I have rewritten the Ajax Link Tracker to provide a more robust downloadable version.

One of the more interesting aspects of Ajax is the ability to track a user’s interaction within the browser. I wanted to investigate navigation patterns, so I built the Ajax based link tracker. If you press the “Ctrl” and "X" keys you will be presented with an overlay which displays links usage by percentage. This functionality was created with JavaScript and a very simple API. The first version was an experiment, it was never my intention to create a finished tool just to explore the idea and share the results.

Subsequently I have moved on to produce a hosted web application calledMapSurface that includes link tracking. Although MapSurface has many advantages over the link tracker I thought it would still be useful to produce a downloadable version of the link tracker. I have completely rebuilt the link tracker adding a few new features. It contains many of the lessons learnt from the construction and beta testing of MapSurface.

Ajax Link Tracker 2.2 + .Net/SQL Server Backend /> Ajax Link Tracker 2.2 + PHP/MYSQL Backend (Pierre Far) /> Ajax Link Tracker 1.0 + ASP/MDB Backend (Dean Liou)

Pierre Far and Dean Liou have provided alternative backend systems. I would like to thank them for their efforts and everyone else who has provided feedback.

New features and updates

• Records clicks on buttons /> Tracks clicks on form buttons. This includes both submit and button input types. /> 
• Overlay is dragable /> The overlay of click information is now dragable. This helps you to view data that may be overlapping. Thanks to dom-drag script from Aaron Boodman /> 
• Allows you to change what information is displayed in the overlay /> The JavaScript can be configured to display click number, percentage of clicks and label or a combination of the three pieces of information /> 
• Allow you to change how many days data is displayed in the overlay /> The JavaScript can be configured to change the date range of data used by the overlay. This property is useful for sites which have constantly changing layouts. /> 
• Record keyboard hyperlink interactions /> Not everyone uses a mouse to click hyperlinks and buttons /> 
• Can find hyperlink label text even in complex HTML /> Can find the label text in a link even if the hyperlink contains HTML mark-up. /> 
• Object encapsulation /> All the JavaScript is wrapped into two objects. This should stop any conflicts between the Ajax Link Tracker and other JavaScript code. /> 
• Does not override existing JavaScript events handlers /> The JavaScript will not override any events already added to the page.

Please remember that Ajax cannot work across domains. If you wish to make this code work within a website you must include the two aspx pages and .net classes within that project. You will also have to copy the appSettings xml block into the “Web.config” file of your application. Ajax Link Tracker 2 was built with Visual Studio 2003 and SQL Server 2005.