We don't often write about other sites, but this month on Elite by Design, there's a series of interviews that are simply too good to miss. So to ensure you check them out - we thought we'd dedicate a post to them.

There's a massive collection of interviews from some of the greatest, more influential designers in our industry right now including:

Elliot Jay Stocks
Adelle Charles
Jonathan Snook
Jon Hicks
Fabio Sasso

and over 50 more awesome designers.

Some of my favourites so far are the interview with Fabio for his advice on how to establish yourself as a designer, David Appleyard for letting us in on how he manages so many sites at once, and Jacob Gube for talking about his experience writing a book on Moo Tools while also managing the Six Revisions blog.

I don't think enough people realise how much effort has been put into organising so many interviews with so many inspiring members of the design community. It's like getting the top 50 music acts in the chart right now to perform live on your own radio station. Go visit Elite by Design and read a couple of these wonderful interviews - learn from their success stories and their mistakes and take all the free advice they're willing to share.

We launched LiveStats 2 on February 3rd and so far the response has been fantastic. We're thrilled with your feedback and you'll be pleased to know we're continuing to dramatically develop LiveStats with its new stronger foundations.

With LiveStats 2.1 we've refined some of the new interface features that were introduced in version 2 such as linking to Map View from a row in List View. Also, you can now double click any row to expand it - no need to click on the arrow at the left if that was bugging you before!

New and Improved Map View

What we're most proud of in 2.1, though, is the dramatically improved Map View. Before, Map View was quite simple - we showed a world map at whatever size your browser window happened to be. Now you can zoom in and out, and pan around just like you'd expect from a decent mapping application. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to pan, or click and drag. Zooming can be controlled by the lovely slider in the top left of the screen, by scrolling with your mouse, by double clicking on any location, or with the "-" and "+" keys - interact however you want!

As with anything new - there may still be a few bugs that we haven't worked out yet. With the complexity of showing real-time visitors to your Site on an interactive map, there'll likely be plenty for you to pick us up on. Just drop us a line and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Also new in Map View in 2.1 is the ability to toggle the daylight line. LiveStats is still the only real-time analytics app to show which of your visitors are browsing in the day or night via a beautiful map view.

Support Documentation

Finally! A Help Centre for LiveStats! We've been working on building up a few pages to help you get to grips with integrating LiveStats on your Site, and educating everyone on some of the hidden little features that make LiveStats better in every day use. We should have had these ready from day one, but there's only so much that can be done in a day. Please feel free to have a good read, and ask us any questions you may still be having or to request an article on anything you're struggling with.

LiveStats 2 introduced an array of new features:

Map View

At the tap of a button, switch between a condensed List View showing every visitor on your Site in tabular form, to expanded List View with more information and icons for each visitor's referrer, to a beautiful, fully live Map View showing each visitor's location to city-level accuracy.

Event Tracking

Building a web application? Using some nifty javascript in your company site? Just because it's on the same page it doesn't mean it can't be tracked. Integrate LiveStats Custom Events with your site to see more than just pageviews.

Advanced Real-Time

Real-time traffic monitoring like you've never seen it before. LiveStats constantly checks to see whether a visitor still has a page open, knows exactly when they leave, and can even tell if they've opened several pages in different tabs or windows

Custom Name Integration

By default, every visitor to your Site has a unique ID. You can double click any unique ID to assign a name to that user. If you have a database of users for your Site or web app you can automatically show their username when they visit.

Key Strokes

The minimal interface of LiveStats belies it's power. By using some of the keyboard shortcuts we've added to LiveStats 2, you'll be able to zip around the interface with barely any need for a mouse whatsoever. Try hitting "M" for Map View, or expanding and collapsing List View with "X" and "C". You'll zip around when you know them all.

And a Load More

The new foundations of LiveStats 2 allow us to build some great new features in the future that would have been impossible on version 1. Using LiveStats with OS X is a pleasure - with full Fluid and Growl integration LiveStats feels like it's a native app. LiveStats 2 can now be used as an integral addition to your arsenal for usability testing, as well as a comprehensive real-time component for traffic analysis.

Thanks for being awesome,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

LiveStats 2 is here.

We're thrilled today to announce the all new LiveStats 2 - real-time analytics completely rebuilt from the ground up for faster performance, more accurate results, and a more powerful interface.

Here's the press release we sent out this morning:

LiveStats 2 pushes the innovations made in the first version to the next level. This update introduces second-by-second live monitoring of all visitors so there’s no guess work left in discovering whether people are on your Site, actively reading your content, or just have it open in the background.

By monitoring your Site’s traffic in absolute real-time, LiveStats can detect whether a visitor is actively focused on any page on your Site, and whether they have more than one page of your Site open at the same time in separate tabs and windows. You can even see which of the pages the visitor is looking at, gaining an insight into their habits by watching as they jump from page to page in real-time. No other analytics package, real-time or otherwise, offers the ability to view a user as they travel through your Site like this. The experience puts you in the observation tower, while enabling you to observe details that would otherwise only have been achievable by looking over a visitor’s shoulder.

