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Major tracking upgrade – sendBeacon(), etc!
Yesterday we pushed up a major update to how tracking works. The purpose of these changes is to make the code work even faster and smoother behind the scenes. 24 hours later, no sneaky issues have cropped up, so we're officially announcing it now.
We've migrated most tracking-related beacons to use navigator.sendBeacon instead of appending a [script] element to the HTML document. We've had our eyes on this for quite a while as its purpose is literally for making tracking faster and more reliable, but there's been very little discussion of it anywhere even though most browsers have officially supported it for years now. But earlier this year, Google announced "parallel tracking" for Google ads, which uses sendBeacon instead of redirects to track clicks on ads. Google relying on it for their revenue backbone was a sign that it was ready.
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Personal data management tools for GDPR requests
As promised, by May 25 we are releasing tools to help you find and then export or delete personal data requested by your end users.
We cleaned up the user homepage a bit as you can see below. If there's a new blog post within the last 30 days, the link/title is in the top right corner. This gives more room to the main links on the left, which are now in a single row instead of 2 rows. A bit easier on the eyes. And the link to manage personal data requests is in the "Your web sites" area. Couldn't come up with a good icon for it since we already had a "person" icon for the sub-users link, so we just used a turtle which we had lying around because hey it's cute.
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GD;PR
Hello there! It's been way too long!
As the May 25 deadline for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) approaches, we've been getting a lot of questions about it. So without further ado:
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Infrastructure upgrades and migrations
The last 6 months, we have been extraordinarily busy with a major infrastructure upgrade that will make Clicky much faster and more resilient. This is by far the most major backend upgrade in our (almost) 10 year history. A lot of planning and testing has gone into this and we're excited to finally be under way with the database aspect. Our load balancers have already been on the new infrastructure for a month now, and web and tracking servers will follow up after the databases are done.
The database maintenance in late April was in prep for this migration, to make it as fast as possible. This weekend we will be doing 8 database servers – 6, 22, 28, 29, and 59-62. And each weekend thereafter we plan to do at least 20 more. We have 85 total database servers at the moment so we should be done or at least very close to it by the end of June.
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HTTP/2, sticky table headers, tracking code fixes
No posts for a few months so I figured I'd group a couple of things into a single post.
Last summer we migrated to Nginx for load balancing and it's been fantastic. A few months later, Nginx released support for HTTP/2, which I've been salivating over ever since. We recently acquired some new servers that are much higher end than the ones we were using before. We migrated load balancing to these and took the opporunity to update Nginx to the latest and greatest while we were at it. This means we're now live on HTTP/2 across the board – our own load balancers, plus our CDN (Cloudflare).