I was able to solve my problem by adding a table to my db and working the times and page views from there. Thanks again.