What's Up

     Just recently a new friend of ours wanted to move his
entire domain from another Akron Internet service to our
rainbow server. Yes, it's true that the very same machine
that brings you rainbow-akron.com also provides a home for
akrobiz.com and a few others domains that we don't own, but
provide for. Anyway, the webmaster of our new
cyber-room-mate turned me on to something really cool:
LDS WebTrac.

     A Web server runs a special program called HTTPd, which
stands for Hyper-Text-Terminal-Protocol-daemon. Basically,
it is responsible for taking requests from Web browsers and
serving up the pages and graphics required to present our
Web site. It runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it also
keeps a log of all of its activities. LDS WebTrac uses this
log to create a database object. Once the log is in database
form, queries can be asked of it and it will return its answers
as either text reports or graphical charts. Since October
11, 1996 (Coming Out Day) rainbow-akron.com has been
there serving up a gay positive image of Akron to the world.
This has resulted in the accumulation of about 16 megabytes
of logged activities. That's a lot!

     At the moment of writing this article, there are some
494 pages at rainbow-akron.com (not counting all of the cgi
stuff and pages linked to at akrobiz.com). After this issue
of What's Up is posted on the Web there will be 518 or more!
With LDS WebTrac, we can now see: pages in order of number
of hits, All of the other Internet Service Providers who
have requested pages from our site, highest traffic times,
and a variety of other useful bits of info. It's interesting
to note that many people get to our site from search engine
results. So, they might jump into the site from any page.

     I was glad to see that within the top 10 pages was one
called symptoms.htm, which outlines symptoms of HIV / AIDS,
myths about how it is spread, and HIV testing information.
This page is part of the AIDS Holistic Services Program's
site. What's Up (this fine little publication) is the most
looked at feature on our site! Adams Street's home page is
the highest hitting commercial page, followed by Pecs. That
is probably because they've been there, to be seen, since
day one. Our guest book gets a lot of attention too. Have
you signed in? The highest amount of activity on our site
was on 5/7/97 with well over 3000 pages served in one day to
Web surfers of the world.

     The one little factoid that really blew me away was the
international activity report. Obviously, the United States
is, by far, the the largest audience to our site, but our
site has been seen by 47 other countries in the world.
Canada requests the most information across our borders,
followed by Sweden (it figures) and Australia (go
Priscilla!). Germany, Spain, and Great Britain all come in
just under that. There are names of countries on this list
I've never even heard of! All of which brings me to a point.
If you're going to do it, do it right, and do it BIG!          JL :o)