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Web design is boring

Published February 19, 2007
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In an uncharacteristic spate of motivation, I've mucked around a bit on the TKC project and ended up with a site mockup. Oooh, XHTML strict, CSS prettiness, blah blah blah.

The client is downright functional now, tracking clicks, keystrokes, wheel scrolls, and mouse cursor distance travelled (in kilopixels). With a little bit of UI hackery (and code to save state when shutting down) it'll be more or less ready to run as just a local gimmick.

The complex part of the project has always been the server side, though. Collecting the stats into a database requires a database; showing the stats requires a web site; and keeping punk-ass kids from messing with it requires security features. All of that stuff requires work, which requires time and motivation - two things I'm clinically deprived of these days.



I'm seriously considering two clients - the bog-standard Tiny KeyCounter with the stats submission and all that excitement, and a new spinoff "Really Tiny KeyCounter" which just tracks locally and doesn't have all the security cruft. RTKC would be very easy to finish up and release, and it'd (hopefully) keep people entertained while I slog through the process of rebuilding the entire site back-end from scratch. It'd also address the FUD from the old days where people were scared of TKC being a keylogger - you can firewall RTKC just to be safe and you're guaranteed it'll never phone home, even while getting your fix of pointless PC usage statistics.


Moreover, this would finally present a good solution for something I've been wanting to do since the 0.x days, which is release the source. The 1.x clients heavily relied on security-by-obscurity, with quite good results. RTKC could be released wholesale without concern of people mucking with the server.


... and now I need to go do some real work.
0 likes 1 comments

Comments

bigski
Hi Apoch,

Years back I enjoyed using TKC 1.6.1. Is there any change of releasing 2.0 anywhere in the near future?

Greetz, Bigski
March 22, 2009 08:56 AM
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