An acquaintance of mine mentioned in casual conversation the other day that he’d seen a demonstration of some code that would track the path followed by a website visitor across a webpage and store the information in a log file that the software would later download and plot as a series of coloured overlays to the page itself - he couldn’t remember the name of the software/developer, but I thought that one of y’all might know something about this.
Googling wasn’t much use - I could only find this old BBC news item about the development of the technology.
I’ve never heard of this before, but it doesn’t seem terribly complicated. One could use Javascript to record mouse coordinates at intervals, then pass that data to the server through a cookie or other means to be stored. It wouldn’t take much effort to “replay” the movement using javascript, either.
I thought it would be fun to code: this page works as I described - recording the mouse position every 1/10th of a second and saving the result in a cookie. The link on that page “replays” the mouse movement (though it’s buggy and can’t record much). Fine tuning this method, however, won’t get more than 1000 or so coordinates in a single cookie; other methods would have to be used to record longer sessions.
The contents of the cookie could be recorded on the server and be replayed or analyzed later. You could probably log other client-side behavior as well.