Transcript Presentation PPT

In-page traffic distribution display
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Original idea
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Allow a website administrator to see the flow of
users from current page to all available destinations
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Present information either in form of progress bars
or semi-transparent overlays
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Throw in informations about sources from which
users came to this page
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Should be a “context” data source (providing simple
background view of situation)
Evil reality intrudes
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Available data somewhat skimpy, and so pageA
-> pageB visit statistics are quite meaningless
Largest sources of traffic – unknown, Google
Result: right now, backend offers only global
link popularity data
Also, got tangled up with a nasty bug in Opera –
had to change target browser in the middle of
development
Benefits
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Administrator can compare usefulness of links
without digging through reports
No modifications of source website needed
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No diving into unmaintainable cruft!
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Access logs are the only required data source
So simple that even a manager can use and
understand it
Building blocks
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Client: Firefox with Greasemonkey extension
(allows the user to run their own Javascript on
pages they visit)
Web Server: just about anything
Statistics Server: Apache with a couple of
Python scripts.
Browser
Request
Web Page
Web Server
Statistics Server
Browser
(link extraction)
Web Server
Statistics Server
Browser
XMLHttpRequest asks
for popularity of given URLs
Number of visits for
every requested URL
Web Server
Statistics Server
(data served
by Python script)
Browser
(process and display
received data)
Web Server
Statistics Server
Demo
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Or static screenshots if statistics server (my
home machine) is down for some reason.