Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Introducing Feed Compare, a free web application that you can use for comparing FeedBurner feeds. This tool is great for checking out your competition and noticing trends in growth.

Much like comparing website ranks using the Alexa website, you can use Feed Compare to compare your feeds against up to three other feeds. All you have to do is input the name of your feed, and then the name of your competitors feeds.

Features for this tool include: viewing up to 24 months worth of data (other options are: 12 months, 6 months, 3 months and one month). Zoom in on particular timeframes using click and drag. Users can link directly to the feed comparisons chart much like Alexa ‘permalink’ style. And it allows users compare up to 4 feeds at a time.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.feedcompare.com
License: License Free

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Yes, we all love Google Analytics. However, it does not stop us looking at other good alternatives. W3Counter is your free, hosted website analytics solution for answering the key questions about your website: who’s your audience, how they find your site, and what interests them. There’s no installation, no configuration, and tracking starts as soon as you copy-and-paste a snippet of code into your website. Here is a list of features you can find on W3Counter, but not on Google Analytics.

Follow Your Visitors
Since W3Counter’s service is truly real-time, you can follow visitors as they browse your website. See who’s online at any time and their entire path from referring source to the page they’re currently viewing. Plus, view detailed activity for visitors that have recently left your site as well.

Visitor Identification
Label your visitors, as easily as installing a plugin on a WordPress blog or adding a few lines of JavaScript to your membership or customer-based website. Your labels will appear in your reports of online and recent visitors, where you can view all the past activity of each member or customer on your website.

Web Stats Widgets
Share your web stats with the world. Embed them in your website or blog with 7 different widgets including visitor maps, top pages, top searches, weekly visit graphs and a live feed of the most recent people on your site. You can even pull up a click overlay of your site without logging in to W3Counter.

Tracking Feedburner Feed Stats
You can track your Feedburner Feed Stats easily with W3Counter. It shows Circulation, Hits and Reach for your Feedburner account by using Feedburner API. It also shows us a beautiful line chart for your RSS Stats as well.

Many small website owners remain on the free plan. However, free accounts are limited to websites receiving under 5,000 daily page views.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.w3counter.com/stats/2
License: License Free

• 7 Comments

Woopra is a web-tracking & analysis tool. It is mainly targeted for small to medium websites ranging from few hundreds up to tens of thousands of daily page views. Essentially, it is targeted for blogs interested in the most minuscule details of every single action. In addition, Woopra provides a precise real-time streaming of every single activity on the website. Woopra also features a clean interface, including many graphical visualization components, such as charts, maps, panels… Along with many other clean and advanced options that make Woopra an ideal solution for webmasters who desire to discern all the aspects of their website. Here are the main features of Woopra.

Live Tracking
Webmaster will be immediately updated with all the actions taking place on his website. Woopra makes tracking seamless with its inherent live technology.

Rich Interface
Woopra provides an intuitive interface to display complex data sets (such as maps, charts, etc…) , without discarding the balance between design and function, creating elegant data visualizations.

Activity Search
Woopra log shows you all the events on your website in chronological order, offering an outstanding tool to go back in time and identify all the actions that took place.

Instant Messaging
Woopra enables you to engage your visitors by starting a conversation with them; a friendly popup will appear on the web page to establish the chat. Also, Woopra provides your visitors with a special link on the page, to be able to start a conversation.

Notifications
By putting valuable information around real-time data, Woopra provides an on-demand notification component highlight operational data and apply intelligence to make the data actionable and to spot special events.

Developer Tools
For developers and enthusiast users, Woopra provides a full featured API that allows extracting a website’s data into several common web 2.0 formats, making it useful for use within your own application.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.woopra.com/
License: License Free

• 14 Comments

Piwik is an open source web analytics software. It gives interesting reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords and etc… Piwik is built with plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. Piwik being installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database. You can very easily embed your graphs in your blog or website or dashboard.

If you are a developer, you can definitely help. One of their main mid term objective is to make it easy for external developers to build plugins for Piwik. Help is also welcome if you want to work on the core of Piwik: there are lots of interesting problems to solve, new features to implement and bugs to fix.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://piwik.org/blog/piwik-open-source-web-analytics/
License: GPL License

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RobotReplay lets you record and watch your website visitors in action. Replay the actual mouse movements of your visitors. View recorded sessions of every mouse movement, click and keystroke. What areas of the page do users spend a lot of time on. Do they appear to get lost? RobotReplay allows us to see where the readers get bored in order to improve the site’s usability and convert more visitors to buyers.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.robotreplay.com/
License: License Free

• 3 Comments

MochiBot is a Flash traffic monitoring tool that tracks the performance of individual Flash content files (SWFs) no matter where they end up on the web. If your SWF is on 5 different servers, then MochiBot will count the number of views that SWF got for all 5 servers. You simply copy and paste a few lines of ActionScript from MochiBot into your Flash file (FLA), and publish the SWF. Every time your Flash content is played, MochiBot sends a signal to our servers indicating where it is and that it’s being played.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.mochibot.com/my/dashboard.html
License: License Free

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FoldSpy is a tool for finding out the actual dimensions of your visitor’s browser window. It gives you access to this data and presents it in completely new way, the data from FoldSpy is overlayed on your site. FoldSpy is most useful for people who need real data to make important layout decisions. It can answer questions like “where do I put this ad if I want 85% of my visitors to see it without scrolling?” Now, you can find the answer in seconds and because the FoldSpy data is displayed in-place, on your site, the answer can be viewed in a way that’s most useful.

Requirements: Modern Browsers with Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://www.foldspy.com/overview/
License: License Free

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Site Meter is a comprehensive real time website tracking and counter tools give you instant access to vital information and data about your sites audience. With the detailed reporting you’ll have a clear picture of who is visiting your site, how they found you, where they came from, what interests them and much more.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=samplestats&HELP=ON
License: License Free

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Do you want to get a heatmap of where your visitors are clicking and enhance your website’s result? Now you can install it on your own server without paying a penny. ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones. You are free to download it and start visualize your visitors in order to find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper.

Requirements: Firefox 1.5+, Internet Explorer 6+, Konqueror
Demo: http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.php (Username:demo Password:demo)
License: GPL License

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Reinvigorate Snoop is a real-time tracking tool for your website which is running in the System Tray (Windows) / System Status Bar (Mac) you no longer need to endlessly flip between your work and stats. When something happens, Snoop will let you know. Snoop will run on any website or blogging platform that allows JavaScript. Simply insert the tracking snippet on any page you want tracked and we take care of the rest. You can assign different events with different sounds, e.g. new visitors, comments and donation,etc. You’ll know the instant someone makes a comment on your website, visits your website, make a donation, etc..

Requirements: Internet Explorer 5+, Firefox 1.0+, Opera 8+, Safari
Demo: http://report.reinvigorate.net/snoop
License: License Free

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