Clicky Web Analytics is growing fast. We are seeking an additional programmer to help us grow even faster. We are offering $36K yearly salary with health benefits, performance based incentives and the possibilty of a small equity stake.

Please send resume as plain text in email body (no attachments) to jobs at roxr dot net.

Requirements:
* You live in the Portland, Oregon area
* You have at least 3 years experience with PHP/MySQL
* You have designed a relational database and are familiar with index optimization
* You know Javascript, in particular jQuery and "Ajax"
* You know CSS and HTML inside and out, and you prefer to write them by hand because the thought of using a program such as Dreamweaver gives you nightmares
* You have basic Linux skills

Things that would make you head and shoulders above your competition:
* You are a Linux expert
* You have web analytics experience, as an end user or programmer
* You have built "widgets" on top of a third party API
* You have built computers from parts
* You have experience with high-load applications
* The terms apache.conf, my.cnf, and php.ini mean something to you
* You are decent with Photoshop or equivalent
* You have used some form of source control - CVS, Subversion, etc
* You strongly believe Mario Kart SNES is the best game in the Mario Kart franchise

The default dashboard now includes beautiful line graphing functionality, but if you've customized it at all, then you have to enable it manually. Go to your dashboard preferences (click the icon in your tab bar, then "dashboard" sub-tab) and check the box "For historical data, show line graphs instead of simple HTML bar graphs". Then you'll start seeing things like this:



Don't you just want to eat that because it looks so good?

(Please note: If this is not working on your computer, please email Sean a screenshot of what you see, along with the exact URL in your browser's location bar. I need to know what OS you are using and what browser (including the version), e.g. Windows IE 7, Mac Firefox 2, etc. Also please verify that you have Javascript enabled and at least Flash version 8 installed on your computer. Thanks!)

The date drop down menu lets you choose between last 30 days, 90 days, or 180 days, for whatever it is you are viewing. If you have a custom date range selected (globally speaking), then that option will be shown as well.

The "Compare..." menu is where things get a lot more interesting! Much like our visitor filtering feature allows you to compare two sub-sets of visitors side by side (example), this lets you compare two pieces of data as well. Except that they don't have to be directly related, although you might find that they are once you view the data. For example you could compare...

Searches for "Clicky" vs visitors from New York City
Hits to your homepage vs visitors using Internet Explorer
Visitors from social media sites vs bounce rate (Hint: strong correlation)

If you have the line graphs enabled, you can use them to view the historical data for ANY items on your dashboard, or any item in any of the other "popular data" pages, by clicking the trend percentage figure (the red or green percentage on the right hand side). I mention this because based on our own click tracking (with Clicky of course), not many people view the trend data for individual items, so I thought I'd mention it in case you didn't know how.

Full functionality of all of this is available to everyone through Sunday. After that time, the comparison feature will only be available to "Pro" members, just like the visitor comparison feature is. The date selection feature will only be available to premium members (any level), since free users don't have access to more than 30 days of data anyways. If you want to upgrade, the upgrade page is here.

Of all the requests we get, this has been in the top 5 for as long as I can remember. I'm so excited to have it in the product finally! I've always liked the simple HTML bar graphs we've had but I knew we needed something new. One of the problems is that I didn't really like any of the available options that I could find - either way too expensive, way too overused (fusioncharts), or just plain old crappy (but usually free). The other problem was that none of us at Clicky know Flash at all, so we were unable to develop our own solution. Then one day recently, someone sent in another email on this subject, but they included a reference to a product called Open Flash Chart. I checked it out and knew almost immediately that this was what we had been waiting for.

I'd like to conclude with some linky love to the developer of this software: Free flash graphs and charts! We're also considering paying him a large sum of money to make some customizations for us, because there's a few things I want to do that I just can't at the moment, one of them being there's no way to have different lines in the graph have unique tool tips. This problem is apparent when you select the "same item, previous period" option - the date shown for when you hover over the previous period line is the same as the current period, instead of 30, 60, or 180 days ago. I also think the tool tip shouldn't jump around quite as sporadically as it does when hovering over the values. But these are minor issues, so go enjoy the new features already!

