Today I've been mostly replanting spider-plants, aloe-vera plants, and shuffling trees around inside my flat.

Beyond that I've been updating my trivial dashboard skeleton, which was put together as part of this simple introduction article. (So there is a standalone redis&sinatra-using visualization server)

After working on the display I was suddenly reminded that I run a cluster now. That means I have four servers each writing a local Apache logfile, and no central way of viewing all my visitor-data.

There are several open source analytic packages such as piwik and openwebanalytics - but they require MySQL & PHP at the back-end.

Given that node.js is "teh new shiny" it is a surprise there isn't something out there using that, and web sockets perhaps, to collect visitor data.

I found a few toy projects, but nothing that seemed to be a clear winner. Adding some javascript to webpages to submit:

• Browser version
• Referer
• Screen Size.
• window.location
• etc

Is trivial. The hard part is storing that and visualizing it in a neat way. Making data pretty is something I'm notoriously bad at - unless it is turning numbers into graphs using a good library I'm out of luck most of the time.

Anyway I will keep digging. Ideally I'll have a scalable node service that'll receive submissions, bung them in redis, and then show real-time activity in a sexy fashion. I can dream?

Tags: analytics | 1 comment