visualization of 'who's online'

[dpsd]

I want to build a mechanism for my blog in order to visually grasp who's online. For example, if a particular member is online, a circle would appear floating with his name in it - a kind of abstract visualization of "who's online". I am not a programmer, so I'm looking for a simple and straight-forward way of doing this.

I'm on apache/php/mysql. Is a Flash integration possible to implement such a thing?

Any ideas? Please direct me to any helpful links/tutorials/codes.

Thanks in advance.

[devinemke]

i assume you have a database driven login system? just add a boolean field to your users table, when someone logs in make it TRUE, when they log out make it FASLE (or NULL). then just do a query of all logged_in = TRUE records.

if you want to make it a bit more robust then create a separate table called "logins" that track the exact date/time that users log in/out. since not everyone will actually log out you could run a cronjob every 5 minutes or whatever to check for inactive logins and delete them.