GeekFindr: WASP - seeing web beacons
Scott pointed this one out to me a bit ago - WASP, the Web Analytics Solution Profiler. It’s a Firefox extension that gives you a sidebar showing you info about the various analytics beacons on the page you’re currently looking at.
If you’re building an big website, it’s useful as an easy sanity check to make sure you’ve put your beacons in all the right places. Beyond that, if you’re using some of the more advanced features of various analytics engines like passing different information to them it helps immeasurably in showing you exactly what’s being passed. Much easier than viewing source and hunting around for the javascript.
The sidebar shows you both the query string and cookie information in a very easy to see fashion. This is useful for your own sites to check and make sure you’re passing what you think your passing. And if you’re the sort to worry about exactly what other sites are saying about you then this may be just the thing for you, too.
It has specific knowledge of analytics engines, 45 of them to be exact. All of the one’s I’m concerned with are on the list, and way more beyond that.
There’s really only one gripe I have with this little beauty - it’s a little slow to use. One problem is that there’s no command key assigned to the sidebar. So you have to do it menu style, which is a pain if you just want to flash in and out of it for a given page. Instead or in addition to that, if they gave an option to put something in the status bar that would show you what beacons were in place and clicking on them would bring up the sidebar - that’d really help too.
But it’s a good single purpose extension. If you ever need to check on beacons WASP is clearly the way to go.
