New Project: Live View of Visitors On Your Site

Posted At : November 17, 2007 1:24 PM
Related Categories: Web Dev

(Update: I meant for this to be posted on Monday. Sorry for the bad link some of you got in the aggregators.)

I am working on a new project and would like some feedback.

I was inspired by the handy WhosOnCFC authored by Shane Zehnder. It does a good job of delivering totals of visitors and tracking sessions on now, purging old data, etc. However what I really want is a nice interface to track live traffic on my site. Who is visiting, where are they located, where did they come from, what pages are they visiting, etc. Why? Because google analytics is great, but not live. I want to know what is going on now. I can use other tools for data mining and analysis.

So I have built something that does this, and in a somewhat sexy CF8 fashion. Basically a fancy visual interface to the whosoncfc, plus extra data mining. It isn't quite ready for prime time yet, but I am interested in any requests for features people have and if anyone is interested in a beta test.

The way it works is you add a nugget of code to your application file (or into the files you wish to track) and then put up a folder that contains the code and the modified whosonCFC. At that point it starts tracking all sessions and storing data on them. The data only lasts for 10 minutes (my default time) and is only stored in memory. NO DB and no longterm storage.

The interface shows you a list of users (reverse dns lookup on ip), the number of pages they have visited, their total time on the site and if they came from a search engine or if they are a bot. Clicking on the user shows you their details including the path of pages they have gone through thus far.

The idea is that you leave the page up and when a new user comes a friendly 'ding' sound plays to let you know someone new is on the site.

So, what else should I be tracking or show? (if possible)

Do you think refreshing the user list every 10 seconds is too fast or too slow?

I haven't played with AIR at all, but this sounds like a great app to try out no?

Should I show Bots at all? I kind of like seeing the bot traffic right now. It is very entertaining to see who indexes and who doesn't. Turns out I am banned from MSN for some reason. Need to look into that.

Do you think having the session timeout of this app be 10 min is too long? (it doesn't kill your sessions as you have set them up, only purges them from the user list after 10 min of inactivity)

FACT: I have few actual visitors and a CONSTANT stream of bots on my site. Who knew there were so many bots?

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First, I would like to say I am glad you found WhosOnCFC useful. Of all the little utilities I have written in the past, I would definately have to say that this one is my favorite.

Right now I do have a little companion project that goes along with it, but I really haven't heard any feed back on WhosOnCFC so I did not know how well it would go over. The down side, it is database driven which may turn off some people. What it does is keep a log of all your new users over a 24 hour period so you can view everyone who has hit your site for the day and at the end of the day that list gets cleared.

However, it does keep track of all your hits for the day and tallys them. That way you can look back over your domain historical data and see a graphical representation of your website activity.

You can see an example here: http://tracker.kisdigital.com

All IP addresses have been hidden so it is an anonymous view.

I also like where you are going with your application. When you get it up and going, please let me know because I would love to check it out.

Take care brother.

# Posted By Shane Zehnder | 11/17/07 12:36 PM

One last little note, I just released WhosOnCFC 1.0.1 in a modest attempt to keep robots and spiders from running up the user counts and just tracking the actual live users. With all the spiders and things out there nowadays, it will be no easy task. I started with a basic list such as coldfusion, msn, google, and yahoo, but there are way too many out there to count.

# Posted By Shane Zehnder | 11/17/07 12:56 PM

I actually planned this post for Monday, but by reiniting my app it posted early. So I fixed the entry date, which made it duplicate for some. DOH! Shane, I will chat with you directly about our efforts, exciting stuff.