Scraping Real Time Visitors from Google Analytics

Question

I have a lot of sites and want to build a dashboard showing the number of real time visitors on each of them on a single page. (would anyone else want this?) Right now the o

Answer 1

Having google in the loop seems pretty redundant. Suggest you use a common element delivered on demand from the dashboard server and include this item by absolute URL on all pages to be monitored for a given site. The script outputting the item can read the IP of the browser asking and these can all be logged into a database and filtered for uniqueness giving a real time head count.

Ammendum: A database can also add a timestamp to every row of data it stores. This can be used to further filter results and provide the number of visitors in the last hour or minute.

Client side Javascript with AJAX for fine tuning or overkill The onblur and onfocus javascript commands can be used to tell if the the page is visible, pass the data back to the dashboard server via Ajax. http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/demo/2007-05-16-detect-browser-window-focus/

When a visitor closes a page this can also be detected by the javascript onunload function in the body tag and Ajax can be used to send data back to the server one last time before the browser finally closes the page.

As you may also wish to collect some information about the visitor like Google analytics does this page https://panopticlick.eff.org/ has a lot of javascript that can be examined and adapted.