Understanding where your visitors are coming from is easier than ever with the new Map View. As soon as a visitor loads a page on your Site, LiveStats will pinpoint their location to city level accuracy on a beautiful full screen map. We’ve even built in a dynamic daylight line so you can see how your visitors browse your Site at different times of the day in different regions.

The interface of LiveStats is built entirely in open web technologies. We’ve embraced jQuery and Raphaël javascript libraries to build a user experience that many have assumed was Flash based. The simplicity and ease of use of the LiveStats interface completely belies the power and information that can be gained from it.

We believe LiveStats is the best way to find out what’s happening and who’s on your Site right now.

LiveStats is available to everyone and does not require a download. You can sign up for a basic plan to try out the service for free. Premium plans that offer some of the great features of LiveStats 2 such as Map View and Event Tracking start at just $5.99 per month. The ideal plan for most small to medium sized website owners is available for $9.99 per month while there is a professional plan for larger websites and corporate clients for $49.99. These are aggressively priced plans for a service that outclasses our rivals in the real-time analytics market.

As a note to you, our wonderful existing members who have enjoyed LiveStats for free up until now - we will not automatically start charging you. All existing Accounts will remain free for the next 30 days on an unlimited plan, but at the end of these 30 days, if you haven't upgraded to a paid plan, all Sites in your Account will automatically be downgraded to the free LiveStats plan that tracks 5,000 pageviews per month. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time and there are no nasty contracts.

We'll write again this week to explain in more detail how LiveStats 2 is a giant leap forward from version 1. We're really proud of how far we've come, and we believe that this latest release pushes us even further ahead in the real-time web analytics industry.

Enjoy.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team

The time has come to introduce the next major version of LiveStats. LiveStats is a web app that enables you to monitor your Site's traffic in real-time.

Since we launched LiveStats just 3 months ago, we've received an absolutely fantastic response with almost entirely positive feedback. We couldn't be more thrilled with your reactions. Over 1,000 Sites have signed up to LiveStats since launch ranging from small personal portfolio sites, up to the corporate sites of some huge institutions and companies. With the most recent updates we're confident we can push forward and develop LiveStats knowing we can serve every Site real-time traffic stats all the time.

We've said from the start that we won't be able to keep LiveStats free forever. On Wednesday, we'll be introducing some very affordable payment plans for the service. Purchasing a LiveStats plan will enable us to continue pioneering the real-time analytics market, and in return gain some extremely high end features from day one that aren't available with any other service.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to begin putting together a list of supported and unsupported services that LiveStats runs on.

List of Supported Services

• Any Self Hosted Site
• Tumblr
• Wordpress
• Squarespace

If you know of or are responsible for any services that can benefit from LiveStats (most services can), please contact us so that we can update our list of supported services.

Services we Cannot Currently Support

The following services do not allow you to embed custom javascript so cannot take advantage of LiveStats real-time traffic monitoring.

• Posterous blogs
• Facebook pages
• Twitter pages

We really can't wait to share more information about LiveStats 2. See you Wednesday.

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team.

It seems pretty clear that the future of Apple (and general human interaction with computers) is touch based.

Apple's responsible for kickstarting the touch screen revolution with the iPhone, so why would they do anything other than push themselves as far as possible along the trajectory they've already begun? When you consider the possibility of Apple building a device that not only sits alongside your iPhone, but replaces your MacBook, the game changes. Whatever Apple's tablet finally shows up as, I'm pretty sure it'll be more "this is the end of keyboard and mouse computing as we know it" than "oh it's a big iPhone".

Many people seem to assume that the keyboard and mouse are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and one of the main reasons they cite is that you can gain pixel level accuracy with a mouse and cursor. The tablet, if it becomes the MacBook replacement many have suggested, will not rely on finger input alone. Sure you'll never need anything more than your fingers (on both hands) to use the device, but I think there are a number of scenarios where using a pen or stylus (or whatever you want to call it) could be incredibly useful.

The Tablet is to Production what the iPhone is to Consumption.

Artists may not be the core target audience for the Tablet (or at least that's what I thought until seeing the invite), but when you consider how many creatives purchase Wacom graphics tablets, and that Wacom can can be the size of company it is through selling graphics tablets alone, this market segment is not insignificant. Perhaps my opinions are swayed being the graphic designer I am, but having a 10" Tablet that I could draw directly on with a beautiful aluminium pen would make my life considerably better - I could save a fortune on Moleskines.

With regards to text input, I don't think I should even begin to pretend I have worked out what Apple has decided upon. After 4-10 years of development time, text input on the Tablet could be a completely new concept, or (more likely) a very smart implementation of text input that we're already at least slightly familiar with. My guess is that we will see handwriting recognition in some form, and if so, likely not see an onscreen keyboard. Just as Apple encouraged the use of the mouse over the keyboard with the first Mac, whatever they perceive as the best method of text input, we will likely end up being forced to use.

