Don’t Negate the Premise

Gource is a visualization for software projects: or is it?

My previous visualization, Logstalgia, was for website access logs. It turns out the information in a website access log and a VCS history are actually some what similar:

  • they both track users, sort of (an ip address may or may not identify one user, but often enough they do)
  • they show the users interaction with a hierarchical directory/file path. Sometimes on a website the path may be a directory path with no specific file, but we can treat such cases as the user requesting the ‘index’ file at that path.
  • they store the time the interaction occurred.

So the up shot is you can visualize website access logs with Gource, and it looks a little something like this:

This feature is built into the current release of Gource, so if your website uses the Apache combined access log format, give it a go.

One Comment

  1. Posted February 23, 2010 at 5:31 pm | Permalink

    This looks cool but it doesn’t seem to tell me quite as much as logstalgia does. Logstalgia is still the better visualizer for me for web traffic logs.