Tom Mollerus' Weblog

Colin suggested some smart changes for my Clickheat for ColdFusion project, which I've duly commited. Here goes:

• In settings.cfm, I've taken my own email address out. [Doh!]
• In click.cfm, I've replaced hard-coded email addresses in the CFCATCH with the email variables from settings.cfm.
• In click.cfm, I've replaced GetDirectoryFromPath() with VARIABLES.logPath from settings.cfm.
• In index.cfm, I've changed the form action to index.cfm instead of view.cfm.
• In clickheat.js, I've changed URL paths which refer to the root so that they're relative to the root, so that the application will work correctly in any location off the root.

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.

Have you ever gotten into a discussion (or perhaps even an argument) with a colleague or client over the effectiveness of one particular feature of your web application? Goodness knows I have. The good news is that if you can both agree that the end goal is to serve your site's users, then there's a solution: A/B split testing.