ArronHirst.com

WAUs Goes v2.0, Real-time Stats Now Available – [Updated]

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Arron

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[Update @ 22.15pm]

We’re currently surveying the impact that public stats have on the load time of the main URL and other pages of RazorianFly. During this time we may pull the stats feature(s) completely to test difference in load speed(s) …

Original Article:

When starting this blog in late July I came across a statistics service which was visual, reliable and more importantly, useful. Who’s Amung Us is a free statistics service which allows you to embed a widget into your blog or site which will track how many ‘people’ are currently browsing, as well as provide a short overview of which pages are being viewed at that time. They just updated the service, and we’re taking full advantage of it …

I loved the service as it was, but the guys over at Who’s Amung Us last night pushed out version 2.0, and I have to say it’s even more polished than before. Ok – they admit that they are still working out the kinks after moving to a new system, but normal behavior should resume shortly.

As you probably know, we’ve taken advantage of their stats for a good few months now and they’re awesome, but today we have something new, which we find pretty damn hot … all thanks to WAU.

It’s a real-time map of current visitors on the blog – See down there, on the right sidebar underneath ‘Latest Videos’? Each visitor is represented as a ‘blue dot’ and you can now run your mouse over any of them to see where they are browsing from.

Active visitors (currently on the blog) are displayed as a ‘flashing’ dot, while recent but inactive visitors are just shown as a dot. The statistics are in real-time (How cool or that?) and so if someone were to leave razorianfly.com, the blue dot from that visitor would disappear. Same goes for people just entering Razorianfly.com, they will flash once on the map on arrival.

We’ll be providing the other widget too – tracking page views per visitor – again soon.

Finally, we highly recommend them to anyone with a blog!

Comments

6 responses to “WAUs Goes v2.0, Real-time Stats Now Available – [Updated]”

  1. David Moore Avatar
    David Moore

    These are all nice tools but at this point in time they are only serving to show your audience how few people look at your site. Your better not displaying these types of maps, stats, RSS numbers until your hitting substantial numbers as it can act to drive people away.

  2. razorianfly Avatar
    razorianfly

    David,

    Yeah, it’s a great service. Thanks for the advice it will be taken into consideration. We originally made the stats public to give people a chance to see what other articles are most popular regarding certain countries.

    It also give’s us a quick way to see how much traffic is on the blog and the pages being viewed at one time. We always think it’s best to publicize statistics rather than hide them – We have nothing to hide – We’re not that popular right now, but we’re working on it.

    Cheers,

    R-Fly
    RazorianFly.com

  3. David Moore Avatar
    David Moore

    There are also many practical reasons you wouldn’t want to continue using all these plugins and stats etc. If i was to tell you it takes me 23 seconds to fully load your main URL and I am only 1 mile from your server yet one of my sites 1 mile from my server loads in 3 seconds flat would you still want to continue using them? Imagine how it is loading your pages in the US or Australia etc

    If you google around there is research done on how long people are willing to wait on pages to load before they get annoyed and go elsewhere. I can’t remember the figure but it’s under 10 seconds.

    Having all these stats counters and trackers is significantly slowing your site down. Your best option is using Google Analytics and you view it yourself. If people really care about the traffic on your site they will go and check your URL on the likes of Alexa and Quantcast.

    EDIT: Just ran a series of page load tests. Quickest I got was 16 seconds but not sure if that’s maybe due to a cache on my HDD

  4. trentiles Avatar
    trentiles

    David,

    Just to let you know I live in the US. Never has this page taken more then 3 seconds for me to load.

    So there’s no need to worry about the page load time for US users. I have asked many of my friends to load up the page from cities all over the US and all have similar load times around 3 seconds.

    -Chris

  5. David Moore Avatar
    David Moore

    Funny as the evidence of fast load speed is showing you downloading around 50kb of data, are you two seriously trying to claim that everything that loads when you load the main URL totals no more that 60kb?? Get real.

    Plus I am on a 100mb connection far faster than any of those.

  6. David Moore Avatar
    David Moore

    Not quite sure why i continue to help sometimes given the response i am met with but I took some time out to do the calculations of what is loading when you load your main URL. 1.11mb of data is loading (not including the 60kb for your actual page code). This also does not include the previews of your Youtube videos AND some shockwave components that are on your site.

    So trentiles, given i am on 100mb connection i take my hat off to all your friends that can load over 1.11mb of data from multiple locations all over the web in under 3 seconds flat! I certainly can’t!

    Arron, I also worked out what is loading from S3 as well but you know how to contact me. And i’d suggest a modification to your updates as your ‘proof’ of fast load times in completely wrong 😛

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