About tlogger

tlogger is a Firefox extension for capturing click-stream web browsing logs.

The home page is at http://dubroy.com/tlogger.
Source code is managed on GitHub: http://github.com/pdubroy/tlogger/.
You can install the extension from http://dubroy.com/tlogger/tlogger-latest.xpi, and get a snapshot of the full repository at http://dubroy.com/tlogger/tlogger.git-latest.zip.

In addition to the source code for the Firefox extension, the git repository contains tools for analyzing the log files generated by tlogger.

The extension has been tested for Firefox 2 & 3, on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
The analysis tools require Python 2.5 or greater and have been tested on Linux and OS X, but should work on Windows too.

Details

tlogger captures click-stream web browsing logs. In other words, it collects data about how the browser is used. Mainly it records navigation events and tab events, as well as the UI actions that cause those events. It's roughly similar to the Spectator extension, but with a few key differences:

tlogger was originally developed for web browsing study performed in late 2008 by Patrick Dubroy at the University of Toronto. The "t" stands for "tab", or maybe "Toronto" -- take your pick.

License

Licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 (see GPL-LICENSE.txt).

Credits

Copyright (c) 2009 Patrick Dubroy, with a few exceptions:

Instructions

Installation

tlogger can be installed like any old Firefox add-on.

Development:

Go to your Firefox profile (see here for instructions on how to find it). In the "extensions" directory, create a file named "[email protected]" containing a single line with the path to the extension directory. E.g.,

/Users/Patrick/dev/tlogger/extension

Distribution:

You can create an XPI for distribution by simply zipping up the contents of that directory. The XPI can then be installed by navigating to the XPI in Firefox (either on disk or on a webserver).

Or, you can install a recent XPI from here.

Log file

tlogger creates a directory named "tlogger" in the user's profile directory containing three files:

tlogger also adds a menu under Tools with two entries:

Log files can be compiled into a higher-level format using the 'tlogger' Python module in the tools directory (or tools/compile.sh, which is a trivial wrapper).

By default, all URLs in the log files are obfuscated. You can turn this off via about:config by setting the pref extensions.tlogger.obfuscateURLs to false, and restarting Firefox.