Track views in Rails app

Rails
1

Hi

Often when I build sites I need some way to track visits to specific
pages.
For instance I need to see what Artists are the most popular so I can
let
my users sort based on popularity.
I have used the gem Impressionist before but recently I ran into major
performance issues
(see Performance issues · Issue #94 · charlotte-ruby/impressionist · GitHub).

I do use Google Analytics and could pull that data somehow I guess,
but
isn’t that data pretty “slow” (I want the views to update at least in a
few
minutes)?

So, what do you use to track views in your apps?

2

On Saturday, August 17, 2013 2:04:51 PM UTC-7, Linus P. wrote:

I do use Google Analytics and could pull that data somehow I guess, but
isn’t that data pretty “slow” (I want the views to update at least in a few
minutes)?

So, what do you use to track views in your apps?

FIrst I would say you need to crack the nut of what “popular” means.
Simple URL hits may not be your best metric for that. It could mean
how
long a user dwells on a page, or how many scroll all the way to the
bottom,
who’s logged in vs. who’s a casual users or an indexing bot, etc.

Assuming “artists” is a table, you could add a simple counter column
(maybe
with a related “counter_reset_at” column with a timestamp) and increment
it
when the appropriate criteria is met.

When I first made a popular T-shirt site (I’ll refrain from saying the
name
here) we used to have a ‘Like’ feature similar to Facebook. We found
users
would systematically set up new accounts and like themselves and dislike
everybody else to try to falsify their ratings. We came up with some
simple ways to weed out the bad data.

Hope this helps.

Phil

3

Thanks for your reply.

I have a “like” system (you can only like, not dislike) as well but I
also
want to track views as another measure of popularity. It doesn’t have to
be
super exact but would be great if it filtered out bots of course.

I just thought this was a quite common issue and wanted to know how
other
people solves it.

The features I would like is:

  1. Filter bots.
  2. Count unique requests based on session hash, ip address or similar.

Perhaps I need to build something custom to get this.

Linus

Den sndagen den 18:e augusti 2013 kl. 02:07:07 UTC+2 skrev Phil:

4

Check out FluentD (http://fluentd.org). Super easy to set up on an AWS
box.
Just ping it with a 1x1 pixel from your pages, and you can output the
logs
to S3/database/whatever.

5

On Aug 18, 2013, at 4:12 AM, Linus P.
[email protected] wrote:

Perhaps I need to build something custom to get this.
Often when I build sites I need some way to track visits to specific pages. For
instance I need to see what Artists are the most popular so I can let my users
sort based on popularity.

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Most of the time what I see it people doing analysis based on the server
log for page hits, filtering known bots based on IP address and
UserAgent string. Sumologic.com does this as a service. AWStats is a
FOSS tools that does this as well. Piwik seems popular as a FOSS tool.
And then there’s the 800 pound gorilla, as usual, Google Analytics.
Further, you could look at
Category: Log Analysis - The Ruby Toolbox to see gems folks
have built to do this.