How to track visitors of your realXtend world
Posted by on December 17, 2008 under howto | 
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After you have successfully set up your realXtend world for the rest of the world to access, you soon start to wonder who is visiting the world. Even if the world is for private use, it may be nice to see how many times you have accessed it and when.
Samuel L Jackson takes a look at how many visitors saw realXtend 0.4 demo world
The best way is to use traditional web tracking tools. realXtend example world “beneath the waves” uses statcounter from www.statcounter.com to track visitors. And yes, it even works from local server installs!
Statcounter offers free set up and free log up to 500 entries. The data is presented nicely so that you can for example take a look at world map and see where your visitors are coming from.
How does it work then? Follow these intstructions to set your own world visitor counter:
- First, you need a publicly accessible web page. There are free hosting services that you can use for that, for example 000webhost.com, they even provide a free domain for your web pages. Make a nice web page with words “Hello World!”.
- set up a new statcounter project www.statcounter.com and copy paste the resulting code snippet to your web page. You can define whether you want to show the visitor count or if it is hidden.
- Start the realXtend viewer and go to your world you want to track, upload image (any jpg will do, but do not use png!) and find it from your inventory
- edit properties of the texture (the image you uploaded) and edit it’s media url to point to your web page with statcounter code (for example http://www.example.com/trackmyworld.html).
- Create a prim, and drag and drop the texture on that. Hide the prim or show it somewhere, it does not matter technically (ethically I think it does and people should be either seen the visitor count or some explanation that they are being tracked).
- Start watching from your statcounter project page how the visitor count evolves over time! You can create more projects for all of your worlds in case you have many.
One drawback of this method is that it does not track where people are coming from (virtually, for example if they are teleporting from Second Life or OpenLife). Another drawback is that if you want to show ads, people can not click the ads and you don’t get any revenue.
Happy statcounting!
