Wizard's Blog

I've been using the private beta of Woopra for about a week.

Woopra is a web analytics service like Google Analytics, but its unique feature is that you can see the traffic live instead of just a report at the end of the day.

The other thing that's different about Woopra is that instead of being completely web based (like Google Analytics), you need to install a Java-based client application.

At first glance it seems like a step backwards to need a client application - all the heavy lifting happens on the server anyway, and a web app is accessible anywhere whereas client apps need to be installed.

However the upside of having a client application is that you can set up Event Notifications so that you get a systray notification when a visitor that matches some criteria (that you define) arrives - that would be difficult to do in a web app.

I really like  Event Notifications because my website only gets about one hit per hour, so in order to see the visits live I would need to have the client application open all the time just in case.  With Event Notifications I can have the client hidden until I get a visit.

The client consists of a Dashboard, a Live display, Search, Analytics and a Management screen for Event Notifications.  No matter what screen you're on you can always see a header with some quick visit numbers and a line graph of today's visits and hits by hour, and a footer with a ticker of today's visit information as compared to yesterday's.

The Dashboard has tables with an overview of visits and hits, what content has had hits today, referring sites and search keywords used.  It's a good overview of the day's traffic but doesn't make it very easy to see live traffic so I don't spend much time there.

The Live display is much more interesting, assuming you have enough traffic to see some of it happening live.  This screen has a map of the world that shows visits as dots on it when they happen - it's very exciting to watch  You can change the map to only show a specific country, if you have enough traffic to be worth it.  There's also a table that shows your current visitors and a bigger table that shows the details of the currently selected visitor - for example location, operating system, browser, where they came from and which of your pages they've visited this session - it's fascinating.

For me, the best thing about the Live display is that there is a button you can press to maximize the map to take up the whole monitor.  If you have a second monitor attached to your computer or a spare computer with its own monitor you could have map showing all the time, with your visitors appearing on it live!

The Search screen lets you mine the data that Woopra collects about your visitor's browsing sessions.  It's useful because the live data disappears off of the Live display when the visitor leaves.

The Analytics screen gives you more of a bird's eye view of the data.  This is more conventional web analytics - graphs of visits per day, pie charts of the operating systems your visitors use etc.

One thing people worry about with web analytics is whether their web pages will be slowed down.  The Woopra tracking script goes into the footer of your website, so it is run last and doesn't slow the page load down at all.  They also have plugins for various blogging platforms (like WordPress) so the tracking script is added for you automatically.

When it is released, Woopra will apparently have free and paid versions, but at the moment it's still in (free) closed beta.  You can sign up for the beta and they'll approve you when they want to open it up to more users.  During the beta testing phase it is restricted to sites with less than 10,000 pageviews per day.

With the economy the way it is I can't say I would definitely pay money for Woopra, especially with free alternatives like Google Analytics out there but I suppose that depends on the capabilities of their free version and how much the paid version will cost.

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This post is about the social aspect of software development, not the development of social software - I realize the title is ambiguous.

A few days ago, I came across a project someone had done to automatically append a Google Analytics campaign identifier to URLs shortened using Cligs so that you can tell what clicks came from that shortened URL.  It seemed like a really useful idea, but from my point of view the execution was less than ideal - it used a php file I had to host and a bookmarklet.

The only URLs I shorten are blog posts, and I already use the WP to Twitter WordPress plugin to do that.  So I suggested it to the developer of the plugin on his website.  The next day he'd added the feature to his plugin.

I was shocked - I'm still used to the old, monolithic model of development where you get a new version every year or two, it'll have whatever features the company decides, you have no say in the matter and you definitely have no contact with the developers.

I guess the accessibility of home computers has increased the number of smaller companies and individual developers, and the Internet has connected everyone together better to make this possible.  It's a brave new world.

Image by LollyKnit via FlickrI've had this blog for... ...holy crap, for four years. In the beginning it was pretty bare, just single-line posts about things I wanted to buy or things I had already used and thought were cool.

In the last few months I've tried to flesh my posts out a bit more and post more often, with mixed success.

I've come to see it as a sort of game. There's no opponent (I refuse to compete with the entire rest of the Internet) so it's a bit of a solitary game. You start the game with a PageRank of 0 and the goal is to get a PageRank of 10. I refuse to resort to any kind of SEO, so it's all about whether I can produce good enough content to get the attention of the world. So far the answer is "not really". I have got a PageRank of 3, which is better than I ever thought I'd do, but there's a long way to go. I don't really have any really good backlinks, and no RSS subscriptions.

For me, the most fun part of the game is checking how well I'm doing every day. PageRank changes slowly, so that's no fun, but between Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google AdSense, I get some interesting feedback.

When something happens like my Amazon pre-order of GTA IV shipping unexpectedly early, rather than telling someone, my first thought is to blog it. Not because I'm so short of real-life friends or I think there's anyone out there that cares, but because it gives me some content and I want to see what that'll do to my standing in the game.

I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago, when the Call of Duty 4 map pack came out and I couldn't download it because of an Xbox Live error. I blogged about it, and had the biggest spike in my visitor stats because of everyone else having the same error and googling it. Of course my post wouldn't help any of those people because I don't know what the error means or what to do about it, so I wouldn't hold it up as an example of good content. But it did get me a spike.

Another interesting thing is how many visitors I've had because of my posts about having invites to private betas (Twine, Xobni, socialthing, EverNote). Again, not the best content, but visit magnets.

It's interesting that pretty much nobody has ever clicked on the AdSense ads on my blog. I wonder whether that's because the ads weren't appropriate (Google's fault) or whether my readers all run AdBlock (nobody's fault) or whether ads appropriate to my posts weren't interesting (my fault)...