ASP.NET Tracking Code & Unique Visitors - asp.net-mvc

I am trying to find a way to track and produce reports for my site (out of interest). Does anyone know of any articles/projects etc that you can
Track pages / unique visitors etc
Tracking 1) relative to timestamp etc
in asp.net mvc or just asp.net ?
P.S - I know google analytics etc is available but looking to create some basic stats for myself out of interest about how web analytics work ?

There are a couple of good ways to try and determine unique visitors, none of them are exact (which is why different analytics will report different numbers).
The first is to use a cookie. Create a cookie for the user for each time frame that you want to track uniques, so you could create one that expires in a day and one that expires in a month. You can then use both of those to track how many unique daily/monthly visitors you have. Of course this is not perfect since people can clear or refuse cookies, but it is pretty accurate.
The other way is to track uniques using a combination of the IP address and User Agent of the requesting user, this is probably slightly less accurate since if a company has a good IT group lots of internal users will have the same User Agent and since they are all coming from the same internal network could have the same IP address.
If you are interested in reading more about the different methods there is a great article about it here: http://www.google.com/support/urchin45/bin/answer.py?answer=28325

I blogged about simple asp.net module.
You can check it here
http://ilkeraksu.com/post/2009/07/14/Very-very-simple-But-very-very-efficient-Aspnet-Tracking-module.aspx

I would recommend using google analytics instead of reinventing the wheel. All you have to do is stick a bit of javascript in your master page and your done.

Yo can check Piwik out. Its an open source web analytics written using PHP and mysql.

you can find great article in http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/PageTracking.aspx
which is upgraded version of http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/021119.htm
with help of a Session Tracker class that runs in Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute and mailing reports on session end and lot of usefull tips
thanks Wayne Plourde for all that stuff

Related

Rails app for food truck, using twitter to update the google map.

So I am writing a rails application for my friends food truck business.
The functionality that I am trying to create with this specific application is the ability for him to update the google map by posting a Geo-location tag on twitter.
A lot of the ruby gems that deal with google maps seem to be depreciated so I'm a bit lost at the moment. If anyone could just point me in the correct direction I would appreciate it.
I realize that this feature is just a quality of life feature but id like to be able to do it with embedded ruby and not have to break out the JavaScript (ugh). Ideal this kind of automation would be great for this particular type of website because my friend won't always have access to the back-end of the website when he is on the move. (Already able to update a map from an admin backend but its not good enough for a business that moves multiple places in a given day.)
anyways, thanks in advance. (if anyone wants me to post any of my code I will.)
So after reading your question, I thought it would be fun to tinker with the Twitter API again since I haven't used it in a while.
I went ahead and created a sample application for you that basically does what you were asking for. It looks for recent tweets from a user, grabs the latest one, then updates a Google map with a marker on that location.
Keep in mind that this was quickly thrown together, so it's far from perfect. But all the concepts should be there!
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about the app or anything else. I'm always happy to help.

Jira to know how many poeple have visited an issue

I want to know how many people have visited a particular isssue in order to know its popularity( I can't trust on number of watchers of the issue) .Is there any way (JiraDB or anything) by which i can know how many people(just the count) have visited any particular issue.
The question can be modified like this : Top 10 mostly visited issues in a week or so.
Seb's earlier answer provides a possible solution for JIRA Cloud. I am not aware of any off-the-shelf product for behind-the-firewall installations of JIRA, and I do not believe that views are tracked anywhere in the JIRA database.
For behind-the-firewall instances, you could certainly write a script to parse the JIRA access logs (stored in $JIRA_HOME/logs/access_log*) to count issue accesses that way.
The JIRA access logs are stored in a format that is similar to the Apache access log format, so you just need to parse out accesses to individual issues by looking for URLs of the format "http://MYJIRA/browse/ABC-123".
Out of the box this is not possible. Jira does not log view counts for single issues.
You could have a look if there is any plugin for this at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?application=jira
E.g. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/communardo.connect.usage.statistic.addon looks like it could fit your requirements, but I personally have never heard of it.

