I created my site logging system recently and finalized it this morning, I went ahead and scripted it to enter each log in xml format. The reason for this is that each log is removeable, but only after it has finished logging for the day (after 23:59:59pm) the admin can copy the entire log and save it as a .txt or even .xml file and have it on his own machine for future reference. I plan on eventually creating an aggregator so that those who have saved their log files to their computers or wherever they have, might be able to easier manager their logs, with features like being able to search for Ip's / usernames / agents/ actions/ etc etc. so they can find specific visits that need attention or seem alittle suspicious. It would also be able to sort them in a more organized way, right now its just listed in the order the visits come but with the aggregator I plan to develop eventually it can organize the log however you like, and manage multiple logs.
<Log>
<Visit>
<Date>July 6, 2005, 12:24 am </Date>
<Visitor id="Guest" address="***.93.***.199" />
<Agents> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4 </Agents>
<Action> [url]http://phpublisher.net/index.php?find=News[/url]</Action>
</Visit>
<Visit>
<Date>July 6, 2005, 12:25 am </Date>
<Visitor id="Guest" address="***.93.***.199" />
<Agents> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4 </Agents>
<Action> [url]http://phpublisher.net/index.php?find=News[/url]</Action>
</Visit>
<Visit>
<Date>July 6, 2005, 12:26 am </Date>
<Visitor id="TimTimTimma" address="***.93.***.199" />
<Agents> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4 </Agents>
<Action> [url]http://phpublisher.net/[/url]</Action>
</Visit>
</Log>
NOTE: the ip addres don't actually have star in them this is used for my privacy and security.
However I didnt come to tell you what i am doing! I am here to collect some answers to a questions I have.
1: Is it worth the effort to put it into xml format and make an aggregator for it, or to simply put it plain/text format and have it viewable that way?
