I want to trace each user time spent in my Facebook application.
I really don't have any idea how to code this, help me out. If someone has any ideas or hints, that will be enough.
I am using Graph API.
Either: Google Analytics
The easiest solution of course is using Google Analytics - FBML (Facebook Markup Language)
has a tag specifically for that: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/google-analytics
That of course doesn't give you data on what a specific user did, but it is pretty good at telling you the time spent on various pages in your Facebook app. And morally its much nicer not to store what a specific user did exactly on your site.
Or: Self-coded solution
If you do want to track everything specifically, you'll first need to store when a page was accessed using PHP when loading the site and then storing in 10-seconds-intervals (or so) that the user is still present, using an AJAX call. To do that, I'd give the page view an ID and send a request to a page like this *i_am_still_here.php?p={page_view_id}* which takes the current timestamp and updates a database entry for that page view.
This solution has one problem: When a user opens a tab in the background and doesn't look at it for 30 minutes, you don't really want to store that 30 minutes as "the user being on the site".
Also, make sure that with whatever self-coded solution you choose, you have to take into consideration that people might have your Facebook app opened in more than one tab.
Your problem is not Facebook related per se. There are many ways you could implement this, it also depends on your particular application.
You could track every click a user makes (timestamp of the click) and then calculate the time spent from that (last click in session - first click in session). This approach is not very accurate off course since you don't know how many time a user was still using your application after the last click.
One other solution that comes to mind right now, would be to fire a XHR (AJAX) request every X seconds that would also log the timestamp in some storage (db, redis, memcache, ...) and you could then do the same calculation from that. It would be more accurate (depending on your interval X).
You can easily calculate the time spent on Facebook by downloading a software called TimRabbit which is a desktop application and starts automatically calculates your time spent on facebook. It only calculates your live time spent and ignores when you are acting as a idle user.
For details visit: http://etechdiary.com/calculate-time-spent-on-facebook/
Related
I know the title is complicated, but i was looking for some advise on this and found nothing.
Just want to ask if i'm thinking the right way.
I need to make a top facebook shared page with about 10 items or so for my website items (images, articles etc.)
And this is simple, i will just get the share count from facebook graph api and update in database, i don't want to make it in some ajax call based on fb share, it could be misused.
Every item has datetime of last update, create date and likes fields in database.
I will also need to make top shared url in 24h, 7 days and month so the idea is simple:
User views an item, every 10 minutes the shared count is obtained from fb graph api for this url and updated in database, database also stores last update time.
Every time user is viewing the item, the site checks last update datetime, if it is more than 10 minutes it makes fb api call and updates. It is every 10 minutes to lower fb api calls.
This basically works, but there is a problem - concurrency.
When the item is selected then in php i check if last update was 10 minutes ago or more, and only then i make a call to fb api and then update the share count (if bigger than current) and rest of data, because a remote call is costly and to lower fb api usage.
So, till users view items, they are updated, but the update is depending on select and i can't make it in one SQL statement because of time check and the remote call, so one user can enter and then another, both after 10 minutes and then there is a chance it will call fb api many times, and update many times, the more users, the more calls and updates and THIS IS NOT GOOD.
Any advise how to fix this? I'm doing it right? Maybe there is a better way?
You can either decouple the api check from user interaction completely and have a separate scheduled process collect the facebook data every 10 minutes, regardless of users
Or, if you'd rather pursue this event-driven model, then you need to look at using a 'mutex'. Basically, set a flag somewhere (in a file, or a database, etc) which indicates that a checking process is currently running, and not to run another one.
I have an inline chat application which I got from Ajax Chat, which is working brilliantly. The application allows a user to chat with users that are registered on the system. Ie:
Now I need to show if the user is online or offline.
So my question is how do I show online users using PHP?
Thank You
Basically what you need is a way to register users activity.
