Compiling iTunes U Usage Reports?

Question

Has someone come up with a good way to compile the iTunes U Reports into something useful? I appreciate Apple's "iTunes U: Usage report" for knowing what tracks are getting hits, but putting the data together week by week is a pain. I was wondering if someone had figured out a better way? Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Answer 1

I used good ol' fashion Perl to create a web app for distributing stats to our various internal players.
I cron job GetDailyReportLogs once a night to get the stats, then use Perl to parse the stats into meaningful data for year, month, series, episode, etc. Then, my favorite part, I use Perl's Data::Serializer to save all these data to files.
When a user loads the app, I just pull up the already processed data file and pass it to HTML::Template files. Because the data are already in the correct format for my various line charts, bar graphs and tables, the page loads very quickly and I'm not reprocessing the same data over and over, and I'm using AJAX to pull in the template for each chart individually.
So, using the iTunes U web services and Perl, I was able to pretty easily create a web app that lets users dig through their own usage stats. They can view top series, total downloads, most viewed episodes for the year, month, series, etc.
Perl might be old fashion, but I still love it.
-Chris