This tool has been designed to help administrators and webmasters to make fast usability tests and mainly to analyze the gathered data. Although in this page the system (smt) is introduced like a tool for real time mouse tracking visualization, its main goal goes beyond: to analyze user behaviour and to infer a visitor profile by means of psychological, social and statistical relations.
Usually webmasters only want to track a certain HTML page, which is normally the one with the new layout or the most visited one. But sometimes a set of files is required to be tracked. It doesn't matter, this tool works in each HTML file marked with the needed line of JavaScript code. See preparing HTML pages to read more.
disclaimer! (smt) is intended to work on standard HTML pages. If your website is entirely developed with Flash, you should try pure Flash/Flex solutions like Use It Better or Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash.
smt on your server root (/smt).
<head> section of any HTML page that you wish to track:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/smt/smt_record.js"></script>
/smt/playground) and see how users behave in your site.
See next chapters to know more about (smt).
You need to add the following line of JavaScript code in each page that you wish to monitore,
in your <head> section:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/smt/smt_record.js"></script>,
assuming that you have downloaded (smt) in a folder called /smt (recommended).
You can also put the above-mentioned JavaScript line in your <body> section if you wish.
The server must be able to run PHP code (99% of traditional [1] web servers can), preferably version 5. When writing this documentation the last PHP stable versions were 4.4.7 and 5.2.3.
Your server also needs one (only one) of the following options, to write successfully [2] the HTML logs:
allow_url_fopen directive on, orcURL module installed
You need to unzip the (smt) system in your server root folder (/smt).
Otherwise, you will need to configure manually the PHP and JavaScript files provided.
Please read next chapter to achieve this task.
[1] A 'traditional web server' means 'the one that you pay for a hosting service'. You can also try (smt) in your localhost. Check www.php.net for more info.
[2] Both logs directories (logs_html and logs_xml) must be writeable by the PHP/Apache user (usually www-data).
Maybe you want to install (smt) in a different directory that the default one (/smt).
For example, let's say you want to use the path /mysubdir/smt:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/mysubdir/smt/smt_record.js"></script>,
smt_config.php and write the JavaScript path (JS_PATH) accordingly to your (smt) dir:
define ('JS_PATH', "/mysubdir/smt");.
smt_recod.js and write:
smtPath: "/mysubdir/smt".
Due to the fact that a copy of your HTML page is created in /smt/logs_html folder,
a <base /> element is automatically included in the HTML head,
for linking correctly path-relative external files (such as CSS or images) when replaying mouse tracking data.
If you have previously included a <base /> element to link your external files, please edit smt_storeData.php and comment line 93 as follows:
//$parse_url = str_replace(HEAD_TAG, $head_fix, $parse_url);
unload event – which makes sense.
So, if the user leaves the page before all the binary content is fully loaded, the session log won't be created.
unload event when closing the browser window,
either if you type the page URL manually in the address bar or load a bookmarked page (link).
However, the unload event is indeed fired when clicking on a link on that page.
load and unload events do not fire when going back,
forward or refreshing the page (link).
If you find a bug, you can fill in the bug report form.
smt_record.js and write disabled: false.
smt_replay.js and edit the function setBgCanvas, on line 92.
You can change the background color, the layer opacity and add some offsets to its dimensions (both in width and height).
smt_replay.js and edit the (smt) default options.
Color values must be enclosed in quotation marks, and should be hexadecimal following the pattern "#rrggbb" or "#rgb"
(as usual with HTML).
Color names availables in HTML (for instance "maroon") may be used as well.
wmode to transparent, being able to track mouse movements over these embed objects too.