I’m a big fan of Clicky Web Analytics – Why? Well mostly because of their excellent Spy feature which I’ve previously discussed here and here. A few weeks back I emailed the developers asking them:
“Something has just occured to me as I stare at the tab with Spy opened – could you add the current active user numbers into the title dynamically everytime that number changes?”
I was thinking something along the lines of Twitter search, or Campfire (and Chatterbloc) which display an unread message count in the title field which is also seen in your browser tab menu:
Why is this helpful to me? Well like most people I use multiple tabs and it really bugs me to have to flip from one to the other all the time to refresh or view updates that have appeared via ajax. Anyway, long story short – Clicky implemented the change within about an hour of my email (which was also awesome btw).
Fluid
So that’s great, my tabs now show me my current active live user count on reynoldsftw.com. But then I started to think… I’m using multiple applications, not just multiple tabs – so when my focus is elsewhere – I can’t quickly see the latest user count without going back to my browser and checking out the tab!
Enter Fluid.app. Fluid is a browser-type application which goes one step further – allowing you to build site specific Mac OSX applications based on websites. What do I mean by this? Well basically – I can create a brand new desktop application out of any website. It will have a lovely icon, and launch in exactly the same way as any other desktop application.
Fluid isn’t just that though. It also gives you added scripting ability in the name of Greasemonkey. What this allows me to do as a user is write a small script (javascript) to interact with the page, and do something with the results. In this case, I am going to create a script which reads the <TITLE> HTML element, looking for the user count in brackets “(10)”, and display a nice badge over the dock icon:
Once complete, I now only have to peer down to my dock for the latest user count – and if I want to dive into the Spy page, I just click the icon, and my web application is open. Awesome work – so how did I do it?
