Widgets and Custom Visitor Labels

Go to this blog’s index page, then press and hold Shift+W on your keyboard for 3 seconds. You should see the proof-of-concept for a “page stats widget” appear over top of the page. It’s semi-transparent, draggable, and only loaded when the tiny trigger script detects the key being held. That means it adds no overhead to page loads until you choose to display it. Try out the overlay link at the top of the widget for some updates to the overlay appearance, including fixing some clipping issues due to bad z-index choice.

The appearance, information it shows (which is all page-specific rather than site-specific), and activation method are likely to change; this was my experimentation with what type of widgets I could build to make use of W3Counter’s stats in a new way. There are two other widgets I’m working on too, but I’m not ready to show those.

That’s part of the work I’ve been doing the past two weeks. You can see a screenshot above of the new landing page after signing in to W3Counter. The news and survey are replaced by a simplified list of websites. The unlabeled icons, making actions like editing a website and retrieving tracking code hard to find, were reported as a pain point by several survey respondents. They’ve been replaced by text links, along with a new “Get Widgets” link.

The middle screenshot shows another new feature that was requested and implemented: visitor labeling. You can assign labels to any visitor to identify them in the live and recent visit reports. Clicking the label in the report goes to a page with all the information recorded about that visitor — all their past sessions, IP addresses, etc. It’d be simple, and I’ll provide code, to automatically label visitors with usernames from forum and blog systems.

Those are the only major features I’m working on for W3Counter right now. I’ve fixed up some minor bugs, missing errors and cleaned up the interface in a few minor ways. I’ve also done some refactoring, turning some repetitive code into preExecute methods that the Symfony controller runs before all actions and into filters. For example, the “remember me” tickbox on the sign in form is now handled by a filter, and no longer sometimes throws you back to a sign in screen even though you’ve checked it off.

As far as other projects go, not much that’s showable. All of my advertising is now being routed through my own ad tracking code before it hits AdWatcher. There’s no interface to the data, only recording code, so I have lots of real data to use when I start writing the app. I’ll need to do a lot of work learning the best method of tracking clicks, leads and sales accurately before I can think about how to differentiate whatever I build from the competition. I expect it’ll be months before there’s a beta product ready.

Especially since I’ve also started my senior design project for Drexel. I am working with 5 other computer science majors to build an application over the next 9 months for an outside stakeholder. It looks like the project will be a converter for wikis to formatted documents (PDF, Word, etc.). Not very exciting, but there’s someone willing to sponsor that project, providing requirements and guidance.