Forum Moderators: DixonJones
You might want to take a look into "Who's On" by Parker Software. It's basically a graphic interface to who visits your site(s) right now, including paths and repeat visits and some basic tracking and statistics.
Its geo-targeting is a bit buggy right now and I give Steve a hard time on this, but the software itself is reasonably priced and gives you a very good overview of what's happening.
Seems a bit nerdy to me.
Why?
-I know exactly when, where, and what a spider is doing on my sites :)
-Lets me know if there's a error on the site at all when pages are loading
Works very well for me :)
Hey, did anyone ever watched a live tcpdump stream? It's in a way hypnotizing...
You all may be in need of getting out a lttle more ;-)
By the time I got to this I was thinking much the same!
Yes I have watched the access in real time, but only when analysing a DoS attack.
Matt
watchin mail bounce around, apache logs, all of it, we use syslog a fair bit and even that is interesting.
I have watched tcpdump's too, fascinating stuff.
The benefit of all this is that it gives you a better understanding of what data is acquired and helps you see what all of your stats analysis programs are actually interpreting.
I would suggest watching logs as a basic excercise for any person who works with web sites.
Does anybody know of a similar product but which is more stable?
As for "getting out more often". Actually I do get out quite often, having family with two little rascals who prevent any form of lazyness. Nevertheless, watching live stats is quite interesting, hypnotizing and - in a way - soothing,
...just checking sanity levels.
Does anybody know of a similar product but which is more stable?
I'm testing a product right now called VisitorVille. It's SimCity for tracking and logging. Really cool stuff. ;)
Testing stability issues now and over the next few weeks.
Do me a favor, take a look at Who's On at let me know which of the two you still use after a few weeks.
Do me a favor, take a look at Who's On at let me know which of the two you still use after a few weeks.
No need to do the "few weeks" thing. I've viewed the features list and I don't see a whole lot there. It's a very simple interface that shows you who's on the site.
<added> There are more features there, they are just buried a bit. Haven't done a full view under the hood.
What really appealed to me when first considering VV was the fact that the VV code is valid out of the box, no tinkering to escape characters, etc. It is also very lightweight.
I'll agree that the novelty of it wears off after a bit. But, when used together with the Live Help feature, the novelty becomes an integral part of the process.
I'm sitting here now looking at a city that has over 800 buildings. Each building represents a page on the site. There are buses carrying search engine visitors all over the site right now. There are police cruisers, fire trucks, taxi-cabs and a bunch of people just bustling about.
I can right click a bus and see the passengers. I can click on one of the passengers and see their profile which gives me all sorts of information about their system, IP address, etc.
It's basically a gaming package for your stats! :)
That sounds like a fun little program, I really must check it out. Yes, I can see where the novelty would wear off to a certain extent (just like the SIM games) but what a great way to get a quick view of the organics of your site function.
Freq---
pageone: I forgot about the Chat feature. That's actually how I got "hooked" by all this. We used (and still use) LivePerson (HumanClick) for Chat for many years already (actually we used it already back when the basic service was free of charge). We implemented it for chat, but it had sort of a live view as well, and that was great for checking results of email blasts, news releases etc or just for seeing referring sites shift.
Being basically not happy with LivePerson anymore (price/value ratio not right anymore), I started to look for something else. But all other packages I found did not have the live-view feature. That's how I ended up with Who'sOn (which incidentally has a chat feature as well which we don't use).
VisitorVille survived for 2 days on my machine: I got too distracted, my co-workers got too distracted, and it gave no real benefit. Plus I found it rather high priced.
I don't think you are stuck with "live" only thought. It looked to me like you can select a timeperiod and play the "stats" whenever you want.
I don't know if I'll end up using it but I may try it out for a month just to get a feel for it.
Freq---
Problem is, you HAVE to watch it! Unlike a stats package, it's LIVE. If you miss something, you missed it.
Not with VV. There is a VCR feature and you can playback whatever you like. ;)
I don't think you are stuck with "live" only thought. It looked to me like you can select a timeperiod and play the "stats" whenever you want.
You are correct, you can replay the stats. There is both a hosted version and a version you can use to read your log files. It works either way.
Pricing starts at $4.95 USD per month. Not too pricey. It is pretty much inline with most other live stats programs when you get into the larger traffic numbers. The pricing plan is also based on unique visitors and not page views.
Freq---
As a matter of fact some idiot tried it at 1am PST the other night.
He overloaded my server being greedy grabbing too many pages simultaneously, so the server sent me an alarm and he was blacklisted inside of 10 minutes of the start of the download attempt thanks to tail :)
