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History of Spy (also: ZeroMQ)
This post is written by Alexander, hacker extraordinaire, who rewrote the Spy backend from scratch. Next time you're in Portland, kindly buy him a beer.
Clicky is almost 6 years old and hence was one of the first real-time web analytics platforms. Spy is an important part of that offering. Spy allows you to glimpse important information about active visitors on your website, as that information flows out of your visitors' browsers and into our system.
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We're moving!
This Saturday, August 4, from approximately 2pm to 5pm PST (GMT -0700), our web site will be offline while we move our servers to a new data center in downtown Portland.
We have carefully planned this over the last 3 weeks to ensure that tracking will still be online during this time (no data will be lost and there will be no impact on your site's performance), and that the move itself will be as fast as humanly possible. The new data center is already pre-railed and pre-wired with power and ethernet, so de-racking and re-racking will be extremely fast. So why will it take ~3 hours? Well, the old data center is about 90 miles away... 🙁
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New custom data report
If you log custom data with Clicky, you're probably going to like this new set of features. If you're not logging custom data, you should — it's one of our best features.
Up until yesterday, for our own reports on getclicky.com we have only been logging usernames of those of you logged in to our site. This adds a lot of personality to the visitor reports. But a lot of you log a lot more types of data such as shopping cart information, account status, things like that. I've been wanting to add summary reports for this custom data for quite a while, not only for you, but also because there were other types of data we were interested in seeing about who is using our service on a day to day basis. There wasn't much point though since there was no way to see a summary of it. But now there is!
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Cookies and you: an update
The EU cookie law goes into effect May 26. This is a great law because finally, all privacy issues will be permanently eradicated from the internet.
If there was ever an example of politicians really "getting" the internet, it would be this. The law requires that you list on your web site all of the cookies that get set by your web site, and the purpose of each cookie. Not even session cookies, or Javascript cookies that are never sent anywhere but simply used as boolean "flags", are exempt; and this makes sense, because cookies of this nature are infamous in hacker circles for their unparalleled ability to steal your credit card, read your email, and sleep with your wife. The law also requires you to get "opt in" permission from a visitor before any cookies can be set. Redirecting every visitor to a page with this information and the ability to opt in to cookies is a great solution, because every additional step between a visitor and a conversion increases revenue by 10x, according to a study from AreYouFreakingKiddingMe, LLC.
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Android widget beta
We're releasing a beta of our Android widget today. It should work on any phone running Android 2.0 or higher.
There are three widgets to choose from, depending on your needs. You can setup one or more widgets for every site in your account. The widgets are very battery friendly, even when set to pull every 5 minutes. I've been testing it for several months now with very aggressive settings and it's had zero impact on my battery life.