Posted by arianek on April 25, 2010 at 5:00am
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| Project: | Documentation |
| Component: | Outdated |
| Category: | task |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | postponed |
| Issue tags: | docs infrastructure |
Issue Summary
I'm not even sure why I had this old page open in one of my tabs, but it's an unpublished docs page (I'm not totally certain what perms are required to see it unfortunately, likely docs admin!) that used to list most popular pages each month. It appears it may have been manually updated (?). Anyway, just a mental note, to consider later on whether we want to consider rebuilding it.
Comments
#1
Yep, that was manually updated. And I deleted an older scheme that needed Drupal's statistics module, http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=394570. I recommend asking around for Google Analytics access. Maybe even stick 'has book hierarchy' in for segmentation to filter out non-handbook pages.
#2
Ah thanks for the update - have posted a discussion on g.d.o to see if anyone is interested in monitoring analytics http://groups.drupal.org/node/81404
Marking this postponed, since it sounds like it's not re-createable automagically. If I find someone who wants to monitor and update the page, I spose it'll republish it.
#3
Well, I'm willing to help, but I got a question from Amazon that threw me for a loop:
Help?
#4
Hmm... I wonder how this was being done before then? There were lists kept manually and the stats must have been gathered somehow... wish I knew a bit more of the history there.
I suppose that it'll be obvious with pages with Handbook URL aliases. But Kieran might be right about it being more effective to put a tracking code into handbook pages... which we can't do right now, but will be able to really soon I imagine, once docs.d.o launches.
#5
Can you send me a screenshot of the page I can share with Kieran? That might prompt another idea. Otherwise, I'll let him know that we'll wait until docs.d.o is deployed.
#6
Google can do http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVari.... We use http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics.
#7
cliff - http://drupal.org/handbook/most-popular-pages (which i hadn't looked back at in a while actually has a note that it was being made using AWStats logs... no clue if that's still accessible anyway...) looks like (2 more months below this as stated in the text at the top):
#8
@arianek, AWStats is generally provided free of charge by hosting services. At least I could run it for free on one of the sites I administered recently. It couldn't do fancy stuff, but it could quickly produce easy-to-download reports on page hits, unique visitors, and maybe even ISP of the visitor. But wouldn't one need webmaster-like access to the d.o server to run it?
@drumm, are you saying that if I were to get access to the Google Analytics for d.o I could set up my own report, selecting the pages I wanted reports on — as opposed to having to glean handbook pages by node from a sitewide report? If so, that sounds promising… really promising!
#9
Access won't help right now; we don't log whether node pages are in the book hierarchy or not. We would have to start doing that.
#10
Just for more background on how this page has worked in the past, originally back in the day we automatically generated the page from Drupal core's statistics module. When we did the upgrade to 6 (I think) statistics module was disabled due to performance concerns and the page went stale. We took that down and (I) started to manually review the AWStats, pick out handbook pages, and then write the popular pages page by hand. It didn't last long as you can see because it was a royal PITA.
#11
I should add that I was given special access to the AWStats each month by Killes to do this. It is a very manual and not easily accessible way of doing it.
#12
Well, we may need to leave it be until docs.d.o is live then, but I think it'd be valuable information to start gathering again if/when it becomes less difficult - would be good to keep an extra eye on the quality of the popular pages.
#13
adding tags
#14
It might be very helpful if the reader could look at the most popular pages *per guide*.
In other words, if I'm a developer I'm probably more interested in what other developers are looking at rather than seeing that the new d7 install guide is hot this month.
When we have tagging it would also be nice to have the option of both "most viewed" and "most starred (or whatever the term is)".
As a reader (and as a docs person) I'd REALLY want to know what other people think is the most valuable information in a given guide.