Hi, just to perhaps help encourage plugin authors, can you elaborate a little on the usefulness of showing readers how long they’ve spent on pages?
As a long time webmaster you’ll know that this particular stat is one of the least reliable. For instance, if I land on one of your posts then immediately lose interest and click a bookmark to read my gMail your page has no way of knowing that I’ve left.
I could be a slow reader, or I could have left your site entirely – unless I click another link on your page, there’s no (reasonable) way to register my departure.
…
On the other hand, I can immediately identify the value in your first suggestion, and I think it’s a great idea to encourage sign-ups.
Cheers for the reply, and a fair point on the second idea. Admittedly, there is that big flaw where the visitor can nip off and make a cup of tea whilst viewing my page, which would limit its mainstream usefulness.
I’ll explain a bit about my site in particular. I’m using WordPress to create an online games arcade site, where each post features a different game. As an added incentive to signed up members (and it might make interesting reading from the admin perspective), I was hoping to let them view a page so they can see how long they’ve spent playing individual games.
I was creating something in ASP, Access and javascript that done something similar a few months ago. It didn’t get tested beyond my local firefox install (although it worked when I moved to a different site or closed the browser), but the rest of the site didn’t get built anyway. Unfortunately, I’m a PHP/MySQL virgin at the moment, so don’t yet have the know-how to recreate it.
That one’s not a hugely important request personally, so if it doesn’t exist already then I can probably make do without it. But I think the first suggestion is something that can be useful to others, and somewhat surprised that Google didn’t bring back any plugins.
