ClickyChrome - A Chrome extension for Clicky

Hey everyone,

I just published a Chrome extension for monitoring your Clicky sites - ClickyChrome.

Here is the extension page:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nhdlcoplfdhmdbeleincmcnmgdajohig

Features:
- Add as many of your Clicky sites as you want, all you need is the Site ID and Key to monitor them with ClickyChrome.

- The ClickyChrome toolbar icon will automatically refresh and always show the number of current visitors on the selected site, with smart abbreviations for large numbers: 1.3K, 12K, etc.

- Quickly view basic site stats for various date ranges: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days.

- All site info is stored on your computer. I don’t have access to anything you do with this extension once you install it.

Clicky Admins: I hope you approve of my use of your logo and branding - I tried to keep everything consistent with Clicky's look and feel. If this is a problem, let me know - cnanney at gmail.

Everyone: Please try it out and let me know any issues you run into. I plan to keep working on it and add new features, maybe a visitors and content overview.

That is awesome. Nice work. I just tweeted it and will probably blog about it too.

BTW, we have an API that lets you get all of a users sites with one request, but it requires their username and password. I'm not sure many people would feel comfortable giving that out to a third party extension, but it may be an option to consider because it would be a lot quicker for someone to setup. The API is simple:

http://api.getclicky.com/api/account/sites?username=demo&password=

You can also output PHP:

http://api.getclicky.com/api/account/sites?username=demo&password=&output=php


I guess we should probably implement oauth for things like this.

Just curious, how often does it refresh? I was wondering what the little number badge meant but it looks like it's visitors online now? Nice idea. Just curious how often it's hitting the API.

I'm glad you like it! The number badge was the original reason I made the extension - so I can see the online count without needing to keep a window open. I added the stats overview because it seemed kinda lame to have an extension that didn't do anything when you clicked on the icon :)

The online count is currently refreshed every minute.

Is it possible for such an add-on to be in Safari?

Very good, now do not need to be open with the Spy to see how many users have online!

Thanks to all team!

I just wrote a blog about this.

http://getclicky.com/blog/200/if-you-use-google-chrome-youll-like-this

*blog post

@hectorlee
I've never used Safari (Windows guy here), so don't know anything about its add-on/plugin system. However, it was pretty painless making the extension for Chrome - it's all just HTML and Javascript.

@rovieira
Thanks for trying it out, glad you like it!

@admin
Great - thanks for the blog post, I hope it gets some users and I can get some good feedback! About the API - I almost asked about being able to retrieve all the sites in one fell swoop. Maybe in the future there can be an option on first-run: enter username and password to import all your sites, or just manually enter the ones you want.

Also, I posted a few weeks ago about the API geolocation options - specifically regarding ISO country codes... it was for this extension. I'd eventually like to have a three-tab layout for basics, visitors, and content. For the visitors area, if I have a folder of country map gifs named according to their country code, there was no easy way to match up the current location info from the API to the map graphic - without splitting strings and keeping a big array that matches 'The Netherlands' to 'nl.gif'. If you are planning on adding that info to the API, so that I can just pull down a country code of 'nl' for that visitor... awesome.

Then, when 'Today' is selected as the date range, the visitors tab would show you info on last 10 visitors, with the same info as Clicky's visitor tab, with links to take you to details on the main site, and other date selections would just list most active for that time frame - same gist for content.

But, just having basic info was a good simple starting point to get it out the door :)

Yo, I just added a country_code field for visitors-list, so you should be able to do that now.

Also, would it be possible to detect when a user is "idle" (e.g. haven't touched their browser for 10 minutes), then disable the "visitors online now" lookup until they start using their browser again? This extension seems quite popular and is sending a ton of hits to our API. Right now it's fine but I imagine it will keep growing very fast.

If that's not possible, I would prefer if you scaled back the lookup to every 2 minutes instead.

Sweet - thanks for adding the country code. I'll see if it's possible to determine idle state from an extension - if not, I'll make it 2 minutes. I was also going to add the option of changing the notification badge color, and see what other feedback I get this week and push out an update in a few days.

Also, I forgot to add the 'app=clickychrome' parameter to the API calls - I'll take care of that in the next update.

