I was looking at a good mouse/click tracking solution that does visualization of where people are clicking on a site and what people mouse-over the most.. I looked at crazyegg.com and tested out their beta but didn`t like the fact their javascript overwrote every link on my page. I also didn`t like that they limited my click tracking and plan to charge for it..

(EDIT: this probably won`t look very nice or even work in IE, but IE is five years old people.. so `maybe` you should upgrade? If you are using IE your browser is probably older than your computer, think about that….)

for those that cannot see what it is supposed to look like:

Now.. it is not that I plain don`t trust so many people as I would rather control what is going on with my own stats, being a programmer, I like to keep tabs on these things. So, I did my own which is now running on this page. You can click on the little thermometer in the lower left (if you are in firefox, otherwise IE may put it in the uppper left) and the page overlay will pop up which shows you in green (progressive by mouseover) where people move their mouse around the site then, in blue where they are clicking.. This is a running `live` total and obviously limits the queries and the entries to the most relevant possible data and limits the display to 500 mouse areas and 500 click areas (progressive color by most for each spot) anything more than a thousand extra divs on a page and your browser is going to start choking, so let s keep it simple from the start and work up.

HOW IT WORKS:

  1. Register mouse moves
  2. Mark all mouse moves for the first fifteen seconds on the page via a timer (in case they don`t click)
  3. Register all clicks with prior mouse moves on the page, this is reset with each click
  4. A mouse move is regarded as a ten pixel change in the X or Y value of the mouse. All clicks are marked regardless
  5. Stats are displayed sorted by clicks DESC and then divs are created based on a normalization of the hits

TODO:

  • Fix the issue with browser size… great for fixed upper-left sites, bad for centered sites..
  • Maybe brighten up the colors some, they are a bit washed now, though, I am interested to see it after a week, so will wait..
  • cleanup the js… there is some dangles going on..
  • cache the results script, it will get out of hand with more than 100 sites otherwise
  • actually release it

Obviously this has a lot of cleanup and might turn into a hosted app for people who have PHP and such but don`t really feel like managing their own stats and just want to plop a php script and a some js in a dir and have immediate results.. We will see..
But for now, I am collecting stats so I can better tweak things..

Not bad for two afternoons work :)

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