The article mentions the 80/20 rule of feature use, and that got me to thinking of something I’d seen in the Piwik plug-ins directory: clickheat. I looked it up out of curiosity, and not ten minutes later I had a copy running, logging clicks on my development system. Our system is resource based (having several hundered individually assigned/authorized resources), and each user is presented with a menu tailored to the features that they have access to. That gives us a pretty good edge on keeping things simple, but even so I know that there are well-intentioned features that can get in the way; as such I’m not about to turn down any intelligence available to me.

Clickheat–like it sounds–logs all the clicks on whatever page you add it to, and then does some geometric math to overlay a heat pattern on a copy of the webpage; the result? A graphical representaion of what users are doing on any given page, overlaid on the actual page that clickheat fetches with javascript.

A "thermal" map of clicks overlaid on the page

To be perfectly candid, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to figure out, but it sure wasn’t bad. You have to do a couple of simple things (like setting a site name in the javascript tag before pasting it into your html, and deciding how to group pages for logging) and the documentation leaves much to be desired, but all in all it was worth a few moments that it took to install. It will be great when this tool matures a little and possibly adds a database back-end (right now it’s all file logging), but in the mean time it will still provide interesting use information to help us reduce the effort for our users to find and access what they really want: that golden 20.

The issue was actually a rather simple one, involving only a corrupted ext3 journal in the /var partition; that unfortunetly becomes much more complicated when the offending host is located some 350 miles away in a dark basement’s much darker closet with no known *nix admins to be had. I tried to do a phone walkthough with my very patient and forgiving brother-in-law, but that ended when I failed to assert the gravitous difference between

tune2fs -O ^has_journal /var

and

tune2fs -O ^has_journal / var.

If you’re not a sysamdin, the short story is that the mis-placement of a single space made the machine completely unbootable. So thanks to FEDEX, we’re back in business little the worse for the wear.

Aside from hosting a few blogs and our primary DNS, that server was not doing much anyway, and I was in the process of backing up the data to decommission it when the error occurred. I never would have guessed it a year ago, but we are now 100% Ubuntu as that was our last Fedora based server. We just upgraded most of our desktops at work to the new Beta release of Hardy Heron, and I’m happy as cake. The NVidia drivers for my GeForce 6150 LE are finally solid in Compiz-Fusion after endless screen locks (the mouse would move, but no one was home) and the intel video cards are doing their own work so that the processor is freed up for snappy performance. The background art is the best yet.

I apologize to the faithful few who keep checking in hoping for personal news and continue to get assualted with tech jargon.. I have plans to split my personal and professional blogs apart–stop laughing, I know that keeping has been more than a task for me so far. Thanks for sticking with me anyway. Blessings!