A visit is all the information that polliwog has about what a visitor to your site actually did. It is modelled by the org.polliwog.data.Visit class. The visit contains the following information (some information left out, please see the Visit class for full details):

• ID - each visit is allocated a unique id (unique within the processing of the log)
• Hostname - this is basically the IP address of the visitor (unless the IP address has been resolved into a hostname)
• Pages viewed - this is the set of pages viewed by the visitor during their visit.
• Browser/OS used - this is the browser/os used by the visitor to view the site.
• Hit Statistics - this is overall information about how many hits/pages the visitor viewed, how much they have downloaded, when their visit started/ended and so on.
• Location - this is the country/city/town that the visitor is from (using the GeoIP data if present).

By default a visit is said to have timed out (i.e. the visitor is no longer actively looking at pages on the site) after 30 minutes. This means that 30 minutes have elapsed since the visitor last looked at a page. After this time a new visit is created.

Two properties control the timeout:
which should be an integer value.
Property:
provides meaning for the visitTimeout value, it should be one of: min, hour, day, sec.

Once all the HTML pages have been generated that use the visit the visit instance is converted to an instance of: HumanVisitSummary. This object is similar to the Visit object except that it doesn't contain the pages viewed (except for references to the entry and exit pages).

In some cases you may not by interested in all the visits. For example, if you use your site yourself you may want to filter your visits to not skew your statistics. polliwog can filter out visits based on the information in the Visit class. See the hit filtering page for more details.

It is possible to create custom collections of visits (filtered and non-filtered) that you can produce your own statistics pages with. See the visit collections page for more details.