Idle timeouts would be really great. I would think they would have that built in. Because you know there are tons of people who leave their browser open 24/7 - me, for example.

Your plugin has been a hit. Our blog post on it got the most "first day" page views of any of our blog posts ever, so people are really into it.

That's great news! How has the API been handling the traffic? I've just made and am finishing up testing idle timeout functionality. There currently is no way to determine browser idle state from an extension, here's a bug report about it:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36201

To monitor idle state, LastPass needed to make and host themselves an alternate binary type plugin that when you install, warns that it will have access to your entire computer. Regular Google-hosted extensions don't have that type of functionality.

But, there are event listeners for tab activity, which is pretty good substitute for determining if the browser is idle. ClickyChrome will listen for both changes in active tab, and the current tab state, to determine idle time. As long as people are actively using their browser, their refresh rate will be 1 minute, but there is a gradual decline that takes it to 2, 5, 10 minutes, to eventually totally idle and not refreshing if the browser has been inactive for over 2 hours.

As soon as you change tabs, load or refresh a page, or click on the ClickyChrome icon, it snaps back and resets the idle timer.

There are a few other little things to do, and I hope to push the update tomorrow.

Also - is anyone out there using this on a Mac? I got an email about it not working with Chrome for Mac and I don't have the means of testing it myself. Anyone notice problems with it?

Sounds good, thanks for doing that.

The API is getting hammered pretty bad, since we now have over 400 users (according to your extension page on google.com) hitting it every minute, but at least the requests your sending are fairly simple ones.

It's ok though, we've been wanting to spin off the API onto its own server anyways, this is just upping the priority for that.

Hey All,

ClickyChrome v1.1 was published earlier tonight, so you should be auto-upgraded soon, if not already.

New Features:
- Visitors Online counter adjusts refresh rate according to browser’s idle time to give Clicky’s API a little relief
-Better form validation to prevent ID and Key entry errors
-Five badge color options
-Added data wipe option if you are having problems and would like to just start fresh without having to reinstall

Ironically enough, there seems to be a bug with the latest dev build of Chrome that dropped earlier tonight - 5.0.342.5, that does not properly render checkboxes or radio buttons. All of a sudden after I updated Chrome the checkboxes in my Gmail inbox disappeared, and I couldn't see the badge color radio buttons on ClikyChrome's options page - they both seem to decide when they want to appear.

So, if you're on Chrome's dev channel, you might not be able to change the badge color, but the beta channel of Chrome is fine. I assume there will be an update released soon that takes care of the dev weirdness.

Also, if you've installed ClickyChrome on Chrome for Mac, please email me and let me know if it works ok - cnanney at gmail.

Nice work, I like the badge color options. I think blue stands out a little nicer against the icon than the default red does.

I pushed another update today - I had accidentally turned off validation on the name field, which could cause problems with the extension. Also fixed a potential bug if someone edited info for the currently active site. Also threw in links back to Clicky for visitors and actions for good measure.

Now that I'm comfortable with its stability and resistance to user error, I'm gonna let it rest for a little bit. In the next few weeks I'll start playing with adding visitor and content snapshots, and if anyone has suggestions or ideas, let me know - cnanney at gmail, and of course let me know of any issues you encounter.

I'm also curious if you can tell whether the idle refresh adjustments had a noticeable impact on API traffic?

Yes I can see the difference on the API. Our API gets a ton of usage (over 30GB output a day) but hundreds of users hitting it every single minute from your plugin was definitely very noticeable in terms of total hits. I can see the difference although I have not quantified it :)

Hi folks. This extension was working fine. Now I seem to have stopped seeing the little number of visitors online notification. Using Clicky for Wordpress on the site. Just upgraded this - coincidence?

@topaccountants

What OS, Chrome version are you running?

topaccountants, joost did release a WP upgrade this morning. Are you "normal" stats (in the Clicky interface) still working?

Clicky Chrome Addon stops working. OS WIN7 Chrome version 5.0.375.125

whats happend?

sorry - now i install new ClickyChrome - Version: 1.3.6 and it works fine

Very Nice! Just uploaded today. Thank you.

Need for Firefox! Just switched back from the spying shitfucks of Chrome and could use it for Firefox.