One way you can do this is doing it by sessions within PHP, and you log these. There are tons of ways to register then your activity in a log. If the activity is not updated for example in 5 minutes, the user is offline. Bassically you just need then a sessionId, and a timestamp (and i would recommend this also to hang to a userid). If offline, there is no userId assigned and when online you add a userId. If you have those, its pretty easy. Its a matter of updating them constantly when a new page is loaded and if they log out, you simply destroy the session, or update it so it wont be linked to the user.
It may not be the best system, but it works, and it might help you.
I don't know your specific needs. Pardon me, If I am wrong.
If Jabber support is there with Ajax Chat, why not try ejabberd kind of XMPP servers rather than re-inventing the wheels on your own. And you could have a look at Apache Vysper too, since it has support of extension modules too. If XMPP server is there, users presence handling and message transfer would become a cake walk.
What you need is a constantly update for a table in your database that save the last change in an user and save the date time... so if that date is more than 5 or 10 min, the user ir off..you can do it with ajax...
What i would do is have a script that the clients run to do an ajax call to update a entry in your database with a time stamp for last seen. Not too often or you will overload your server.
you can also put some if statements where it checks for keystrokes, mouse movement, and if the window is active if you really want to get technical and do a away status.
then in active chats just check the time stamp for active messages or when the user list is open. anything outside a acceptable range will show the user as off line. 5 minutes seems pretty long to me. poll for a check every 10 seconds maybe?
I'm not awesome enough to write a chat application, and I'm trying to get one to work, and I've recently downloaded one from here, it's pretty good so far, as I've tested it out on XAMPP, but I have a slight problem. I'm trying to generate a list of online users to give it a more practical application-like feel, but the problem with that, is I have no clue how to do it easily.
When users login to my site, a session named g_username is created, (the chat says 'username', but I'll fix that) and from what I see so far, the easiest method would be to store their username in a database called OnlineUsers and call that data via Ajax, but, the other problem, is that it's session based, and sometimes the users can just leave, without logging out, and I intended to run a script to logout the user from both the OnlineUsers table, and by deleting the session.
If they leave without logging out, they'd be online forever! I could potentially suffix a bit of code on every page, that toggled an ajax event on page close, the event being a script that kills their OnlineUsers table record, but then again, that would load the server with useless queries as users jump between pages, as far as I'm aware.
Creating my entire site in Ajax isn't really an option, as it's a load of different sites combined in to 1 'place' with a social 'layer' (if you will) from a social service.
Does anyone see a way to do this that would make sense, and be easy to integrate, and do with Apache, without command line access?
You could so something like storing a timestamp of the users last action in a database, comparing that timestamp when outputting online users and making sure that it was done at most 1 min ago.
Run on all/vital pages:
(Deciding if the last action is outdated, you could also check if it was done for one minute ago to reduce the database-load)
if($user['lastAction'] < time()) {
//update into database, last action is outdated
}
When calculating the amount of users online and is within the loop of each timestamp
//If the users last action was within a minute, the user is most likely online
if(($row['lastAction']- time()) > 60*60)
//count user as online
you could have a cron job [if you have cpanel] running on the server once every 60secs or so, that checks when a user last sent anything via the chat if they have not in the last lets say 5mins then remove their entry from the online users list.
im making some statistic codes for my website (im a php developper). I want to calculate how many seconds/minutes the web user stay on any page (like google analytics do) but i have no idea of how to make this. Thanks for any help or scripts!
How are you gathering the data? The common options would be instrumenting the page using javascript, looking at webserver log files, in the server-side request handler or sniffing the TCP/IP traffic.
Doing it "like Google Analytics" implies the former. In which case the way to do it would be to grab a timestamp as soon as possible when the page loads (rather than waiting for page ready / onload event) and compare that value with the previous tiestamp (so you'd probably store that in a cookie). Then you need some way to send this back serverside, and a way of recording and reporting on the data.
Note that trying to fire an ajax call as the user leaves the page, e.g. via onunload, will not work reliably (the page launching the request is at the end of its lifecycle). The important thing here is the ASYNCHRONOUS part. And making a synchronous call will just have the effect of slowing down the website.
