A few months ago a tool was released that can record Live interactions of people maneuvering through your site. This tool tracks and logs data entry and mouse clicks and you can replay their session as many time as you want.

The sole purpose for these guys to create this Clicks Plugin was to allow the webmaster to increase his or her conversion rate if they are trying to sale stuff. On the other hand, one could find this tool useful in seeing how someone was able to deface your website and replace it with “Hacked by Chinese” with just a few minor tweaks.

Parsing a Web Page is also known as screen scraping. This task is to identify certain portions of a web page and extract the data out to fit your needs. For example, if you went to a website that showed today’s stock totals. You may want to use just the totals so that you can export it into an Excel spreadsheet.

If you are a programmer or familiar with program languages, you of course cold hack through and create your own algorithm to parse through the html tags. Unfortunately there is no standard way to display information on any given web page. Some webmasters for example will place table or row/column type information into an html tag called table. Others and most of the newer web designers are now displaying this type of information in html tags known as div. But, within the tables or divs, there could be other tags. So if you really want to parse web pages yourself, you should first have a grasp of the html language.