Watching Blog Activity In Real Time
written by John Chow
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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(10 votes, average: 2.9 out of 5)
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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.
Reminds me of Bruce Almighty — where the prayers just keep flooding in his email. In a way, John’s a blog deity like that!
Odd way to say it
uh…. i wouldnt exactly say diety…its the rootof all
Yeah, but in the movie, didn’t that come to bite him in the butt later on when he couldn’t keep up?
I guess if having too much traffic to my site was the worst of my problems in life, I would be pretty happy too though!
Agreed! Same here, sadly.
Visitorville is another cool tool to use - http://www.visitorville.com/
I had it going for a while until it couldn’t handle the number of pages we have on the site. I think it caps out at 500 or 1000 - nonetheless it’s a fun tool to watch.
very nice plugin, john, thats a hell of a trafic cool.
David same thing on my blog its boring to watch my traffic
Don’t feel bad. I’m sure the majority of us would associate watching this page with watching paint dry!
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!
great site,we can download free wordpress plugins…
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
haha! dont we all
So actually you spied on me reading this post
?
Nice plugin but I won’t use it now.
John any info on bandwidth and how’s the server running with it ON?
I have a better plugin: it’s called tail
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?
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.
Great Plugin! Thanks!!
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?
Lol thats crazy amounts of traffic john lol. MOst of us can only dream..
[...] note: I am really sorry for this copy paste job from johnchow.com as I have to rush for a official meeting call i got just now. Meanwhile if someone has tried this [...]
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.
Watching my blog’s traffic, compared to you, would be like watching paint dry…
Nice pluggin though.
Thanks John
Beijinho (Kiss)
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.
Sweet! It works and like others I am not a hit machine like you… YET!
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.
Wow, that is a blast to watch!
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.
It’s like watching what happens inside an ant-hill…
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 …
[...] Video of Live Running on a Wordpress Blog [...]
A bit worthless but neat nonetheless.
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.
Wow, I’m so jealous… I wish I had 10% of that traffic!
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.
Cool plugin, I must try it!
Yeah, i tried it a while ago, but nothing seemed to work! I forgot that my site didn’t get much traffic then! >.. Duh!
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
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 plugin though.
I want that traffic for my site:
Yeah, for mine it’d just scroll up one line a minute. LOL
I want that traffic for my site:
The Prize Blog.
[...] 4 - Video of Live Running on a Wordpress Blog [...]
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?
[...] John Chow blogged about a wordpress plugin that lets you get your website activity in real time. It shows your website/comment, referrer and the IP address that it came from. It is a very cool update which is similar to DiggSpy. [...]
John,
You can do this with Clicky Web Analytics as well. The feature is called “Spy”. It’s pretty cool!
Doug