Live Plugin for WordPress 2.0
ADVERTISEMENTSLive is a free WordPress plugin that lets you watch your blog’s activity in real time. You can watch as your readers are visiting your pages, leaving comments, and grabbing your feeds.
The plugin uses Ajax and log files to keep showing you everything that’s happening on your blog from an Admin menu.
Note:This plugin will only work with WordPress 2.0 and above.
Screenshot (click to enlarge)
Ping rate
Above your website activity, you will find an option for increasing and decreasing Ping Rate. Ping Rate is the time needed to send a query to your server to see if there is any new activity to display. You can adjust how often these queries take place by adjusting the Ping Rate from the Live menu.
How often you ping the server depends on the speed of your server. For fast servers, you could set the ping rate to about 3-5 seconds. For slower servers, you should set the ping rate to about 8-10 seconds. I have left it at it’s default 10 seconds.
Live Canvas
The area in the Live menu that displays your website activity is called Live Canvas. Currently the plugin displays 3 types of events.
- Page hits- When someone visits one of your blog pages, their IP address, the page they are visiting, and the referring page will be displayed in the canvas. It is shown in blue color
- New Comments- When someone leaves a new comment on your blog, their IP address will be displayed along with the name of the post, the author’s name, and the comment they left. It is shown in green color
- Feed hits- When someone grabs your blog’s feed, their IP address will be displayed along with the type of feed, i.e. RSS, RSS 2, ATOM, etc. It is shown in red color
Note: The visitor’s IP address is a link to www.dnsstuff.com, which will show you WHOIS information for the IP address.
Installation
Download the ZIP file and extract the directory somewhere on your home computer. Using your favorite FTP client program, upload the directory into the /wp-content/plugins directory.
Give write permissions to the logs directory. Log into your WordPress Admin panel and from the Plugins menu, activate the plugin.
After doing that, a new top menu named Live will appear in the main menus tab. Click on this tab to watch your website activity in real time.
My Thoughts
I liked the idea of showing our Website activity live but did not like the plugins interface. The live activity is shown on a text box and the full Page and Referer URLs are not shown. The URLs are cut after about 24 characters and then dots are displayed. See the screenshot above. I would also like to see the URLs linked back to the posts.
I hope the future versions of the plugin will include these and more advanced features.
Download Live Plugin for WordPress 2.0
I have added this plugin to the WordPress Plugin Collection
Search JohnTP.com or view a random post
Related Articles
Find out what I am doing currently by .
Posted on July 24th, 2006 | Category: WordPress Plugins |
Thilak
July 24, 2006 at 6:43 pm
I tried to install this plugin a week ago but i had some issues with my Feed, so i had to deactivate it.
Did anyone face similar problem ?
Ryan M
July 24, 2006 at 6:57 pm
It sounds pretty cool, but can you go back and see the activity or is it only good when you’re sitting there watching it?
John T P
July 25, 2006 at 5:09 am
Thilak- No, I did not have any problems with the plugin so far
Ryan M- It seems to work only when the page is open
Thilak
July 25, 2006 at 8:28 am
Are you running this plugin on your blog now ?
John T P
July 25, 2006 at 9:18 am
Yes, I have it activated at present.
Thilak
July 25, 2006 at 10:18 am
I’ll give it one more try
Yvonne
July 25, 2006 at 10:52 am
I’ve had this installed for a while now … it’d be perfect if the referring urls were clickable or at least not cut off. And also if the IP addresses could be converted to names if that person has commented on your site before. (Not that I’m complaining, that’d all be pretty complicated I’m guessing!) Nice review.
Thilak
July 26, 2006 at 3:24 am
Crap!!, I just installed it, and now comments are not working (even after i deleted the plugin)
Sean
August 26, 2006 at 10:21 pm
I’m working on the next version now. I never expected so many people to use it, and I only wrote it as a way of answering, “I wonder if Ajax can do this…”
I’ve seen a lot of comments on the plugin, and I have a good idea of what people are looking for. Those ideas are going into the next version.