Visitor.js
visitorjs.com
visitorjs.com
For example, the problem with "upvote" button littering, just can just show the upvote button from the referring service (say HN or reddit).
Or just autoselect my country in a form, it's a pain going through the country dropdown, even if it's a fancy autocomplete widget.
Or just provide me an appropriate zoom level when I'm looking at your world-wide locations in your embedded Google Maps.
It's a rhetorical question. I understand that the devs want to make $10 to $40 a month by hosting a piece of Javascript and storing trivial stats, and it's an awesome way to make living, but - c'mon - it's like fitting a round peg in a square hole. Those who need this sort of site customization are likely to have a proper backend in place and to be able to implement the same thing themselves. And those who don't have the backend, they won't be able to afford the service.
The value-add they offer is good, but I'm never gonna find out about it first hand because I'm not gonna pay to try it (even with a 30 day money-back guarantee)
I predict they would have far more luck if they open-sourced the basic library (so we could use it to get say 80% of the functionality ourselves BUT would need to self-host it etc. etc.) and then offered a hosted version for $$ per month.
Good luck!
The window object provides screen height, width and colour depth.
Modern browsers have geolocation as a JS API, but if you want it to be less accurate/less intrusive then an ajax request to a script that does a geo lookup on the IP would supply that.
The time on site and visits can be done by storing information in localStorage, or whatever the IE equivalent is called.
There are a few harder bits, but replicating most of the low hanging fruit is trivial for any web developer.
Also, props for renaming it to session.js (I think it's unfair to use their name)
This might spur the visitor.js guys to release part of their codebase as open source and continue to provide a paid service with extra support and features etc.
Personally whenever any site does the "you are from Lexington!" I get a little freaked out. What else is it tracking about me? is it going to use this info for anything? I know all sites have the capability to track me, but it makes me uneasy when they are showing me they are actively doing so.
Still I feel like they nailed a key service which is "If they googled "free" offer them a discount". This kind of thing would be very, very good for buisness. This is probably the future of web advertising and marketing.
Do Chartbeat/Google Analytics/etc not provide that for you?
the internet is a place in and of itself.
also geolocation fails for my IP, says I'm 35 miles away from where I am, which in UK terms is quite far.
edit: (The lesson, then, is to not do web geolocation unless it strongly enriches the usefulness of the site (map-related sites, etc) or your hand is forced. People rightly don't want their location freely-shared and people are rightly annoyed by location-sharing-confirmation popups.)
I find the "personalised" geolocation stuff mildly annoying in general - and not only because it's invariably miles off. It doesn't show me a site 'cares'. If anything, it looks lazy.
If it's for showing prices in my currency rather than dollars then that's useful, but more often than not it's to show some stupid "What ho, old bean!" message. I'm a Northerner living in cider country - you may as well have said that in Spanish!
no, not obviously.
Craigslist always comes up in French for me and shows me Quebec listings. And for a while we couldn't log into our bank of America web account because they don't allow foreign logins.
Just to rub in the culture shock.
I agree, it's hugely annoying.
In this case, I think I prefer that approach.
So, perhaps if Visitor.js had exception handling for where visitor.browser.name == [an array of known proxy browsers] then this might not be worth it if a good portion of your traffic is mobile.
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201001-...
In fact, GeoIP has suffered from the problem you describe for a decade now, from every AOL user appearing to come from Virginia, USA, all the way to modern corporate proxy systems which have vast numbers of visitors all appearing coming out of, say, White Plains, NY, USA (yes, there are lots of corps there... but not every employee works in that location).
So, your idea is a good one for mobile where we kind of know the big "offenders" (Kindle Fire may rise up to become an issue as well), but it's hard to figure this out for every IP.
Commercial GeoIP companies often offer a "confidence value" with their data which reflects how confident they are than an IP would really reflect the geo of the user; unclear if this service will have that. In addition, a good user experience might be to personalize the session but allow user feedback, ala "we think you are currently in Antarctica; click here to tell us where you really are..." You might also decide not to use some functionality in your "mobile skin" or other version of the site, if you do separate designs for mobile vs. desktop.
I say, best of luck to them. Web analytics continues to suffer from a disconnect: vast reporting on users, but little connection to taking that data and impacting a user's visit, even in future visits, much less in the same session. Let's see some folks push this a bit, even if the data has some problems (which, let's face it, is always a problem with any data involving the web, imho).
As far as I can tell it's delivering almost all the functionality in the single javascript file except for the geocoding so you could host the js file (http://www.visitorjs.com/visitor.js) on your own server and get 90% of the functionality for free.
If they recorded the details and provided a hosted UI to view stats that might be worth paying for.
Also, as far as I can tell, Apple provides nearly all of the functionality of Pages in a single .app file, so you could make as many copies for your company as you want for free.
geo:{continentCode:"AS",continentName:"Asia",countryCode:"MY",countryName:"Malaysia",city:"Kuala Lumpur"...
There's a free API for geolocation too:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/javascript
http://www.maxmind.com/app/javascript_city
Anyway this project has no future, sorry for that.
If the developers of visitor.js create a new version of the script that supersedes the version cached on users' local computers, will my number of script requests suddenly spike?
Yes it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough that I, like the person to whom you were replying, would not pay it - largely because I could code it myself.
If my site is big enough with world wide visibility that it needs custom locations, it bet to be fast also
http://developer.bizo.com/documentation/bizaudience-api
E.g. customizing their home/landing pages based on the business demographics of users (is this a small business user, Fortune 500 user, etc.).
(Don't mean this as a gratuitous plug, it's just cool to see the same client-specific customization technique used elsewhere.)
like offering deals, suggesting content (based on keywords), optimizely and reedge do offer this sort of thing in its package, but this looks easier to integrate and utilize. but a bit expensive for the service offering
Given the expected benefits for the cost (any cost, really), it's not a library I would use.
Can log custom info, goals, conversions, revenue etc.
I use them for "normal" js site tracking, and now for app tracking without JS and couldn't be happier.
As a user I already know my IP, my browser locale and probably I can be more accurate on my location. I know where I came from and what browser I am using on which OS.
As a site owner I already have this info from the http headers and implementing a reverse IP geo mapping is not a big issue.
So? where is the groundbreaking stuff? perhaps in the payment scheme ...