Observer Blog

Events & other new features

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:04:14 -0400

Today we’re releasing the latest feature, Events. Events lets you track your own arbitrary, well, events, on your sites.

Currently we are showing increments per day, but we plan to let you drill down to view per hour & other interesting data very soon.

Events are currently only available through the JS api, and you can run it on any page which you have already run Observerapp.record('my-site-id') on:

Observerapp.incrementEvent('my-event-id');

or, if you haven’t recorded the visit on that particular page, first set your site ID:

Observerapp.setSiteID('my-site-id');
Observerapp.incrementEvent('my-event-id');

This has been our most requested feature to date, and while it’s still a bit rough around the edges, we think it’s better to deploy it today so we can get some feedback & quickly iterate.

Ignoring your own visits

You can now ignore your own visits on all sites that you have access to. Simply check the “Ignore my visits” checkbox in your Settings and your visits to your sites will now be ignored by Observer.

Updated recording snippet

We recently updated the recording snippet with better error handling. While updating is not required, we do recommend doing so!

Beta Phase 2

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 09:38:08 -0400

Within the next 24-72 hours, all traffic will be moved onto our new & completely rewritten back-end architecture. This will let us implement a lot of requested features and also let a lot more users into the beta.

New features

In general, Observer is now much more detailed and flexible. You can now view past data per hour, day, and week.

A lot more data is also now available in the system, but haven’t yet made its way into the client, such as:

Searches & Referrers now keep track of multiple entry points.
Locations now track cities as well as countries.

Speed

All requests to the server are 30-50% faster, which is an incredible improvement and will definitely make everything feel a lot snappier.

The client has also seen some great optimizations. Re-thinking the way certain tasks are done and really working on making everything feel so much faster.

Scale

The amount of people that want to try out Observer has completely caught me off guard, and I’m incredibly happy to see so many people interested.

This new architecture will let me invite a lot more users, and I will start sending out a few hundred more invites in the next few days as the system settles in to its new home.

Data migration

Only user accounts & sites will be migrated to the new beta phase.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I’m not spending the time migrating all the old visits data, and the reasons for this are quite simple.

I’m a sole developer, and my time is limited. This initial phase of the beta has proven to be immensely valuable, and has really shown where our pain points are and what needs to be improved in order to take on many, many more users.

The current beta testers that I’ve asked about this really feel that I should rather spend my time working on improving the current system and working on features rather than porting the old data to the new system.

Being a beta, there are no guarantees until we launch.

Going forward

I would like to thank all of our wonderful beta testers for their contributions. I really wouldn’t have been able to come this far without you.

Thanks, and here’s to another great phase of Observer.

Hello World

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:38:00 -0400

Welcome to the brand spankin’ new Observer product & development blog!

This is way overdue, but between various real life events and work on a major update to Observer, creating this blog has been pushed back over and over again, but finally, it’s here.

Watch this space for various posts & announcements about Observer.