In a new post today on Joshua Eichorn's weblog, he shows you how, with a little bit of PHP and some Ajax, you can create a cool little "Website Usage Visuationzation" script.

I've been working on a small website stats project, mainly because webalizer et al don't meet my needs. The actual implementation is mod_log_sql + a bunch of php/sql script to transform that to a star schema and then some php scripts for visualization.

Things are finally getting to the point of being useful, I have enough of the dw built out that I can answer basic questions about my site with a little sql fun, plus I have one good report. Now this report is where the AJAX tricks come into play, its a trick because were loading in data asyncronously, but its a trick because its done by changing the src of imges instead of using XMLHttpRequest. There is also a lot of neat JavaScript fun happen which I use to put up a loading screen while the images are being generated.

He moves to a look at the report - the output of the project - and how the interface works. By clikcing on one of the items in the list to the left, you can dynamically generate the stats for the project in one of the four windows.

Of course, he includes the code to get it all working, including an example of how the "Loading" div works...