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[nycphp-talk] Hmm, how to count 'online' users?

Mark Armendariz nyphp at enobrev.com
Thu Aug 12 08:28:56 EDT 2004


 > If you really wanna know as much as you can about page-view 
> duration and user stickiness set up a socket connection 
> between an invisible flash movie on the user's page and a 
> simple PHP socket "page-views" server. And the funny thing is 
> I'm not even joking.

I've done this for 3 projects (intranets) and it worked incredibly well.
The issue becomes that once you have a socket server script / app setup for
such a minor task, the temptation to build something far more robust -
similar to one of Colin Moock's intra-page chats, 'live' user viewers, PM's,
live forums and whatever else a socket connection from every page can afford
you - becomes unbearable.

patServer is a pretty good start, for a php based socket server:

<http://www.php-tools.de/site.php?file=patServer/overview.xml>

And I put up a very basic, um, story for communicating with a socket server
from flash:

<http://www.enobrev.com/chat_tutorial.php>



Mark


(I'm not affiliated with the PAT people, I just really like their Socket
Server and their Template Library)




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