Review: Funnel Web v1.04
(Active Concepts) -- $149.95

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Copyright 1997 by Bill Fox

Last Updated: September 29, 1997

I have used Funnel Web v1.04 for the past week to analyze my web site log files. Active Concepts, a sponsor of Macs Only!, provided the evaluation copy of the latest version.

First, let me say that I can not take full advantage of Funnel Web since I do not run my own web server. Macs Only! is hosted by pair.com on an Apache server and I receive daily log files of activity on my site. Nevertheless, Funnel Web is an excellent product for what I do--it is not overkill. Funnel Web may be used as a cgi resource as well as for analyzing log files.

When Funnel Web is run on the web log file, it provides a series of summary reports with corresponding graphs. Server requests are summarized and classified as hourly during a day, daily during a week, days during the month, directory and file type (.gif, .html, etc.). The graphs are line, bar or pie charts, whichever is the most relevant for the report at hand. If used in conjunction with a web server, information on the country, browser and URL source are also provided.

Funnel Web installed simply without drama and is very easy to use after installation. One may drag and drop a web log file on Funnel Web's spider icon or select "Process" in the File Menu or click the "Process" button on Funnel Web's floating widow. Funnel Web recognizes virtually all web log file formats. While Funnel Web does not currently summarize several log files concurrently, a feature that Active Concepts plans to add in a future version, the Concatenate function in BBEdit may be used to combine files for analysis.

One significant feature of Funnel Web is the speed at which it processes logs. As an example, my concatenated month-long July web log is ~16 MB and has some 171,000 individual files. It took just 75 seconds to process, including producing the graphics files.

One additional recommendation is that Funnel Web should summarize not only the number of requests (all file accesses, text and graphics) but should also count the number of different sites that visited during the period and the number of actual visits. The number of sites and the number of visits are important information for web site management. Active Concepts told me that they are working on these additional features and hope to incorporate this information in the next version.

The bottom line? I think Funnel Web is an excellent application for analyzing web log files. The graphs are super as is the processing speed. Here are some further comments on MacWEEK.

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Copyright © 1997 by Bill Fox.
All rights reserved--no commercial use permitted without my expressed permission.

Of course . . . . . . and I am proud to be an Evangelista! . . .

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