In-page traffic distribution display

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In-page traffic distribution display

• Original idea
• Allow a website administrator to see the flow of
  users from current page to all available
  destinations
• Present information either in form of progress
  bars or semi-transparent overlays
• Throw in informations about sources from which
  users came to this page
• Should be a context data source (providing
  simple background view of situation)

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Evil reality intrudes

• Available data somewhat skimpy, and so pageA -gt
  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

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Benefits

• Administrator can compare usefulness of links
  without digging through reports
• No modifications of source website needed
• No diving into unmaintainable cruft!
• Access logs are the only required data source
• So simple that even a manager can use and
  understand it

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Building blocks

• 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.

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Browser
Request
Web Page
Web Server
Statistics Server
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Browser (link extraction)
Statistics Server
Web Server
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Browser
XMLHttpRequest asks for popularity of given URLs
Number of visits for every requested URL
Statistics Server (data served by Python script)
Web Server
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Browser (process and display received data)
Statistics Server
Web Server
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Demo

• Or static screenshots if statistics server (my
  home machine) is down for some reason.

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