The API has now been updated and geo-location info is now available in the feeds. This means that your Watcher and Tripwire feeds will now include City, State/Region and Country information where such information is available. In addition to this, if you examine the XML tags of the RSS feeds, you'll see that longitude and latitude has been added as well. These points don't represent the user's exact location, but they will point you at the correct location for the city (if available).
This kind of information is very handy when coding your own applications to interace with the API. The longitude/latitude info enables you to add pushpins to Google maps without first having to look up and geocode the locations provided in your feed. It opens up a lot of possibilities for working with WunderCounter data and for creating 3rd party applications. Since the RSS feed is made up of valid XML, you can quite easily parse the feed via Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python etc to create some really cool stuff.
If you're a developer and you have some requests for API features and/or documentation, please get in touch with me. I'll try to post some Perl code samples in future, so that you can get some ideas for mashing up your WunderCounter hits with your own web site. If anyone wants to submit some code in other languages, I'd be happy to post it here or point others to your site to get inspiration.
Showing posts with label watcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label watcher. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
How To: Using the Watcher Feeds
Watcher feeds are now live. Just like Tripwire, these feeds are still in beta mode, but they're available to Premium accounts.
What are Watcher Feeds?
Watcher feeds are a little bit like your daily and page log files, but they're distributed via an RSS feed. If you're not familiar with the WunderCounter API or how RSS feeds work, please have a look at the Tripwire How To. This article will explain all of the basic concepts you'll need to understand.
Watcher feeds are RSS feeds which keep you updated on the last X hits to a particular page (or all of your pages) over the last 24 hours. Currently the last 100 hits are reported. That number may change in future, but that's what we're working with right now. Using this feature you'll get a summary of all traffic to a certain page (or all pages). So, unlike Tripwire, you don't need to tag any IP numbers as all IPs are affected.
Who would find this feature useful?
Because watcher feeds provide a lot of data, they're probably not useful to everyone. For instance, if you have a high traffic site, you may not find all of the RSS items to be particularly useful, because there will be many of them. However, even high traffic site owners may want to monitor activity on certain pages (like pages which have been recently added) or very important pages (like payment pages). Sites with lower traffic may benefit from a watcher feed which reports on all traffic as it will give you immediate feedback as to the type of traffic you're getting on any given day.
So, whether or not you get loads of traffic, I encourage you to play around with this feature and see if it's useful to you.
How do I get started?
Once again, if you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds and how to use them, please read the Tripwire article to get yourself started.
What are Watcher Feeds?
Watcher feeds are a little bit like your daily and page log files, but they're distributed via an RSS feed. If you're not familiar with the WunderCounter API or how RSS feeds work, please have a look at the Tripwire How To. This article will explain all of the basic concepts you'll need to understand.
Watcher feeds are RSS feeds which keep you updated on the last X hits to a particular page (or all of your pages) over the last 24 hours. Currently the last 100 hits are reported. That number may change in future, but that's what we're working with right now. Using this feature you'll get a summary of all traffic to a certain page (or all pages). So, unlike Tripwire, you don't need to tag any IP numbers as all IPs are affected.
Who would find this feature useful?
Because watcher feeds provide a lot of data, they're probably not useful to everyone. For instance, if you have a high traffic site, you may not find all of the RSS items to be particularly useful, because there will be many of them. However, even high traffic site owners may want to monitor activity on certain pages (like pages which have been recently added) or very important pages (like payment pages). Sites with lower traffic may benefit from a watcher feed which reports on all traffic as it will give you immediate feedback as to the type of traffic you're getting on any given day.
So, whether or not you get loads of traffic, I encourage you to play around with this feature and see if it's useful to you.
How do I get started?
- Choose Options
- Choose API
- Click on the "Watcher" link
Once again, if you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds and how to use them, please read the Tripwire article to get yourself started.
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