What is a good strategy for staying up-to-date with external API's?

My project is reliant on several API's, like Twitter and Youtube for example. Recently, Youtube deprecated their old API, and it caused issues with my team's iPad app.
We could have stayed ahead of the change if we were paying attention to Youtube's announcements of the upcoming deprecation. But alas, we were not and the idea of staying up to date with all of our dependencies manually(browsing the web) seems exhausting and inefficient.
I have found the following tool to help notify when changes occur with external library dependencies, https://libraries.io. However, this does not help with API dependencies.
Besides checking the API source webpages every so often, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to stay notified and up-to-date with news regarding updates to a specified list of external API's?
After some time looking at different options, I have found a solution that is not perfect, but seems to work best at fitting this need.
Solution Description
This solution uses a combination of Twitter, Google Scripts, and website blogtrottr.com. I am creating a twitter list of reliable dev handles that often post updates on new API. For example I made a list that contained #twitterapi and #YouTubeDev. Used Google Scripts to create an online feed out of the twitter list. Then used blogtrottr to email me every time that feed gets a new posting.
Steps to Implement
Create a twitter list of reliable handles that often post about updates to their API
Create an RSS Feed from that Twitter list. The details for how to do this can be found here.
Plug that url that you get from Google Script into blogtrotter.
I did find some other ways to do this, but so far this is the only solution that was 100% free!

Tracking Page Popularity in a Time Frame in Rails

I'm very new to web development and this seems like a basic question, so perhaps I just lack the correct terminology to search it on Google.
On my site I plan to have many dynamically generated pages, based off data in a MySQL server, and I would like to know which ones people have been visiting the most, in say, the last 24 hours, so that I can place these most popular page on the front page of the site. How would I/would I be able to accomplish this in a Rails application.
What you're looking for is a web analytics solution to analyze your traffic, and possibly your marketing effectiveness. Here are some of the most prominent services you could use with your website:
Google Analytics
Chartbeat
Reinvigorate
HaveAMint
GetClicky
Piwik
Woopra
Personally, I use Google Analytics as its setup is darn simple: configure your account, add a Javascript snippet on each of the pages you want to track, and you're done.
You could also look out for web analytics software that you would host. All in all, take a look at this Wikipedia page for more information.

Search Engine without crawling?

Is there a way to collect web content in order to use it in a search engine without passing by the web crawling phase? Any alternative to web crawling?
Thanks
No, to collect the content you have to...collect the content. :-)
Yes (and sort-of no).
:)
You can download existing data dumps from various websites (wikipedia, stackoverflow, etc.) and construct a partial index that way. It obviously won't be a complete index of the internet.
You could also use meta-search to construct your search engine. This is where you use the APIs of other search engines and use THEIR search results as the basis of your index. Examples include citosearch and opensearch. duckduckgo uses yahoo's boss api (and now yahoo uses bing...) as part of their search engine.
There are also real-time streaming APIs that you could use instead of crawling the web. Look at datasift as an example. There are lots more resources you could cleverly use and avoid/minimize crawling.
If you want to be updated with the latest content on pages, then you can use something like pubsubhubbub protocol to get push notifications for subscribed links.
Or use paid services like superfeedr that make use of the same protocol.
directly or indirectly you have to crawl the web in order to get the content.
Well if you don't want to crawl, you can follow a wiki-like approach, where users can submit links to sites (with title, description and tags). So a collaborative link collection can be built.
To avoid spam a +/- system can be involved, to vote useful sites or tags up and useless ones down.
To avoid spammers mass voting SERPs you can weight votes by user reputation.
User reputation can be gained by submitting useful sites. Or somehow tracing usage patterns.
And considering other abuse patterns too.
Well, you got the point, I think.
As spammers gradually discover weaknesses of traditional search engines (see Google bomb, content scraper sites, etc.), a community based approach may work. But it would suffer severely from the cold start effect, and when community is small the system is easy to abuse and poison...
At least Wikipedia and Stack Exchange is not spammed to useless levels so far...
PS: http://xkcd.com/810/

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