The last couple of days I have noticed a disturbing trend on my WhosOn stats page.   A server out of Amsterdam has been linking to my stats page every hour and 15 minutes or so to get its web sites listed in the referrer stats.  This alone irks me.  The stats page is there so folks can view a sample of the reporting in WhosOnCFC and it is not necessarily there to increase your page rank.  The domains in question would make Attila the Hun blush with shame and as I am not in the business of promoting pornography it will not be tolerated.

I uploaded WhosOnCFC 2.1.2 to RIAForge this evening since a couple of folks requested it.  All the updates add some functionality to the timeline viewer bubble. 

Each session on the timeline now shows the page history for a given client.  The bubble will tell you how many pages are stored for that session, what pages they visited and how many seconds they were on that page.  Newer pages are on the bottom of the list and the page time on the newest page will always be 0 since it was just opened.

The EntryPage, CurrentPage, and Referer URLs displayed in the bubble are now shown a links that will open in a new window.

I also added in the ability to view the WhoIs results for a given IP address through http://www.who.is.  Just click on the IP address in the bubble and it will open the results in a new window.

If you need to change the information displayed or just want to fool around with it, all the timeline information is provided by data.cfm located in the /timeline directory.  You pretty much have free reign with the cfsavecontent areas, but the code that actually outputs the XML document is pretty finicky.  Change that at your own risk.

As far as features go, I am working on adding in some search capabilities so you can sort, search, and display the data.  I was also thinking of adding some security features in such as being able to redirect a specific client or IP address if they are going somewhere they shouldn't.

If you are interested in checking it out you can download it here: http://whosoncfc.riaforge.org.

I managed to get a little ahead of myself in the last release.  I did not check the timeline support in Internet Explorer before releasing 2.1.0 and it would seem I should not do that again.  Internet Explorer support was broken and this version corrects that, it should now be working as expected.

Joshua was kind enough to test out the new version and came back to me with some great suggestions.  I have spaced out the timeline a little bit because there was a problem showing all sessions when there were many hits around the same period of time.  Also you can now glance at the timeline and see what sessions came directly to your site and which ones were referred from another source.  A session with a green icon was referred, red on the other hand, was not referred.

That should get everyone working.

I finally got the version updated on RIAForge.  This version uses cfTimeline to graphically visualize traffic to your web site.  The bot list has been moved to an XML file so you can create one master file and update multiple instances of WhosOnCFC.  The URL can be set in the whoson.cfc initialization file.

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cfTimeline support is currently working in the newest beta of WhosOnCFC.  This allows you to see a timeline of who hit your site, the time your site was viewed, and the duration of the visit.  Clicking on a timeline item will present you with a familiar list of options such as the entry page, current page, etc.

The original viewer application packaged in earlier versions will be removed since the new version is uber cool.  Todd Sharp did a great job on the cfTimeline project and it is not tied to a specific ColdFusion version where my CFLayout viewer only worked on CF8.

If you want to check out the timeline view, you can check out the beta site at  http://whosoncfc.kisdigital.com/timeline.

WhosOnCFC 2.1.0 implements an XML-based bot list file that will allow you to specify which user-agents you wish to ignore.  It should make editing the bot list easier since no modification of WhosOnCFC is required.  All that should be required is editing the XML file and making the component reinitialize itself.

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Well, it has been almost two months since my last post, but life has been a little on the crazy side.  Life gets that way from time to time I suppose.  Hopefully I can avoid being such a stranger in the future.

Recently, my friend Joshua Cyr introduced me to Plurk, a web site that strikes me as an improved Twitter-like social network.  After using the service for a few days it has really grown on me.  For those of you who are not familiar with the service, the updates you and your friends post shows up on a timeline showing the date and time of your plurk.  You can then add replies to the plurks and create a dialog.

After using it for a while, I realized the potential of using a timeline to represent time-based events.  Joshua was also kind enough to point me towards CFTimeline by Todd Sharp.  It allows you easily throw together a timeline based on XML or JSON data (honestly I have not had a chance to play with it other than quickly skimming over the documentation to view the implementation.)  I thought it would be cool to create a timeline off WhosOnCFC to see a timeline of current users logged in as well as the 24 hour history provided by WhosOnCFCStats. 

Just a quick note...  I updated WhosOnCFC to v2.0.2 this afternoon.

This version adds support for ignoring potential bot's with masked user-agents.  For more information you can check the related posts.

Well, I finally got around to pushing the latest round of updates to RIAForge this morning.

New features include:
- When more than 5 sessions are created from one IP address WhosOnCFC treats the address as a bot.  All the information tracked will be purged from the active user list.  Also, the user maxcount will be adjusted accordingly.  WhosOnCFC defaults to 5 sessions, but you can adjust that value higher or lower in WhosOnCFC's initialization code:

<!---
    What is the threshhold (how many hits from 1 IP address) before we assume it's
    a bot and should not be tracked by WhosOnCFC?
--->
<cfset variables.ipBlockListThreshhold=5>

- When a sessions are removed by WhosOnCFC, it will also check to see if the stats package exists.  If so, all sessions from that IP address will be removed from WhosOnStats tracking.

I have not actually updated the download package because I prefer to test if for a few days before I release it to make sure I thought everything through.  If you would like to take a sneak peek at it you can download a ZIP of the current SVN version here:  http://whosoncfc.riaforge.org/index.cfm?event=page.svnzip.

Well, today has been a rough day to say the least.  To get my mind off of things, I have followed Joshua Cyr's advice and added a few options in to help control how bots with masked user agent's are handled.

First I added in the ipBlockList array.  Basically, this is just storage for IP addresses we no longer want to track since they keep creating a new session on every page they view.

Next I added a new argument to the WhosOnPageTracker() function in whoson.cfc, useIPBlockList which is just a boolean value that defaults to true.  If this is enabled, once an IP address creates a predetermined amount of sessions in the active user array (indicated by variables.ipBlockListThreshhold defined in the initialization of the CFC) it will add the IP address into the ipBlockList array and will then delete all sessions in the active user array with that IP address as well.  The next steps are to have the max user account adjusted accordingly as well as having that information reflected in the WhosOnCFCStats information.

These are things I will probably tackle this evening if I am not running around Azeroth.

EDIT: The new code has not been uploaded to RIAForge yet nor has the SVN repository been updated. I am waiting until I get the code polished off.