trax

jQuery-based web analytics

About trax

trax is basically my experiment in writing my own elementary web analytics engine, something I decided to start at about midnight 16 April 2009. I basically wanted to build my own toolkit for doing interaction analytics that I could throw at my personal sites, and thus trax was born. Since trax exists on the JavaScript side as a bunch of jQuery plugins, you can grab and use the only bits of trax that you want to. trax is a living experiment and the code in master will hereby be kept as ‘stable’, but it’s kind of hard to think of an incomplete project as stable. It is recommended that you do not use trax in any production environment for now.

trax’s backend is written in PHP 5 using the PDO engine to allow for tracking using SQLite or MySQL (whichever is easier for your setup.) If you aren’t running MySQL for your main site or just don’t want to place that kind of load on your server, you can just dump the records to SQLite. Obviously running any type of analytics engine is going to be really write-intensive, especially one as infantile as this, so I highly recommend you don’t use this on any site that gets a lot of traffic until I have it actually working well.

trax is released under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa 3.0 Licence If you would like to use trax for a commercial purpose, please email me at eston@socialuxe.com.

Current trax jQuery Plugins

trax has a few jQuery plugins involved in its structure.

• jquery.clicktrax.js – An asynchronous link tracker with quite a few setup options. Use this to track the clicking of outbound links, buttons, spans, you name it; anything you can set an onClick on you can set clickTrax to track. It’ll record the ID of the element (if it exists) and the href of the element (if it’s a link) and dump those to the backend. See more in the help/ section of this. Note that doing link tracking means that a request will be fired before the link is actually processed, so you could experience latency. clicktrax has a timeout parameter to help with this at the expense of dropping data.

Coming soon trax jQuery Plugins

• jquery.trax.js – A typical web analytics tracking system. Tracks user agents, referrers, google search terms, &c.
• jquery.traxmap.js – A Crazy Egg -like heatmap tool that tracks page clicks in a graphical fashion. Will play nicely with clicktrax (and share data!)

Other bits that don’t currently exist

Um, the whole backend. Check the “development” branch for as far as I am at any given point.