FOSBENNER.NET - Website Visitor Tracker

Website Visitor Tracker

Select date range, then click submit to view graph

Results for July 05, 2020 to August 03, 2020:

Total: 789 visits from 20 countries

Items omitted from graph:

Country	# Visits
Netherlands	7
Poland	3
Ireland	3
United Kingdom	3
Finland	2
South Korea	2
Austria	1
Japan	1
Spain	1
Brazil	1

About the Website Visitor Tracker

Summary:

The visitor tracker uses webserver log data, geographic IP information, and some custom logic to visualize the traffic to Fosbenner.net based on country of origin and date.

Details:

It all starts with a custom Apache access log, which includes only the information that I need for this purpose: remote IP address, timestamp, and server name. These values are seperated by tabs, to allow me to parse with the csv module on python. Once parsed, I filter the logs by server name (I have a couple domains on my server, so I only keep traffic to Fosbenner.net), then remove traffic from my own IP address. Next, I apply a "unique visit" filter, removing logs from the same remote host within a short time period (see notes below). I then perform a geoIP lookup for each remaining log to identify it's country of origin (using a module that I wrote; see link below). Finally, I save the data for each log in an SQLite database. This whole parsing/filtering/storing procedure is done at regular intervals with a simple cron job.

When this page is loaded, the backend is retrieving logs from the database based on the date range provided, then generating the graph to be displayed (using matplotlib), as well as processing the remaing data to be shown in the tables below the graph.

Notes:

-Data begins on September 5, 2019.

-A unique visit is identified by an interval of 10 minutes with no activity.