Live view, TV mode, and the wall board

Most analytics questions are retrospective — what happened last week, which post decayed, where did the campaign traffic go. But there's a category of question that's purely now: did the launch post land, is the newsletter send driving clicks, is that traffic spike real or a bot. This note is about the three ways Tracely answers it.

The live view and its two clocks

The live dashboard at /sites/{site}/live runs on two different clocks, and keeping them separate turned out to matter.

The first is presence: is this visitor here right now? The tracker sends a lightweight presence ping every 15 seconds while a tab is open, and a visitor counts as live if they've pinged within the presence window — 90 seconds by default (TRACELY_PRESENCE_WINDOW_SECONDS). Why 90 and not 15? Because pings get dropped. A missed timer here, an ad blocker eating a request there — if presence expired after one interval, the live count would flicker as real readers blinked in and out of existence. Ninety seconds is about six ping intervals, so one or two lost pings don't evict someone who's still reading. The config floor is 30 seconds, because below that you're just measuring packet loss.

The second clock is the rolling window for everything else on the page: recent pageviews, top pages right now, where the current traffic is coming from. That defaults to five minutes (TRACELY_LIVE_WINDOW_SECONDS, default 300) but it's a selector on the dashboard, with presets running from 1 second up to 30 minutes and a configurable cap (TRACELY_LIVE_WINDOW_SECONDS_MAX, default 1800). During a launch you might tighten it to 60 seconds and watch the response minute by minute; for ambient monitoring, 30 minutes gives a smoother picture. The 1-second preset is mostly a debugging tool — paste the snippet, load your page, watch the row appear — but I've kept it because that first "it's alive" moment is the best onboarding a tracker can have.

TV mode

The live view is built for someone sitting at it. Put it on a screen across the room and the proportions are all wrong — navigation chrome you can't use, text you can't read.

So the live screen has a TV mode: append ?tv=1 (or use the Live TV link) and you get the same live data reformatted for distance — bigger numbers, less chrome, no interaction assumed. It's still the live dashboard underneath, just dressed for the back of the room.

The wall board

TV mode shows the live picture. The wall board answers a slightly different brief: one URL you can leave running on an office display all day that covers the whole story, not just the last five minutes.

It lives at /sites/{site}/wall and rotates through four slides on a 45-second timer:

1. 7-day KPIs — pageviews, visitors, sessions, bounce rate
2. Live visitors — the presence picture from above
3. Top pages
4. Top sources

Footer dots show which slide you're on, and the rotation aligns with the Livewire polling cycle so a slide never appears with stale data mid-transition. The layout is a dark, full-viewport shell with no app sidebar — it's meant to be glanced at from across a room, not operated. You can page through slides manually, and doing so pauses the auto-rotation so the board doesn't yank the screen away while someone's mid-sentence pointing at it; there's an explicit resume when you're done lingering.

Two details that matter more than they look. The page carries noindex, because a URL designed to live full-screen on a shared display is exactly the kind of thing that ends up in a screenshot or a browser history sync, and it has no business in a search index. And it sits behind the same view policy as every other site dashboard — kiosk-shaped is not permission-shaped, and putting something on a TV shouldn't require making it public.

Navigation between the three modes is deliberately circular: from Live you can jump to the Rotating wall, the wall's Live TV link takes you to TV mode on the same live screen, and Exit wall drops you back at Overview. Three views, one loop, no dead ends.

Why bother

A wall board doesn't help you make decisions — the retrospective dashboards do that. What it does is keep the numbers ambient. When the 7-day KPIs rotate past every couple of minutes, everyone on the team has a shared, passive sense of whether things are up or down, and the "wait, what happened Tuesday?" conversations start themselves. That's a soft payoff, but it's real, and it cost three views and a timer to get.

The live pipeline feeding all of this is the same queue-backed ingest path I wrote up last Friday — there's no separate real-time system, just a short window over the same data. More on what the dashboards cover at /features.