Here’s a tutorial to include that nice little feature to your nice little site!
There are several ways to accomplish this, but the easiest is with the help of global.asa
In case you do not know what global.asa is, I’ll explain it to you.
The global.asa file is a root-level file that can contain variables, objects or methods that are
available to every single ASP file in your application.
Therefore, you can declare a variable in global.asa and then ask for it in whatever.asp and
use it without needing anything else!
So, by using global.asa, we will keep count of how many users are active in our site.
Here’s the code for global.asa, this code will not be placed inside the <%%> tags
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript" RUNAT="Server">
Sub Application_OnStart
Application("CountActiveUsers") = 0 ‘ We initialize the counter
End Sub
Sub Session_OnStart
Session.Timeout = 20 ‘ Session timeout determines how long will the server consider and idle
‘ session as an active session, it’s given in minutes.
Session("Start") = Now
Application.Lock
Application("CountActiveUsers") = Application("CountActiveUsers") + 1 ‘The actual counter
Application.UnLock
End Sub
Sub Session_OnEnd
Application.Lock
Application("CountActiveUsers") = Application("CountActiveUsers") – 1’ Substract inactive users
Application.UnLock
End Sub
</SCRIPT>
Place the global.asa in your root and then create whatever.asp and place the following code:
<html>
<head>
<title>How many users are active?</title>
</head>
<body>
Right now, there are <%= Application("CountActiveUsers")%> users surfing mysite.com
</body>
</html>
If you’re hosting your own site you might need to restart your IIS, if your hosting somewhere else,
there might be the need to ask the admin to restart your site.
Questions?
Write me, Romeo Marquez Guzman romeo@gelattina.com
www.gelattina.com
