Chirpss – Hear and see people visiting or leaving your website | Hacker News Reader

Chirpss – Hear and see people visiting or leaving your website

chirpss.com

98 pointstechmarch38 comments

“Chirp chirp” is the common onomatopoeia for cricket sounds, i.e. nobody is there. So it’s funny to me that “chirpss” is used as the name of a product that announces when someone visits your website. You have literal chirps when someone is there, and figurative chirps when no one is.

This is known as “Calm Technology”, as first defined in “Designing Calm Technology” by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in 1995: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm

”Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive.”

Ahhhhh must have been nice to live in 1995! :-)

Since I host my own website this is really easy. Here's how I did it in 2006,

tailbeep -f /var/log/thttpd.log -t /dev/tty1 -F 3000 -M 100 -s GET

But it's obvious how to adapt this to my modern nginx setup. You can get tailbeep at https://soomka.com/tailbeep

I hear some guys at Google added this for Google.com for a joke. They're deaf, and in Arkham asylum now.

It's the perfect excuse to get you to give up your analytics data to a third party

It's a bookmarklet, so you can see the code. It doesn't send any data anywhere.

Apparently you can only use it with Google Analytics, so it is indeed encouraging you to give up your analytics data to a third party. :)

Assuming you're not already doing that.

I'm not and I won't.

Here is the code of the bookmarklet https://gist.github.com/dustingetz/000c3d048bc5ed0c3f7650ac6...

There’s also a Chrome extension [1] and a website [2] for the same purpose.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/startup-bell-doorb...

[2]: http://bellbot.com/

If you use a product like SalesIQ it creates noise in the dashboard as users enter and leave (and hit interim targets you define)

Lol maybe for your personal website otherwise its going to be the most annoying thing in the world.

Every company got its start at some point.

I like the fact that it's temporary and doesn't require any modifications on the website, nor does it need any kind of server code, just a js bookmarklet you execute on your analytics page.

TL;DR; script for Google Analytics, that chirps when people enter/leave your site.

This isn't healthy.

Not sure why this is #1 on HN, or why it was developed?

Because this is largely a webdev community, and who doesn't love instant notifications that someone's paid attention to you?

At the very least people shouldn't upvote posts with non-descriptive titles.

This is not largely a “webdev” community. There’s all classes of tech workers here, webdevs are just easily excited by stuff like this and will vote it up quickly en masse.

Why? We already have too many alerts interrupting our lives. The best thing you can do is have fewer alerts, not more.

It's fun. Especially when you are first starting out.

The URL has ref=producthunt.

What does that mean?

The site producthunt appends it to all its outgoing links. To let the websites know source of the traffic.

That's already built into HTTP with the Referer header. So what's the point?

Sometimes links will go through a number of other things (url shortener, analytics, so on) before hitting the final URL.

I think the point was that all these clicks from HN are probably misleading the analytics provider.

(Assuming the site is integrated with an analytics provider that uses that query parameter to determine the referrer.)

That is correct. This was the intention.

Some people might bookmark the link, copy it, view it later, share it, etc.

It's helpful to know that the original source of the link is producthunt (in this example).

It means that this link is misinforming chirpss that we were referred (“refered”) by producthunt.

Is that not accurate assuming the OP is from or was referred by producthunt?

The OP was, but I was referred by news.ycombinator.com.

Sure, but they are for measuring the effectiveness of marketing channels, not simply the direct referrer. They can discover the direct referrer through HTTP headers. If a marketer promotes something on Product Hunt, then somebody on Product Hunt submits it here, then you follow the link from here, it means the marketing channel that reached you was Product Hunt. It gives marketers better information in aggregate about which marketing channels are most effective.

I’m glad to understand that, though it doesn’t make me any more inclined to add any extra metadata to my web traffic.

Thanks, we've removed that from the link.

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