Development: Reporting current connections/users

External Since: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 1625

It can be a helpful marketing tool to be able to display the number of
users currently accessing a site.

On a Linux machine this can be achieved with the aid of a Perl script
and an iframe:

An example Perl script to report current users:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Change hostname to your domain!
$hostname = "www.mydomain.com";

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<HTML>\n";
print "<HEAD>\n";
print "<BASE HREF=http://$hostname/index.html>";
print "</HEAD>\n";
print "<BODY>\n";

open(FILE,"netstat -na | grep ^tcp | wc -l |");

while(<FILE>)
{
print "STATUS: $_ users online";
}
close(FILE);

print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";

exit;

This sends back an HTML document just saying:

STATUS: 45 users online

or however many connections the site currently has.

This may then easily be incorporated into a web page with an <iframe>
thus:

<iframe src=http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/status.pl scrolling=no
frameborder=none></iframe>

You will want to adjust your <iframe> width and height according to
the data being returned.

This is a quick and dirty solution which just returns a snapshot of
the number of concurrent connections at the time when the script is
run. There is room for improvement, of course, but even as it stands
it can be useful.

Matt

External Since: Sep 19, 2003 Posts: 3499

Matt Probert wrote:
> It can be a helpful marketing tool to be able to display the number of
> users currently accessing a site...

Maybe useful to help sell advertising [1] but I'm not sure how it helps with
retianing a visitor - unless you're target audience is a flock of sheep.

[1] I'm sure there are more meaningless stats one can use to sex up the
desirability of any site.
--
William Tasso