| eKstreme.com PHPCounter VII | ||
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The Filter Plugin allows you to search and filter your log file data using text searches.
The search is case insensitive, and will match an entry if ALL filters are matched (i.e., think of the filters as connected with an 'AND').
You do this by setting 'filters'. You can set a filter for each of the pieces of information that PHPCounter stores. They do NOT need to be exact matches; they can be partial strings.
There are search filters for every piece of information that PHPCounter stores.
Note that by definition, if you do not enter any filters, the Filter Plugin will display all of the hits, which is identical to the All Hits Core Plugin output.
We will now look at some examples to show you what you can do the Filter Plugin.
Suppose you want to know how many visitors you got during December 2003. Go to the Filter Plugin, and type in the 'Date Filter' the following: dec-2003. This will find all hits that occured during December 2003.
[Note: For this to work properly, your log file needs to be longer than the month of December. Otherwise, you will only get a partial list of the December hits.]
How many visitors did you get on April 1st?
In the Date Filter, type in 01-apr-2003.
Let us take a more interesting example. Suppose you want to find out how many visitors came to your website today by clicking on a link on another web page.
For this, we are going to use two filters at the same time. For the sake of this example, suppose that the refereing web page's URL is http://ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php, and that today is January 2, 2005. In the Referer Filter, type in http://ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php, and in the Date Filter, type in 02-jan-2005. Click on the Filter button to see the hits!
Suppose you have a Mac-specific page; for example, it is the download page of a Mac-only program. How many visitors that visit this page are using Windows?
Again we have to use two filters; suppose that the Mac-specific page's URL is http://ekstreme.com/mac.php. In the Actual URL Filter, type in /mac.php, and in the User-agent Filter, type in Windows. It would be useful if you compare this to the number of Mac users visiting the page: Instead of searching for Windows, search for Mac in the User-agent Filter.