I'm finally ready to share ClickHeat for ColdFusion with the rest of the community. It's a port of Labsmedia's original ClickHeat project, which is written in PHP. ClickHeat shows you where users are clicking on your pages: which links, which graphics, which nav items.
ClickHeat has two main parts: a JavaScript which tracks click coordinates and sends them via AJAX to a .cfm page which saves the information to a log file; and an application which reads the log file and converts it to a click map or heat map. A heat map creates a fuzzy, color-coded map telling you where the greatest amount of click activity occurs on your page (cooler blues indicate less activity, while brighter yellows and reds indicate more activity).
You can check out ClickHeat in my projects section. Please let me know what you think or if you run into any problems using the code.
Comments (3)
January 30, 2008
3:43AM | #
Hi Tom,
Thats a pretty cool port, it seem to me that it would be a good addition to, or replacement for google analytics. I have a few friends that are loath to give google even more information than they already have. For them I can see this being a good option.
Nice job!
January 30, 2008
10:08AM | #
Tom,
This looks great! Is this something that could safely be used on a live site? Any ceiling on the amount of traffic that it could handle without slowing anything down?
January 30, 2008
11:31AM | #
@Steve: thanks for your compliments! The client-side JavaScript, which was ported over from LabsMedia's well-tested code, should be very fast on a production environment. The image generation, however, will put a bit of load on a server depending on just how large your click files are.
For instance, on my Linux server (Apache 2.2, CF8, 1Gb RAM), ClickHeat can draw 416 clicks in 3.17 seconds. 2,179 clicks took 23.26 seconds, though, which is definitely not production quality. So... I'd suggest that people download their click logs to a development server and run ClickHeat there. Also, I'm going to be putting ClickHeat up on RIAForge, and I'd welcome interested coders to ask me about contributing to the project to make it faster.