Lil Brother: Open Source Client-Side Event Tracking

Length of time is not the issue here but utility of something written earlier for web analytics today. There's not much that these guys are leaving off the collection plate.

Many HN readers have no problem with 1st-party analytics (web developers collecting usage information on their own websites). Privacy problems become more of an issue for 3rd-party analytics providers, who can track browsers across all the sites using the same analytics provider.

Piwik is probably the most widely-known option in this space. It is a more complete solution (including the reporting side) written in PHP; it also requires MySQL. http://piwik.org

LilBrother may be a nice option for developers to include in their existing node.js backend.

It's been some time since I had a hand in that code. We were trying to solve a couple problems. First, third party event trackers all introduced a delay to ensure they captured events, at the time of writing. Second, none of the major vendors at the time allowed a full data export.

We wrote lil' brother to solve those problems, but also to gather enough context on non-instrumented browser events to e.g. draw heat maps without a ton of extra work on the collection side.

Fun bonus fact. Lil' brother's tracking image response was implemented as the smallest rendering of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" single cover that fit inside of a TCP packet: https://github.com/shutterstock/lil-brother/blob/master/data...

Takes me back :-)

We can now build heatmaps of visitor patterns, visualize traffic patterns, discover customer friction points, measure behavior in A/B tests,etc

Because application developers would like to know how their users are interacting with the application?