Its been a awhile since we last posted – apologies, no one likes to be in the dark (unless you’re a one of these!) Right, so where were we… we posted our beautiful Rose diagram, this was to satisfy some class requirements and to illustrate generally how things would/could/should(?) work.
At the moment schools out, hence the slow down/quietness of everything, however things should get a little bit more lively when class kicks in (Sept 4th).
We had the opportunity to speak with Polvi about this project on our last day of class. We were able to get a better understanding of what Mozilla would like, the direction they would like to take, and how we could align our efforts with theirs in order to get something we could all sing songs about. Our initial approach was to go in guns blazing and start from the bottom and work our way up. After speaking with Polvi, it seems like it would be a better idea to work with whatever existing code is in place and ride on from there. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop all our previous efforts, just re-adjust them to work more collectively. We plan on prototyping this in Javascript along with working on whats in place. It’d be great to have something to show and work with sooner than later.
In my search of all things metric, I came across Songbird who also have a metric gathering functionality in place. I’ve been going through their code and checking out their kung-fu, and I’ve learned quite a bit from it. A majority (if not all of it) is done in JavaScript. It also inspired me to up my JavaScript game, so I grabbed a copy of Resig’s book (highly recommend it) and have been hacking my through that.
Thats skinny at the moment will post as thing *pop* up.
- Cozby
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This will be our teams high level use case diagram. Although it doesn’t really represent much of the projects scope, it does give us an example of things work. The browser will be considered outside the system since our extension will be communicating with the browser more than the user.
Any comments would be appreciated, so that we can get a better insight from other contributors.
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The following is a list of things we thought would be interesting to know. Is there something you think would be useful to know?
Drop us a comment.
- Size of bookmark collection?
- Do users even use bookmarks?
- What search engines have they added in the search bar?
- Do they use the search area?
- How many unique sites does one surf to?
- How often do they frequent the same site?
- Do the sites they visit utilize Javascript?
- Most popular Javascript library?
- How do people navigate to pages?
- How many extensions do they have installed?
- How often does one clear cookies?
- How often does one download files?
- What kind of technologies do the sites they visit use (Flash/JS/.NET)
- How often does one send form data GET/POST transactions?
- Do users always start by surfing to an initial 10 pages and then branch out?
- How many tabs does one open?
- Do user modify the default configuration, in what way?
- How many sites are secure/insecure?
- How man windows does one open?
- Resolution/Size
- Version
- Do they use RSS?
- What theme do they use?
Cozby
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Well, this was my attempt at creating any extension for firefox.
The extension I created is a little messy so forgive me please.
Basically, what the extension does is listen for page loads(including tabs)
and whenever a page is loaded it takes the URL and adds it into a
SQLite database that is located on the local machine; in the moz
profile.
If the URL is already in the database, the SQLHelper.js adds to the
page hit counter.
The reason why I did this is because I think we can use
the raw data to find out most of the users web behaviours.
For instance, how many times they went to a secure site or what
sites they frequently visit, etc.
There will also be a View Statistic button like shown in the image.
What the button does is very simple, it opens a new window and
writes all the data collected(from the SQLite db) into a table using
the viewData( ) method call.
Anyways, check it out, modify it, do whatever that can help this
project along.
***Note: My update statement does not seem to be working at this
moment, but I wanted to give you guys something to work with while
i fix it.
The extension
-Earth2Simon
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Conversing with Dave about how we could kick things off, he mentioned that we might want to get something like about:config going, but modified to handle stats information. I think its a pretty cool way to get things rolling, just type in about:stats and bang! you got your session stats in an easy to read layout, similar to about:config.
I’ll let the mock-up do the explaining.
As you can see session data like number of tabs open, unique URL’s visted, etc would be displayed, along with anything else
we might find useful. This could display session info by day, month, and year.
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Come hither all are welcome (except clowns, they’ve always freaked me out).
Welcome to the MozMetrics blog! We’re a bunch of students (see About Us) developing a metrics gathering extension
for Firefox. We’re working on gathering data that’ll help us find answers to questions like…
How many tabs do people have open on average?
What version of Firefox is everyone using?
Do people bookmark websites using CTRL+D or via the menu way?
How often do people open new windows/tabs?
Think about how all this kind of collective data could improve Firefox. Better UI design, site support, shortcuts, no more download window, etc.
We’re just scratching the surface with this stuff – there’s much to do and learn.
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