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Watching Blog Activity In Real Time

written by John Chow on June 21, 2007

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WordPress Live is a free WordPress plugin that lets you watch your website activity in real time. You can watch live as people visit your pages, leave a comment or grab your feed. The Live display is similar to Digg Spy. Each page hit, RSS hit, and comment slowly (or quickly, depending on how much traffic your blog gets) scrolls onto a canvas. The plugin also includes a hit graph that dynamically shows you how much traffic your site is getting over a period of time.

The plugin is available from Headzoo, who seems to have a bunch of neat little plugins on his WordPress download page. So far, Live has been the only plugin I’ve tried and it’s pretty entertaining. Mind you, I wouldn’t give up the TV for it.

The best way to show Live is to watch it in action. I’ve made a little video to do just that. Enjoy!

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I thought it was broken, but now I realise there's just no one that visits my blog!

It would be really amazing if that video was actually taken sometime in the middle of the night. John's site never sleeps, does it.

It would be cool to modify this code to work on a regular site.

Hi John,
Looking at your traffice my head spins.. :roll:

John,

You can do this with Clicky Web Analytics as well. The feature is called "Spy". It's pretty cool!

Doug

Cool stuff but how do you keep up with all the e-mails and comments you must get? Do you have an army of little people helping you?

I want that traffic for my site:
The Prize Blog.

I want that traffic for my site:

Yeah, for mine it'd just scroll up one line a minute. LOL

Pretty cool looking plugin but what do you do with it?

You watch :) Turn the TV off and bask in the success of your blog :cool:

Obviously everybody here is fooled by the fact, that this "live" plugins replays the last 5 minutes of hits once you look at the view. Of course that's scrolling by very very fast ... notice how the video stops right after all the scrolling?

http://headzoo.com/live

The plugin that lets you watch your website activity in real time. So this ain't fake its real

Yeah, i tried it a while ago, but nothing seemed to work! I forgot that my site didn't get much traffic then! >.. Duh!

Cool plugin, I must try it!

I don't think may of us realise (myself included) how much traffic John gets until you run this on your own blog. It's immense.

Of course, I'd love to know the load this plugin causes on the server.

Wow, I'm so jealous... I wish I had 10% of that traffic!

I don't get a whole lot of traffic, but that is still a really interesting plugin. I think I may have to try it out.

A bit worthless but neat nonetheless.

With respect ... but this plugin sucks, because it generates an additional hit (index.php?livehit=blabla) for every normal hit. For what purpose other than tainting normal statistics that parse your access.log?

Uninstalled ...

It's like watching what happens inside an ant-hill...

It's boring enough having to delete blog spammers comments without having to watch them make them too. I think I'll skip this one.

Wow, that is a blast to watch!

I just read about this plugin yesterday and was thinking of installing it. I was wondering how it actually looked in action, so thanks for the video.

Sweet! It works and like others I am not a hit machine like you... YET!

I'll have to remind myself of this plugin later. I don't receive enough traffic... yet!
This reminds me of the web analytics site called GetClicky. But this live plugin works on the blog, so it looks way more convenient.

Watching my blog's traffic, compared to you, would be like watching paint dry...

Nice pluggin though.

Thanks John

Beijinho (Kiss)

That's a fantastic plugin. Finally I can track how many people are clicking the RSS icon in their browsers address bar, rather than just tracking those who click the FeedBurner link on my site. :)

Thanks for the heads up, John, and thanks to Headzoo for creating a great plugin. :)

Lol thats crazy amounts of traffic john lol. MOst of us can only dream..

wow, very fast rate
wordpress 2.2.1 is out, I think John is busy enough to upgrade so I can make screnshots a few famous blogger wp version. Who already upgrade?
:twisted:

Thanks for sharing this great plugin. Unfortunately we don't have your traffic

I think it's actually beneficial for sites that get moderate traffic. With a site like John's though, it would be pretty amusing to see the words just...scroll by so fast like that.

I have a better plugin: it's called tail :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

For the non-tech here, tail is a unix command that shows the end of a file. If you do "tail -f access.log" (where access.log is your web server log file) you'll see a real time log of all the connections to your web server (lol while I'm writing this I see a sphere scout coming..).

With some little effort, I'm sure you can build a simple real-time traffic monitor like Live or just leave opened a puTTY/terminal and just watch it from there.

Feel free to read my blog if you like this kind of tinkering :)

:)

I love tail :)

I don't use it for real-time visitor watching, but when you're trying to debug a problem, tail is one of your best friends :)

Hey that's pretty cool. Is the program hard to learn how to use?

So actually you spied on me reading this post :lol: ?

Nice plugin but I won't use it now.
John any info on bandwidth and how's the server running with it ON?

I think my traffic is only a tenth of yours if even that much. I'm going to give it a shot though. I wonder how much it affects your bandwidth on the server though.

Wow, I wish I had a tenth of John's traffic :roll:

great site,we can download free wordpress plugins...

Oh! I've been looking for something like this!
I remember I had a plugin similar on my other blog but couldn't come up with the name. This is much better though :) .

Thanks!

Haha. Just finished watching your video. My mouth is open in amazement until I start cracking up after I hear

"We got a lot of traffic. "

Haha I can't seem to get his voice saying that line out of my head. It's just sounds so funny and very matter-of-fact both at the same time!

very nice plugin, john, thats a hell of a trafic cool.

David same thing on my blog its boring to watch my traffic :neutral:

Don't feel bad. I'm sure the majority of us would associate watching this page with watching paint dry!

Very cool plugin! However, I think it would be rather boring to watch my blog live as I don't receive traffic like you do.

Same here. He gets so much traffic that it scrolls too fast.