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Clicky is a launch partner for CloudFlare Apps
We met the CloudFlare team while we were at TechCrunch Disrupt last September, and we think their product as well as their co-founders, Matthew and Michelle, are awesome! CloudFlare was runner up for best startup at the conference, and they've been growing leaps and bounds since then.
CloudFlare sits between your web site and the internet, making it faster by acting like a CDN for your entire site, and more secure by blocking evil bots and the like. The original article on TechCrunch summarizes what they do quite well. CloudFlare is completely free to sign up for. They have paid upgrades with additional features, but there aren't any limits on free accounts for things like how much traffic you have. So if you think your site is slow, we wholeheartedly recommend trying them out.
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The user experience and psychology of color [FIXED]
One of my most favorite articles ever written about Clicky is this one, which might seem entertaining at first glance, because it's basically ripping us a new one for a design decision I made almost 7 years ago (pre-Clicky) and that I have stuck with ever since. What decision is that? That whenever I want my software to give you any kind of feedback, whether good or bad, that it will be displayed in SKULL-MELTING BOLD RED.
Now of course, I know that people associate red with bad. For example, "You totally forgot to fill out a field! Nice going!". But I make web sites for a living, and while I consider my attention to detail to be off the charts, I have caught myself missing "messages" all the time that random web site X is trying to share with me, because the message doesn't BURN MY RETINA.
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HTTPS support for all of Clicky
Clicky has always had HTTPS support on the login and credit card pages (and of course for the tracking code on your site), but otherwise we weren't allowing it. You may be thinking we were trying to save on performance, but that's not the case — our load balancers have hardware HTTPS decoding so the penalty is negligible. No, the one major reason was because of Google.
The Google Maps javascript API that we were using (version 2) did not allow HTTPS without an enterprise account for the low low price of just $10,000/year. Including insecure items on a secure page isn't a big deal of course… unless you're an IE user, and 13% of our users are on IE. So it is in fact a big deal. We could always just exclude that feature for them, or only include it on the pages that require it, but those felt like cheap hacks. I wanted proper support for it.
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We're hiring
We're in the process of opening an actual office, and hiring a web developer or two to help step this bad boy up a level. This is going to take a ridiculous amount of our time so you're not going to see much excitement around here over the next month or two.
If you're an experienced web developer, proficient with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and you're looking for a full time job… view our listing here.
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Enforcing page view limits
We've been very lax about enforcing the page view limits of whatever account you have signed up for. For the most part this hasn't been a big deal, but as we continue to grow past 300,000 monitored sites and attract bigger customers to Clicky, it has become a serious problem.
When you go to the upgrade page, it won't let you sign up for a plan that doesn't have at least as many page views as you are currently logging on average. That's all well and good, but the problem typically occurs after the upgrade. Here are the two most common patterns that we see: