Web Traffic Analysis

While Google Analytics are great for traffic analysis, they show you a particular version of reality. Google tracks using javascript & attempts to track unique visits, which isn’t 100% reliable, but still gives a good idea about real world traffic through your site.

At the other extreme are your web server log files which, if switched on, will contain an entry for every URL request made to your site. This gives a more complete picture of what the server has actually been doing.

Looking at the raw logs isn’t much use, however, being just massive lists of dates, times & URLs. Something is needed to process these and provide an overview. My boss just sent me a link to an old favourite of his that I’ve not used before: Analog is a simple, free log analysis tool that understand IIS log files, for example, out of the box.

It’s simple to get going. Full instructions are in the how-tos, which are also included in the download, but you basically download, unzip & fiddle a couple of settings in a configuration file. The exe then processes the raw logs and burps out an html report file with images.

There might be more sophisticated tools available, but this one’s so easy it’s a good one to begin with.

Making Notes

I used to use notepad or notepad++ to take simple notes, but a few months back I converted to Microsoft OneNote. This is part of the Office suite, was included on my Surface RT and has a free store app version for Windows 8 and Windows 8 Phones. It has a simple tabs & pages interface and automatically syncs across my devices via Skydrive.

To Do

You can also mark a paragraph as being a to-do item which gives it a simple tickbox. So Onenote has also become my default to-do list tool, although I use Trello for projects. Ctrl+1 will cycle the current paragraph through the 3 states: tick box unticked; tick box ticked; no tick box.

Screenshots

I often grab screen shots when making notes. I don’t usually want the whole screen, just the relevant part. These will paste into Onenote OK and the desktop version will let me grab a clip via Insert > Screen Clipping, but I often need to grab a clip from a dev box which I haven’t installed Onenote onto.

The old-school route is to use the Print Screen (PrtScn) key found on a standard keyboard. This places a copy of the screen into the clipboard where it can then be pasted into something like Paint, cropped and then saved as a file. Alt+PrtScn will just grab the active window instead.

Windows 7 included a tool called Snip which fits in the middle here. It lets you grab a screen area and then copy it to the clipboard, save it to file or email it. This is ideal to take a clip from a machine without installing anything else.

It’s missing from Windows Server 2012 by default though. You can get it back by activating the feature through PowerShell, for example. Run PowerShell with Administrator rights.

Install-WindowsFeature Desktop-Experience

This required a reboot of the server afterwards in this case. You can use the following to list the features and sub-features and see which are installed:

Get-WindowsFeature

Windows 8 seems to contain the snip tool still, at least it has on the builds I’ve seen. You can also press Windows Key + PrtScr in Windows 8 to take a screenshot and drop it directly into your Pictures > Screenshots folder as *.png files.

Maths

Something I only recently noticed is that OneNote will spot simple maths as you type it and put in the answer for you. I just happened to type the monthly cost of SharePoint Online and multiply by 12. I typed the equals sign and pressed space and OneNote filled in the answer, including the pound sign (it omitted the trailing zero though, so not quite perfect):

£7.80 * 12 = £93.6

TeamViewer–Remote Desktop

I just used TeamViewer to allow a remote user in to perform an upgrade on a server.

Similar to LogMeIn, GoToMyPc and FogBugz CoPilot.

The nice thing is that it’s free for non-commercial use and you can download and run the client on the PC without doing a full install. Once you stop it running it has gone, so no need to worry about someone reconnecting later on. It gives you an identification code and password which you give out to the external user (over the phone or whatever) who can then connect and take control of the machine.

As it’s running over standard ports there’s no firewall configuration to get in the way, so this will be ideal the next time a friend or family member wants me to connect remotely and fix their PC.

Windows Live Writer

This blog post was written with Windows Live Writer, which is freely available from Microsoft. Just doing a quick test post with it to see how it plays with my Google Blogger blog.

Updated: Seems to work ok.

Dia - free diagram drawing utility (like Visio)

Dia is a diagramming tool, a bit like Microsoft Visio, but free. You create a diagram out of shapes and lines and if you move shapes around it automatically keeps all the lines pointing to the right shapes.

In the following diagram I've just used the basic box shape, basic line connector and some text objects (I'm using version 0.97.1). Dia comes with a bunch of other pre-created shapes for drawing UML diagrams, network diagrams, etc.

The text objects are also connected to the shapes and also move around automatically. It took me a while to figure this out as dragging a text object onto a shape's connection point didn't appear to 'latch-on' as I expected it to, but this is just a wrinkle of the UI - let go and the point should change from green to red to show it's bound to a shape. The text objects will also bind to connection points on lines and you can bind both a text object and a line-end to the same connection point if you want.

A little time-saver: if you click on a connection point when adding a line or text object, then the line or text object will be created and bound to that point.

I've bound the line-ends to the connection points in the centre of the boxes (not shown). The lines automatically move around the box edges so you don't have to alter the connection point bindings if you move shapes around.

I tried putting the boxes and lines on different layers. While this worked, I got errors when I reloaded the diagram and all the objects were all disconnected. I've moved them all back to a single layer for now. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release.

Dia can also auto-scale the diagram to fit a page. Use File > Page Setup and use Fit To 1 by 1, for example. Check the paper size and orientation too. Note that if you want to export the diagram to an image format later you might need to swap back to specifying a scaling otherwise the image can come out a little 'blocky'.

SequoiaView - why is my hard disk full?

SequoiaView is a free tool that shows you how your disk space is being used and is very useful when trying to identify what is taking up all your disk space. By default it shows all the files as grey boxes, but it can also be configured to use different colours for different file types.

Psexec - run a process on a remote machine

A quick note to record a handy utility: psexec. It runs from the command line and allows you to run a command remotely. The command could be 'cmd' in which case you get a remote command line. Can also use it to run on multiple machines including an option to try all in a domain. Can specify credentials or it will try to impersonate your current login account. Very handy.