…and the winner of the Learning jQuery book giveaway is:
Nick from Crealities. I’ll be in touch, Nick, to get your mailing address. Thanks to everyone who commented to win. Next time I’ll try and get more stuff so everyone has a better chance to win.
Remember you can pick up copy right from Packt if you want to buy it. They offer 10% the cover price getting it from them. Otherwise check out the bookshelf for a link to Amazon.
Weird Date on Screencast #47
When #47 originally went out, I screwed up the date on it. It had 8/11/19 for the date, which is obviously far in the future =). So new screencasts are not automatically downloading in iTunes because it only downloads the latest one. To fix this, you can simply unsubscribe and resubscribe, or just ditch that one when you are done with it. The date has been fixed.
Clickmap Demo Turned into WordPress Plugin
Roger Stringer turned the clickmap demo from yesterday into a WordPress plugin. All you do is activate it and it starts saving clicks from all the different pages on your site. You can then pull from a dropdown and see the clickmap overlay on that page in an iframe.
It’s pretty cool, but it’s pretty raw in plugin format right now. It needs jQuery to run, and the plugin manually loads it, so watch out for that if you are already loading jQuery. It also has the potential to seriously increase the size of your WordPress database extremely. Just a heads up.
Just another quick note, I love your site but sometimes it takes for ever to load. I checked it with YSlow in firebug and you got an F. I’d suggest that you take a look at that. Thanks for everything!
About the database size getting out of control – How about only recording the clicks if they occur over a ‘clickable’ element? (link, img, btn, etc.) It doesn’t seem like the orphaned clicks would be of much use, except maybe show where users were mistaking an element as being clickable.
Imo that’s like 40% of being able to track clicks. To show where the user THOUGHT there was a clickable element. Maybe if you actually made that element clickable or moved the relevant link to that position, that could improve sales, clicks or usability.
If the user have no problem finding the clickable elements, you should find out why the user isn’t clicking the element you want them to…
Hi AdamA,
If it’s what you need, the actual clickMap jQuery script already allows that.
Just apply the clickMap plugin to link, image or whaterver you need instead of the document.
try :
$(‘a, img, button’).saveClicks();
instead of
$(document).saveClicks();
Ah shucks!! didnt win that book – maybe that means I have to actually go out and buy it :)
-Brenelz
http://www.brenelz.com
Just to post a quick follow up, I did an update recently (within the last hour or so) that makes use of the “wp_enqueue_script” function to handle how the clickmap.js file is called.
The script was a pretty quick plugin, so I’ve been working on getting some new features added to it (like the ability to clear your clickmap and start over).
Will have some new things happening over the next couple days as I get time.
WTH Chris, I thought you loved me.
Lol, jk. Grats Nick.
@”Weird Date on Screencast #47″
To be honest iTunes really %$#& ?! sometimes when it comes to
podcasts… Seems like really ‘lazy’ programming sometimes..
I still haven’t figured out if iTunes gives me opportunity to
access ALL episodes of podcasts .. eg. I subscribed to the css-tricks iPod-version since I’m watching a lot of podcasts on my ‘Touch.
Is there only like 10-15 episodes in iPod version?
Or does iTunes only show me the last 10-15 episodes? -argh
just a note, mee too:
great site. I love the design and the professional way you design it… you, david walsh, script and style, and others of this group are giving an order to the caos web 2.0 is doing with it’s moltitude of redundance…
For italian people, we are growing with a tv http://www.ictv.it where we put a format named CODE-IT, where we show video and examples of CSS and javascript too, i wish a day to make something in english and share it with you…
just a demo link: a video on some css tricks code-it (free downloadable examples and video tutorial)
Crazy, I had the same idea to create a plugin with the tutorial about the use of jQuery for a Clickheatmap but put that a little later on my to do list cause I have no time at the moment. I love the implementation of the tutorial in this plugin and I’m looking forward to a version which may save database usage?
Thanks for that great plugin again!
A bit off topic, but what software do you use for the podcast feeds? I’ve used Feeder, but there’s also the hand-coding alternative.
Great work Chris!
I have Feeder but I haven’t messed with it much. I hand code all the feeds. It’s kind of pain but then I have full control and can make sure it’s done right.