Debugging Toolkit
Some of the things keeping me busy lately are a bunch of site re-designs. From a web analytics perspective this means new strategies, choosing appropriate KPIs, creating new reports and, of course, tagging the new sites appropriately and making sure the tags work as intended. I use a few tools to help me with the tagging tasks, here they are in no particular order:
- Live HTTP headers – This is a Firefox plug in that shows all the HTTP request and response headers that are sent when a page loads. It has a nice filter feature that allows you to just show the headers you want to see (some pages might request 50 images/stylesheets/script files so it can get kind of messy without a filter). This is VERY useful for debugging AJAX and Flash tagging. One drawback is that it doesn’t parse the querystring, you just see the whole shebang on one line. That said, it is usually not too tough to confirm that the key info is being sent.
- Fiddler – The same deal except for Internet Explorer. This one doesn’t have the nice filter feature, although you can write scripts to extend it’s functionality. That’s on my to-do list, but for now I just search through the list. Also, to see HTTPS requests you need to install something else, it is explained on the Fiddler site.
- WT Debugger – The WebTrends debugging script. Drag this link on to the “Links” area of your browser. Press the button when you are on a page with a WebTrends tag and you’ll see everything that has been sent to the SDC server, nicely formatted.
- Our homemade page checker spider. We wrote a little spider that will crawl a site and look for specific text in the source of each page. We use this to look for missing tags. It’s still pretty shaky. I’d love to hear of any similar (free/cheap) programs out there that do this.
[...] WT Debugger, from Mike Keyes over at On the Trail. WT Debugger is an itsy-bitsy script that displays all the parameters sent by a web page tracked by WebTrends back to the data server. Obviously that last sentence only makes sense to the small minority of people who deal with web analytics and, in all likelihood, there are probably three people in the universe who actually might be excited by this insight. Let me assure you, WT Debugger is very cool, especially if you happen to manage a very large website and work for a management team that likes to have superior data on their internet business. You see, gathering web analytics data requires that your website is properly tagged — a trifling matter for the typical neighborhood blog, but one giant headache for large commercial websites with multiple technical providers and content suppliers. Enter WT Debugger, which is a wonderful way to spend a Friday evening. Who says web analytics isn’t interesting? [...]
Hi. Your WT Debugger does not work. I put it in my Favorites and click on it when I’m on a site that has WebTrends tags, e.g. icoke.ca. Any suggestions? Thanks!