Feature: Anonymous and ephemeral realtime statistics
Use case
It would be good to have a means to see how your site is being accessed – which pages are most popular, etc.
Suggested implementation
- On server start, you get a cryptographically-secure URL for your statistics page
- When you visit that URL in the browser, you see a live view of the following statistics since you last started the server:
- Number of “unique” visitors (approximated by counting unique IP addresses – this is never hugely accurate but it is informative)
- Number of hits
- Most popular pages
- Most popular referrers
- Possibly a list of suspicious looking requests and/or unusually high requests from certain places.
This is emphemeral in that the statistics are kept entirely in memory and lost on server restart.
This is anonymous in that statistics are kept only in aggregate form.