Web Server Quest

Web Server Quest is a Google Chrome extension that record and count up your activities on requesting web pages. It can summarize the count of web server types and technologies used by each page request.

You can also use existed or setup your own Cube server that helps you record each request and deriving metrics. With the help of Cube, you can make richer analysis in post-hoc manner, such as quantiles and histograms of arbitrary event sets.

For the future work, we are going to provide a mini roll playing game that makes it more fun for end users.

Preface

In recent years, researches and web analytic tools help web developers get to know their user. Such as the popularity of the browsers and OSs. However, there are few tools for us to understand how these excellent web sites built on and how the web get composited.

To get to know the web, we have to collect server properties from all popular web servers that distributed all over the world. Instead of setting up dozens of crawlers walking through the web, we adopt crowd-sourced computing model for user orientated statistics.

What can you get after using Web Server Quest?

Statistic collected locally: (display with pop-up window)

Total number for each
- Web server types (serverType)
- Application stack types (serverTech)

Diagrams for historical events of each
- Web server types (serverType)
- Application stack types (serverTech)

After uploaded to a Cube server:

Overall page popularity
Overall domain popularity
Overall web server popularity
Overall application stack popularity
... and more

What do we log?

Time-stamps
Response status code
For each document request, we record the URL string without # part, which meant to be an anchor. We can now get the domain name and "some" detail about each request.
Web server type (serverType)
Application stack type (serverTech)
Future work: Host OS type
Future work: Users' Nationality by their IP or other libraries

How to promote?

Play the game, unveil the web.

That is, Gamification!

We are going to provide a mini RPG game in the future.

Permissions and Data Policy

This extension monitor and record user's browsing activity locally for counting and plotting.
Browsing event will send to localhost by default, you can change it to other trusted servers.
Future work: Local storage for
- settings
- statistics
- game save data

Acknowledgment and License(s)

Web Server Quest was inspired by:

Web Server Quest Google Chrome extension uses:

dygraphs (MIT License)
Cubism.js (Apache License)
- D3.js (BSD License)

The document can be generate with

Docker

For detailed parameters, please take a look in Makefile.

Shortcuts

Overall performance: server dashboard
Dashboard with chosen facts: demo dashboard

asserchiu / WebServerQuest