You might want to have a look at Yahoo Boomerang - although it doesn't support dwell time measurements out of the box, it's easy to extend. For a backend, you could do a lot worse than Graphite
You can fire an unload event in javascript when the user leaves the page, which sends an Ajax request to your server. Since this may not work in all browsers, especially if the network latency is high, also have a ping script (also with Ajax) which calls your statistics system once in a while as long as the user stays on the page (for example, every 10-60 seconds depending on the resolution you want).
If you want to do it in serverside i.e in php then probably you would need a table allocated for this. say "analytic"
First you need to add this script in every pages. that inserts these data into the table analytic which is $_SERVER['http_referer'] , current timestamp, remote address and current page URL.
Now the calculation part.
basically when a user first lands in your page $_SERVER['http_referer'] wouldnt be from your domain. Then keep the timestamp as the start time.
Now check the next time stamp. If the http_referer is same as previous records page URL then find the difference in the time stamp to know how much the user has stayed in a page.
More or less what am trying to say is find the time between each request from the user.
Disadvantage of this method: When user lands in a page closes it. its impossible to find the time on your site.
A quick and easy method I came up with is pretty useful.
On every page of a site where I want to track time on page, I include a tracker script.
I grab as much info as I can, and make a database entry, including the referrer, the requested/loaded page, user-agent, ip, timestamp, etc.
These timestamps, in conjunction with the user's ip, can be used to determine the time the user was on the previous page (including load time of current page).
The only drawback is that I can't determine time on the last page they visit (which isn't always a bad thing, I can reduce tracking idle time).
Bounces are identified by single entries by a given ip within a specified time period (an hour would probably be sufficient).
At page load create a date object, then when the page unloads create another and substract them. After that you can do an AJAX request to your tracking server, sending the elapsed time.
var startTime = new Date();
var endTime;
window.onunload = function()
{
endTime = new Date();
var elapsedSeconds = endTime.getTime() - startTime.getTime();
//Do the ajax request, sending elapsedSeconds
}
At the moment I'm using this SQL to check if a user is connected:
date_add(last_activity, INTERVAL 3 MINUTE) > NOW()
This is passive and will only trigger when a page is loaded.
What I'd like to do is a system that checks if a user has remained connected during a given span of time and give them bonus points.
What do you suggest to achieve this? Use polling or another approach?
You need to use some kind of java script that will report activity using ajax to your site in intervals of like 1 min. You need to implement some sort of mechanism to check if user is active, like if the mouse moves or page is scrolled, because some users can use the same page for long times. If the page is not used since the last min(should be a global var in javascript, set to true every mouse move, and to false every time a message is sent) you don't send a message.
When you receive the ajax notifications in the server you check the time between the last ajax notification(should be stored in database) and current notification and if its smaller than an interval (maybe 2 mins) give the user points for it.
As said you can use AJAX and alternatively the Refresh META tag. Note that if I see a browser tab constantly refreshing, I close it as it is distracting. Of course, if you're offering a service that requires frequent refreshes (chat / shoutbox, ticker) then it's less disturbing.
I currently have 14 tabs open, some of which for days which I haven't really looked at, so you gotta ask how valuable your information is. As far as I know, javascript is unable to get the current mouse position if it's not moving over something that has the mousemove event handled, so implementing "is the page in view and the user moving her mouse" may prove to fire a lot of events when user is active.
I may be oversimplifying here, and this probably won't help much if you're trying to charge for time on the site or something like that, but this is something google analytics takes care of. Time on site is a metric they actively record.
Ok. So here is my idea. As I mentioned in comment my way would be javascript timeout and AJAX.
So the idea would be something like this:
Make a global variable for mouse position.
Set timeout for function to fire in around 10 second intervals (which can grow in time).
Function compares last mouse position with current mouse position. If it has changed user is presumably active.
Update global variable for mouse position. And send data to server-side.
Rinse and repeat...
Actually thing that changed can be anything if you want, but mouse position would be most suiting I think.