That's simple. Think of your web site as a party that you throw on a daily basis. You as the party host are always interested in making the next party better than the last. How do you do that? You make sure that your guests enjoy an interesting environment, have enough room to be comfortable and have enough to eat and drink.
To accomplish this you need information. You need answers to questions like: "How many people were dancing in the living room; was there enough space?"; "How many people tried the salmon mousse; did they like it?"; and "Did I have enough red wine, was it too dry?"
ARIA is able to answer these types of questions by grouping website vistors (party guests) into categories.
ARIA comes installed with a set of default categories. These categories were designed to serve the needs of many ARIA users. However, every party is different; every web site is different. Folks who maintain and manage web content need to know different things about their web site content and visitor activity. They need different categories. ARIA allows for each user to create their own custom categories.
How do I create my own custom categories?
Custom categories are easily created by following these steps:
1. Identify a category by asking yourself what information
you need about your web site content and visitor activity.
(How many of my party gusts were from North America?)
2. Give that information a category name.
(North America)
3. Describe the information needed for each category name
with a "regular expression"
(you'll learn more about "regular expressions"
with your ARIA documentation)
(Every guest from the United States, Canada and Mexico)
4. Put the "regular expression" into the correct ARIA configuration files.
5. Stop and restart ARIA Recorder.
Steps 1 & 2:
Just kike your party, let's say you want to know how many North
America visitors came to your website. You've indentified a new visitor
category! Your next step (#2) is to name this category. In this
case let's call it "North America."
Step 3:
We used words to describe the information in the "North
America" category; ARIA needs to use a "regular expression"
to describe the "North America" category. Therefore, you
need translate the information needed for your "North America"
category to ARIA using a regular expression.
Here's the regular expression used for the "North America"
category:
NorthAmerica: .*\.(us|ca|mx|com|edu|gov|org|net|mil)
Regular expressions, and how to write them, are described in detail in the ARIA documentation. If you know PERL you probably recognize them, if not, don't worry, they're relatively easy to learn how to write.
Step 4:
Now that you've written the regular expression describing your
"North America" category, you'll need to add this category
to one of ARIA's category configuration files. ARIA utilizes five category
configuration files:
uri.re
domain.re
agent.re
status.re
referer.re
You may add categories to or remove categories from any of the .re files in the Recorder directory using the text editor of your choice. In the case of your "North America" category you would add it to the domain.re file (your ARIA documentation will explain why). Future releases of ARIA will include a tool for creating and updating categories.
Step 5:
After modifying the category configuration files, you must stop
and restart ARIA Recorder by entering the following at the Unix prompt:
S81aria stop
{wait sixty seconds}
S81aria start