I’m so excited about this! Site Spy is exactly like Digg Spy, except it’s on your web site. How sweet is that? This is a feature we had working and active a long time ago, but because of massive changes to our backend as well as 5 bajillion other things to do, it hasn’t been functional for over 2 months. But as we are preparing for launch, I made this feature my highest priority because we know it rocks and we’ve had a lot of emails asking about it. Finally, it is back and available for everyone’s enjoyment. It’s not 100% done, we really need to do something about those buttons, but it’s functional and very interesting to watch.
If your site has less than a few thousand pages views per day, this may not be as interesting as it could be because clicks won’t appear very often. Getclicky.com gets almost 10,000 pageviews per day, so it works pretty well for our site. See it in action here: getclicky.com/stats/spy?site_id=10
A few tidbits, for you technical fiends out there… Unfortunately the geolocation info is not available in this view. This is mainly because a database connection is not opened on these Ajax refreshes, which would be needed to look up this info. We look up the country information for every visitor as we store their info in our database, but we don’t store clicks directly in the database as they come in – it’s way too intensive. Spy is pulling this data directly out of the “cache” we use for incoming clicks. This actually works pretty well for us because the database is never touched while you are watching Spy, which saves us a tremendous amount of processing power.
One other thing of note, for you multi-taskers out there… this relies on a few cookie variables, so if you have more than one web site on Clicky, you can’t have a Spy view open for all of them at the same time, unless you use are using different programs for each site (e.g. one site in Firefox, one in Opera). I know this will affect pretty much no one, but I wanted to mention it. I will look into making this work differently in the future…
I would love to hear your feedback! Good, bad, bug reports, etc. Leave comments below or use the contact link on getclicky.com to send us an email!
Update: We’ve received word that Spy behaves a bit odd in Safari – on some of the page refreshes, the top item is only half visible. Unfortunately for us, we do not have easy access to a Mac, so it’s not a quick fix. We’re using Prototype and scriptaculous for the Ajax and effects, these are both standard libraries used by many web sites (including apple.com) so we’re left scratching our heads for the moment. We are going to try changing the effects for Safari and would appreciate anyone’s feedback on the issue.
