NAME

dada_stats.pl - A simple statistics script for Dada Mail lists.

Installation

Where Should The Stat Files Be Written?

The best idea is to have a directory *just* for this function, so when you want to retrieve all your reports, you just have to download one directory, and open it up into something ike Excel. make sure this script has permissions to write to this directory!

example:

        my $Stat_Dir = '/usr/home/account/.dada_files/.stats';

Where Is Your Server's Perl Library?

If you run this script as a cron job, you'll need to set the path to the lib directory you can type in (or copy, be smart 'bout this)

        perl -e 'foreach(@INC){ print $_,"\n"}'

in a telnet session to get a list of various perl libs to use.

example:

        use lib '/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005';

Where Are Your dada and DADA Directories?

Make sure these point to the correct place where the dada and DADA directories are, as this script will need to know where they are. If you run this script via a cron job, you should set these to absolute paths.

example:

        use lib '/usr/home/account/public_html/cgi-bin/dada'; 
        use lib '/usr/home/account/public_html/cgi-bin/dada/DADA';

What Does This Script Do?

It tries to do a few things, but most importantly, it helps you get a good idea on what's going on with your subscriber list. Is it growing? Shrinking? Where are people coming from? How many total people are subscribed?

This script creates two tab-delimited files that you can then open in a spreadsheet application like Excel and make pretty little line graphs of what's going on with your lists. Every time it's run, it'll create a new line of data. A smart thing to do would be to run this script once a day, thus giving you a snapshot of that day. The two files it creates are:

Domain Stats

The first thing dada_stats does is take count of email addresses by Top Level Domain, like .com, .edu, and so forth. You can change what Top Level Domain dada_stats.pl works with by changing the @DOMAINS array in the Config.pm, instructions are provided in the Config.pm file itself. This is useful to see from where are people are coming form to subscribe to your list. You may find that you have a large college following if you have many '.edu' Top level Domains, or many people are coming from Japan if you have a big 'jp' number. Things like that. The tab-delimited file kinda looks like this:

        Sun Mar 18 23:15:23 2001        1633    1321    61      5       1       179     1       10      55

Which isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but is easy for a spreadsheet to handle, here's the default format lables:

        Date    Total   com         edu         gov     info    mil     net     nu      org    us       Other

The first column is the date, the second column is the total number of subscribers on your list. That may be all you care about and you can do a great deal with just that. The rest of the numbers depend on what you have in your @DOMAINS array, but its basically the Top Level Domains you want to track, in alphabetical order. After that, is the number of subscribers that don't fall in any of the other categories If you change the @DOMAINS array in the Config.pm while you're using this script, your file's format will change and that not site well with the number crunchers. If I added 'foo' to the @DOMAINS array, its entry will go between 'edu' and 'gov' and all the rest after 'foo' will get pushed to the right. See what I'm saying?

Mail Services Stats

The second file that is created per list is the Internet Email Services table, which keeps track of free email services and other trackable ones like, yahoo!'s mail services, aol.com, etc. This is set by the %SERVICES hash in the Config.pm file. This file has a similar format to the above:

        Sun Mar 18 23:15:23    2001    506      6       5       207     8       0       84      817

First column is the date, second is the total amount of email addresses, the next are your services, in alphabetical order, the default label would look like this:

        Date    Tota    .Mac    AOL    Compuserve    Excite Mail    Hotmail    MSN      PO Box  Prodigy Yahoo! Other

(note that 'Excite Mail' is one Service) After those, anything that doesn't fall in those categories gets written under 'Other'

How to use this script

Everytime this script is run, it'll write to two files per list, the domains file and the services file, the filename will be something like listshortname-domains.txt and listshortname-services.txt

It'll write one line of data, explained above. This script should really be run by a cron job, say everyday at midnight. This will give you a daily snapshot of your list.

This script is just a starting point. the easiest thing to do with the files this script creates is to pull it into Excel, which can do all kinds of crazy stuff to thingies in tables.

The other thing you can do is create a script that takes the information in the files and create a report out of it. This is something else you could run via a cronjob, say at 1am every day, so when you wake up, you can see exactly what is going on with your Dada lists, and try to pick out trends.

Author

Justin Simoni http://justinsimoni.com

head1 License

This program is Open Source Software and is covered under the General Public License. You should have gotten a copy of the license with this script. if not, you can view a copy at: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

COPYRIGHT

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.