It's new-feature-every-day week at Clicky, and today we have something that has been requested a number of times since we introduced the visitor organizations and hostnames. That feature request is to NOT show the organization or hostname in the visitor's list, but instead just show straight up IP addresses. Today, this feature makes its debut. It's off by default so you'll need to hit up your site preferences page if you want to turn it on.

But wait! Before you go and disable orgs and hostnames completely, read on! You see, we added another option that we think makes this feature a LOT more useful. You can now choose to only show the organization if we (Clicky) think it's NOT an ISP (keyword: think). That's been one of the biggest drawbacks of this feature, is that a lot of people are ID'd simply by their ISP, such as Comcast, Verizon, etc. That's useful in some ways but mostly not at all. This new option looks for certain keywords within the organization name and if found, will display the visitor's IP address instead. It's not perfect but works pretty good, and it REALLY helps to make "real" organizations stand out in your visitor's list.

Here's an example of what a big difference this can make. This is data from one of our own sites being tracked on Clicky:



You can change this preference from your site preferences page (click the "gear" icon in your site's tab bar, then click the "edit site" sub-tab).

Hmmm... what new feature will be making its debut tomorrow? Only time will tell!!

We got another new feature for you: "Visitors online now". The value is shown in "the basics" dashboard module. Since this is a live figure and doesn't/can't have history, it will only show up when you're looking at "today".



This can be accessed via the API by calling type visitors-online. traffic-sources has also been added to the API and is in the documentation as well. Here are sample results from our own stats:

Visitors online
Traffic sources

We added a new dashboard module today that breaks down your visitor count between up to 6 different sources. Picture says a thousand and all that so here you go:



This is something I've wanted to do for a long time but it had to wait for some other things to happen first, one of those being processing and storing links much more efficiently. Last week, basically the only thing I did was just that, and managed to shrink the amount of space we were using to store links and searches by 75%! The savings were so big because they weren't normalized at all.

Part of this new processing method is automatically categorizing sites based on their domain. It's not 100% accurate or complete but it does a pretty good job. For example, we decide a site is "advertising" if it has a sub-domain of "ad", "ads", "pagead" (google), including numberic versions (e.g. "ad2"). We decide a site is email if it has a sub-domain of "webmail", "email", "mail", or "mailcenter", again including support for numeric version of those. (This means unfortunately we can only detect this for people using web mail. Visitors coming from Outlook, Apple Mail, etc, don't send any referrer data so we can't know where they came from).

You'll also notice a "social media" number. This is for sites like digg, reddit, etc - we'll automatically filter those visitors out and categorize them seperately. Supported services are as follows: twitter, pownce, youtube, myspace, facebook, digg, reddit, netscape, sphinn, mixx, newsvine, sk-rt, shoutwire, stumbleupon, popurls, fark, metafilter, techmeme, ma.gnolia, flickr, yahoo buzz, del.icio.us, furl, and blinklist. Obviously we can't support EVERY site in this niche because there are thousands of them, but I think we got almost all the major ones. If anyone has suggestions for others, leave a comment.

Everyone has access to the daily figures shown on the dashboard. But premium members (any level - upgrade) get the added ability to click on these and filter down the visitors who fit into whatever category. For example here is a real popular site that uses Clicky, with the "social media" filter applied (note the filtering drop down menu is broken for this new feature, I'll get that fixed soon)



As you can see, the rumors are true - social media traffic really is a bit more hyped than it should be. 85% bounce rate! And this is a site that gets nearly 200K daily pageviews :)

Anyways, we think this is pretty cool. We just started tallying this data a few hours ago though so there is nothing prior to today, which is why the trend values are grey and clicking them doesn't show any history.

If you want to try out a demo of it, hit up the front page of Clicky and "try the demo" - we have this enabled on our stats. And by default, all new web sites will have this module in the top right corner. No existing sites were changed to add it in though, so if you want it, go edit your sites dashboard preferences! Although since it is part of the new default layout, if you haven't changed your layout at all, it will probably appear on your dashboard automatically.