Dayspring Labs
In our spare time, we’re cooking up technologies that may be useful to our clients—it’s fun, it keeps our skills sharp, and helps us to explore the ever-changing software landscape. Some of these technologies are what you’ll find in the Lab. Stay tuned for more of our experiments.
If you like what you see, check out the services we offer or some of the projects we’ve worked on for our clients.
Web Activity Monitor
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About Web Activity Monitor
The Web Activity Monitor shows activity across some of Dayspring’s client sites. These clients have graciously agreed to allow us to display current activity on their sites. Page names are the name of the most recent page viewed on the domain. The number of views is the total number of page views on that domain during the most recent period, as specified by the time frame.
For those that are interested…
The Web Activity Monitor is a tool built on AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), with PHP and Java Servlet components in the background. For much of its life, the Web has followed a very simple model of a) browser requests a page, b) server generates a response, and c) browser displays the response. This model, while simple and powerful, has its limits in providing the types of rich user interfaces that we have all become used to in desktop applications. Specifically, it typically requires a user action (click a link, submit a form, etc.) in order to trigger a change in the user interface.
AJAX technology begins to bridge the gap, allowing Web-based applications to take on some of the behaviors of desktop applications. For example, in this application, the user interface is automatically refreshing as users visit pages across the network of sites being monitored—page view counts are changing and the last page viewed is being updated.
Why do page counts decrease?
If you look long enough you’ll probably find the page view counts occasionally decrease. This is because page view counts are during a window of time—and that window keeps sliding forward. For example, a particular page view that happened 4 minutes and 58 seconds ago will slide out of the 5 minute window after two seconds—and the page view count will decrease.