Help test the new Clicky beta

September 16, 2010

The last month we have been doing nothing but working on a massive overhaul of our entire web site. The goal was to make it faster, easier to navigate, and feel like a true web "application".

Check it out at beta.getclicky.com (but please read the rest of this post too!)

What's new?

• Every page loads via Ajax, including form submissions, which makes everything load lightning fast. (Except for IE — sorry, but this browser just has too many problems).
• All navigation is now in a sidebar that changes depending on context. When you're viewing reports, it just contains your report options. (Click the Clicky logo to get back to your user homepage). Every other part of the site will show a different menu instead.
• If your screen is at least ~800 px tall, the sidebar is in a "fixed" position so as you scroll up/down the screen, it's always there.
• The sidebar helps us get important data as high up on the page as possible. For example when viewing reports, there used to be around 200 pixels of vertical space before the data you wanted was displayed. Now it's about 20 pixels.
• When viewing reports, there are a few figures that are always at the top of every page (visitors online now, and total visitors and actions today). The visitor/action tallies have a sparkline graph next to them as well. These automatically update once per minute.
• Lots of other stuff (I'm a bit pressed for time right now)

This has been tested extensively with all modern browsers — Firefox 3.6, Chrome 6.0, Opera 10.5, Safari 5, and IE7. We haven't tested with older versions of these browsers (or newer, in the case of Firefox 4 (in beta), and IE8/9). So we want to play around with this extensively and report on any bugs here, especially with browsers that we haven't tested.

This is not complete by any means, but we hope to have it released within the next week or two. There's still some ideas we have brewing, and there are some known bugs:

Known bugs/issues that will be fixed

• This is slightly wider than 1024, which is the standard. Thankfully, only around 7% of our users have a screen that's 1024 or less pixels wide. But we will be adding support for 1024, don't worry. Either the sidebar will automatically hide, or we'll just move the tabs back to the top for these users.
• The site may seem kind of slow on your first few page views, but that's because none of these files are on our CDN yet. That will change when this is released officially!
• When viewing "Spy", the visitors online figure doesn't necessarily match the global one at the top. The global one also updates slower. We'll be fixing this so when you view Spy, it will update both figures instead of just the one "inside" Spy.
• The graphs at the top don't show up for MSIE yet
• MSIE also has a few problems with some of the drop down menus that are loaded into the page via ajax
• In some browsers, the "saved filters" drop down menu doesn't work right
• The "filter results…" form at the top of any "popular data" report doesn't work
• When you click on sidebar menu, the item you click is automatically highlighted. If you click "back" in your browser, that item remained highlighted.
• The /user/ pages will probably get their own sidebar menu
• If you're a white label user, there is some new and some changed CSS in here. We'll be giving you a 1-month window to create a new CSS file for the new interface, before the new interface goes live. Also, we'll be maintaining the "iframe=1" parameter, and when we see that we will automatically adjust to 1024 width, including probably putting the tabs back on top for the reporting interface.

Let us know what you think!