Once in a canbebothered

The internet with all its new Web 2.0 trickery is still promising more than it can deliver. It's just not live enough.

I've been dabbling with a few different web analytics tools recently and I've been frustrated by the need to wait a day to see the latest visits. (Impatient? Moi?)

One of the analytics tools, Clicky, does provide a live view of visits to your site. Fantastic, I thought, all I need is an iGoogle gadget from Bonstio.com to view my Clicky visit stats on a Google map and I'll be able to watch all the world's most discerning surfers pushing pins in my maps in real time. Okay, so I'd have to keep refreshing my homepage, but that's close enough to live for me.

Except it doesn't quite work like that. Y'see the gadget sucks stats from Clicky using RSS (or possibly JSON) and that is updated once in a canbebothered.

Also, while I'm whining, how hard can it be to use Yahoo Pipes to merge two Clicky feeds and annotate the posts from each with the name of the site? Very. I'm really not getting along with Pipes at all, the modules are simply not flexible enough. Roll on Google Mashups, say I.

In other news, you will no doubt be thrilled to learn that I fixed the Google Maps click event positioning problem I had. My map DIV was inside a DIV with absolute positioning and no CSS "top" specified. This, as I'm sure you are all aware, turns Firefox's mouse handler into a kettle.