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Spyjax

Well it’s been fun but I’ve decided to stop hosting spyjax. I mainly created
the service because I thought it was a cool idea and wanted to see if it
was possible. Once I had created it I decided to share it with all of you.

If you’re new here read the original article about Spyjax here.

About 450 people signed up for the service in last two weeks. Which is way more
than I thought would. Some of those that signed up have websites getting thousands
of visitors per day. All that traffic is starting to effect our servers and database.
If I wanted to make the service viable I would have to put a lot more time into it
and start to charge people with high traffic sites.

Instead of hosting the project I’ve decided to give away the source to the entire project
so you can install it on your own servers or someone else can set it up and host it for
others. You can download the source here:
spyjax_service.zip

I’ve released the code as open source with an
Attribution Assurance License.
That basically means you can do whatever you want with the source as long as you keep
my credits on it (like the footer on the bottom of this page with (C) 2007 Spyjax…).

Thank you everyone that signed up for the service or left comments on our blog or linked to
it. It was really cool getting so much feedback and seeing so many good debates.

-Justin

ps. You can discuss this here: The spy is dead.

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13 Comments

13 responses so far ↓

  • 1 The Spy Is Dead - Spyjax Offline // May 30, 2008 at 10:13 am

    [...] Because I’ve decided to shutdown the service I’m giving away all the code as open source. Anyone can install the Spyjax service on their server. Someone else could even start the service up and let others user it. You can download the source here: Spyjax Source Code. Spyjax uses PHP and MySQL so most web servers should be able to run it. You’ll need to do a little bit of configuration, mainly in the config.php file. There might be a place or two where you need to put your email address for sign up and feedback emails to work correctly. Also the urls.php file needs your MySQL database host, user name, and password. The service assumes that it’s using a database named “spyjax”. The schema for the database can be found in spyjax.sql. If you have any questions about how to install it contact me using the form on over here. [...]

  • 2 Vancovuer Computers Info // Aug 6, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    thank you

  • 3 Vancovuer Computers Info // Aug 6, 2008 at 1:19 pm

    It was fun while it was available, hard to make viable though.

  • 4 Jason // Aug 22, 2008 at 10:30 am

    Hi. I know this is almost definately a silly question (and my apologies if it is) but where do we squirt the list of URLs to create the 10,000 generic URLs.

    I say the above as I can’t find a list of them within the code nor within the schema so unless it is pulling them in, in real time from another source I guess the URL data needs to be in the DB or hard coded somewhere?

    thanks for all your work and your help.

    Jason

  • 5 justin // Aug 22, 2008 at 10:54 am

    You have to fill in the href table with the urls you want it to check. The backend also gives you a way to add urls to check (it puts them into that table). There’s some logic to scrape google results into that table. So you could go through a list of relevant keyword google results - which can be very insightful depending on your needs for the tool.

  • 6 Marty // Oct 11, 2008 at 6:56 pm

    hey!! i need some help. i want to check the websites my children have been visiting. how do i see where they have been after logging off? is that possible??
    thanks!!
    not so smart mom

  • 7 Jim Calkins // Dec 8, 2008 at 7:54 am

    Error 2005 : Unknown MySQL server host ‘dbhost’ (1)

    Installed all php files. Created sql database.
    Put structure of install just like zip fie with separate directories for javascript etc.
    I get the error above when I try to run the index.php file. I have double checked my database info and think it is correct. Not sure what to check now

    Jim

  • 8 justin // Dec 8, 2008 at 9:07 am

    That’s definitely in your connection to MySQL. Your host name or something is not correct. Search for “mysql_connect” in the source and make sure the connection is correct.

  • 9 Jim Calkins // Dec 12, 2008 at 4:37 am

    OK, got it installed. I added the javascript to a page and loaded the page..no errors, but nothing gets read from my browser history. I added http://yahoo.com to SJ and went to that page first before looking at the database for browser history but theres nothing there. Any ideas?

    Jim

  • 10 justin // Dec 12, 2008 at 8:19 am

    Sorry there’s a lot going on in there and I don’t remember all the gotchas. You’ll just have to hack on it.

  • 11 CJ // Dec 17, 2008 at 11:50 pm

    Hi

    I don’t have a website, but I would like to check the websites that have been visited from my home computer over the last 6months. Could it still be made available even after the history has been deleted? Is this at all possible? Can you help me? Also, could one tell at what times the sites were visited? I teach kids at home…
    Not too smart teacher!

  • 12 justin // Dec 18, 2008 at 8:54 am

    CJ,
    This tool doesn’t do that. I don’t think any tool could get the history once it’s been deleted. There are applications that will secretly record that sort of thing but I don’t know them off hand.

  • 13 Ty Morrow // May 20, 2009 at 12:31 pm

    thanks Justin this is great!
    It’s given me a whole heap of ideas and I get the feeling I will be spending the next few weeks messing with code :)
    Thank you for making it available to us.

    Ty

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