Xerratus - DasBlog Referrers page auto-refresh feature

Thursday, April 13, 2006

DasBlog Referrers page auto-refresh feature

Throughout any given day, I usually monitor my blogs activities via the DasBlog referrer’s page (Referrers.aspx). Since I use a tabbed browser (Firefox), I keep the referrer's page open all day in one of my tabs and just go back to it to see the activity up to that point; call it my obsession. Two things bug me about doing this though. The first is having to refresh the page manually (not a big deal but an extra step). The other is when I come back and refresh the page after my session has ended because it prompts me to re-login, and then I have to navigate back to the referrer’s page.

The first idea I had to solve this problem was to add the following code to my admin/homeTemplate.blogtemplate page in the <head> tag.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300">

What this does, for those who don't know, is to automatically refresh the page in 300 seconds (5 minutes) well within my session timeout period. A big problem arises out of this though; this would go on EVERY admin page including the add entry page. Simply put, I'd have to add an entry within 5 minutes or else the page would refresh (not postback) and all of my data would be lost. Not acceptable!

With that said, I had to come up with a way to utilize the <meta> refresh tag (because I like the simplicity of it) but only on the referrers page; enter JavaScript. By default every page has the document object associated with it, which means that it also has a location object as well. So all I had to do was check the document.location object for the existing href to see if that string had "referrers.aspx" within it. If it did, I knew I was on the correct page and could add the <meta> tag.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
if(document.location.href.indexOf('Referrers.aspx') != -1)
{
    // Refresh the page every 300 seconds (5 minutes)
    document.write('<meta http-equiv=\"refresh\" content=\"300\">');
}
</script>

My solution is simple and can be added quickly by anyone who runs DasBlog as their blogging software. Simply add the above <script> block to the admin/homeTemplate.blogtemplate within the <head> tag. Viola, only the referrers page refreshes every 5 minutes. So activity obsessed people, such as myself, can have easy access to our blog traffic by simply switching to that open tab throughout the day without having to hit refresh and/or re-login back in.

Thursday, April 13, 2006 @ 01:46 PM (-07:00) Pacific Daylight Time

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