New from NetTuts.com today there's a tutorial showing you how to use the FusionCharts tool to create interactive drill-down dashboards with a few simple PHP scripts.

Presenting data in a graphical format always helps a lot in parsing the data efficiently. If the charts are interactive and linked, that's even better. Drill-down charts allow you to convert individual data plots (columns in column chart, pie slices in pie chart etc) of a chart into hotspots (or links). These items, when clicked, can open new charts and you can navigate between these charts easily.

They use the LinkedCharts feature of FusionCharts to make the graphs clickable. They set up a basic database-driven system that holds some randomly generated data for display. Full PHP and HTML are provided to create a simple chart like this where you can click into any of the bars for more detailed information. You can also download the full source or check out a demo.

On the CSS-Tricks.com website there's a new tutorial looking at heatmaps and how to make one for your site by combining PHP and jQuery.

The website will be built using PHP. We need PHP for a couple of reasons. Most importantly we need a server side language to deal with saving and retrieving from the database. [...] We'll be using JavaScript of the jQuery variety to track the mouse clicks and post that click data to the PHP file doing the database saving. jQuery will also help us display the overlay and place the little graphics we'll use to display the click locations.

The complete code - both PHP and Javascript - is included (and available for download too). The jQuery code makes the overlay on top of whatever page the visitor is on and, when they click on any location, an ajax request is sent back to the waiting PHP script. This request is parsed and dropped into the database. Another bit of Javascript code is used to drop the user click heatmap points out onto the page.

Alex Netkachov has posted about the update he's just released to the Jamp! package.

I've updated the Jamp! All packages are updated to the latests stable version available, the "Server" and "Service" commands are added for Tomcat 6.0, Jamp.hta UI is updated

Jamp! is a single-click installer for PHP/Java/Apache/MySQL to make installing them (and getting them working together) simple.

The PHP-GTK Community website has two new posts they've made recently - one concerning clicking on images and the other about grabbing screenshots:

• Getting (x,y) coordinates when clicking on images - I wrote an application where the user clicks on a GtkImage, and I want to know *where* the user clicked. Here's a simple object extending GtkAlignment.
• Grabbing a screenshot with Gdk - Need to grab a screenshot in your program? Or maybe you just need to create an image from an existing GtkWidget. There's an easy way to accomplish both tasks using GdkPixbuf::get_from_drawable();

Check out the rest of the site for more reference, applications and information for the PHP-GTK community.

The PHP-GTK Community website as three new posts today all describing applications built with simplicity in mind and created using the PHP-GTK libraries:

• the "Click Fast" button that makes use of the Gtk::timeout_add() and Gtk::timeout_remove() functions
• a Desktop Widget that can be used for useful information you want to keep in view
• visualProxy - an HTTP proxy server and transmit HTTP proxy requests from a WWW user agent to an other proxy or directly to a server. It displays requests graphically and update information on the fly on a detailed list with many fields columns.

Check out their apps and code snippets sections for more examples like these.

WebDevLogs.com points out a handy tool for those site owners out there that want to see what location on their site is getting the most use - ClickHeat.

Heatmap suddenly became popular when webmasters want to know where did the user click or look at. Websites like Crazy Egg, provides a heatmap generation system for webmasters. But most heatmap costs more than average adsense supported website can earn, those sites need a alternative.

ClickHeat requires PHP (5.1.6 and higher) with GD enabled to work. The post includes a sample image to show you what the end result looks like.