About the halfbite service

What is the halfbite service?
How do I use the halfbite service?
Why should I use the halfbite service?
Why did you build this?
What does it cost?
Who owns the data?
What about security?
Who created the halfbite service?
Why is it called halfbite?
What if I have more questions?

What is the halfbite service?

halfbite.com is a simple click tracking service for your web site.

How do I use the halfbite service?

Copy the code from your settings page and paste it into any page you want to track clicks from. Or if you're more daring, feel free to interact with the service via our api.

Why should I use the halfbite service?

I know some of you are thinking "Wait a second, isn't this just basic javascript? Couldn't I just write this on my own? Why would I want to use this instead?".

These are all great questions, and to give you the short answers "yes. probably. and you might not."

To expand on each of these a bit more: Yes the service is really just simple JQuery wrapped up in a nice little API. Yes you could probably custom build this in about two minutes if you're any sort of a programmer, and if that's the case you may very well want to do that instead.

The advantage to using the halfbite service is:

Click tracking is abstracted away from the guts of your application/website. This means you don't have to do any fancy url wrapping, script installations, server configurations, or remember to set any special flags or parameters on each link you want to track clicks for.
It's super easy to implement (even if you're not a programmer, and especially if you only have limited access to your web site HTML).
Your click details are available via a simple API. This makes working with the click data very simple.

Why did you build this?

I needed click tracking for the knowabout.it service that I'm building (knowing what links in your collection you click on helps improve our search algorithm, make better recommendations, and do better classification on content and people). However, click tracking isn't really core to the knowabout.it idea and in fact I had a handful of other projects that could really benefit from click tracking as well.

So I figured why not break it out into it's own little web service and make it easy to add in as an after thought to any web application I might want? And so then that's just what I did, and I now make it available to anyone else that might want it simply because I can.

What does it cost to use the halfbite service?

Currently the service is FREE and the intention, because I really only built it to solve some specific problems for my own services, is that it will always be free (however if we hit scaling issues over time, we may be forced to charge a small amount for the most active users -- and so we reserve the right to change our minds on this 'free for everyone, forever' stance).

Who owns the data?

You do. You can pull down your click data (via the api or tools available throughout the site) at any time.

What about security?

For the most part, halfbite is a pretty open system and so security is not our primary concern (making it easy to track clicks is more important to us than making it difficult to hack the system).

The best advice we can give related to security around your halfbite account is to try to keep your 'auth' key as private as possible (currently anyone with your auth key can get your click details). This generally means, if working with our api, you should make all your calls to our service from within your application code where they are not exposed directly to public eyes (if you are simply accessing your click details via halfbite.com, then just don't share your username/password combo and you should be pretty good).

In the end though, if you are really concerned about the security of your click data, you may want to implement a custom solution of your own.