As many have already pointed out, text entry on a 10 inch display is not the same as text entry on an iPhone-size display. The iPhone is designed to be used with one hand free, and only rarely requires both hands for efficient use. The Tablet will likely require both hands for operation at most times - one to hold and one to touch the screen when in portrait mode.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we announce the second instalment in our series of GoSquared updates. This update has been in development since November and marks out a key milestone for LiveStats in terms of the service's under-the-hood architecture. LiveStats 1.2 introduces a completely re-written and re-structured tracking backend, geared up for blazing performance, lower latency, more accurate statistics and greater app stability. In short, the LiveStats 1.2 update launches us into the freedom of unlimited scalability, enabling us to take full advantage of the expansive power of the Cloud. Although there are no notable front-end improvements to the UI, the update allows us to scale our hardware horizontally and provide you with an even better service.

When LiveStats was experimentally released back in late October, we didn't have a great idea about how the app would perform under high load. However, thanks to a surge of sites implementing the service, we weren't in the dark for very long; we quickly discovered that the system in its initial incarnation was unable to cope with the load it was being subjected to. LiveStats 1.0 was hideously unoptimised, and was completely dependant on a sluggish database which was unable to scale to a high level of writes.

Something needed to be done quickly to tune the performance of the system so that it could hold for long enough while we worked on a different approach to the tracking architecture. James detailed these modifications in his post LiveStats - One Week On and that was the system we had been operating since... until now. So, what's changed?

Server layout

Previously, the system was bound to a single server running a single, slow and unoptimised MySQL database. Now it has been liberated by a horizontally scalable design in which any number of new servers running our custom AMI can be manually or automatically booted up as LiveStats "nodes" when other nodes approach their load limits. We developed our own internal API which empowers all of our servers to collaborate with each other in a conglomerated stack. Using this API, Sites are allocated to specific nodes depending on their size and resource utilization of each node, so resource constraints can be easily avoided, leaving LiveStats functioning quickly and reliably. In addition to this, we have moved our DNS hosting to UltraDNS for super low-latency, high availability DNS query resolution for all of our services, and also thanks to their API, granting our systems with the ability to dynamically assign subdomains to our server nodes.

Software

A major objective for the 1.2 rewrite was to completely eliminate reliance on the MySQL database. Data collected by LiveStats is currently not persistent anyway (apart from custom naming, more on that later) so there was no need for the use of a MySQL database when there are far more suitable tools available, like memcached. LiveStats 1.1 introduced partial memcached support which, along with closing the service as invite-only, relieved a considerable amount of load, allowing the system to just about hold out for this long despite still being database-bound. With LiveStats 1.2, each node operates its own native memcached instance with access to a large amount of memory, in which the real-time statistical data is temporarily stored. This way data is not delayed by arbitrary disc I/O caused by MySQL, and instead resides in memory which is extremely fast to access.

Persistent Data

For certain features like custom naming of visitors, persistent data is required. Memcached however is not a database, and a database of some sort is usually the best way to go for persistent data. While we haven't yet committed to a particular solution, we've been researching into a relatively immature technology: Key/Value databases, like Redis, Project Voldemort (used at LinkedIn) and Cassandra which is in production use at Digg and Rackspace. Currently we're using a simple implementation of Redis for custom names, although this is subject to change in the future once we take a closer look at persistent data.

Code

All of our backend code has been redesigned from the ground up to take full advantage of these changes in our system architecture. The way we handle our data has completely changed, and has been fully optimised with performance in mind. As such, we hope you'll find the requests in the LiveStats app load at consistent intervals with fewer delays. Furthermore, accuracy of the data has increased. In LiveStats 1.0 and 1.1, due to the database architecture and data propagation across databases, some hits would occasionally be dropped, or sometimes null or "ghost" hits would show up where incomplete information has been received. These problems have been eliminated and LiveStats now displays a very accurate reflection of who's visited and where.

Now that our capacity has increased, we will soon be distributing more invites more regularly. If you want one, ask us on support or twitter, it's likely you'll get one! As always, new software isn't perfect and there are likely to be bugs, so if you encounter problems, get in contact and we'll look into it.

Finally, just a quick mention of LiveStats 2; it is under development and introduces some really intuitive new features that we know you're going to love! More on this soon.

From all of us at GoSquared, we wish you all the best this year and we hope you enjoy LiveStats!

Geoff Wagstaff, James Gill, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team.

Welcome back to GoSquared - it's an exiting new year and we're pleased to kick it off with a small but helpful new addition to the GoSquared app line up: Site Manager.

Since we launched LiveStats we've had loads of great feedback from you wonderful members, but some of the same requests kept coming up: you wanted to be able to add and remove Sites in your Account easier and to be able to access and change the details associated with them without having to laboriously email us and complain about it.

With Site Manager, we've solved some of these common problems with a fairly sleek and simple to use solution. All of the Sites associated with your Account show up in the sidebar on the left, and you can see their details at a glance by simply clicking on each Site's Preview Image. You can change the name, description, and URL of your Site, and update the Preview Image in a handful of clicks. Your site's GSTC code is also available on the "Tracking code" tab, should you need remind yourself of what it is or how to embed it in your Site's pages.

A new feature we're introducing with this update is the ability for you to invite your friends to GoSquared. Many of you are using LiveStats within organisations (both big and small) and have asked if multiple people can view LiveStats for the same Site on different computers with different accounts. Now you can! Simply invite anyone you know by entering their email and you can share LiveStats for any Site in your Account with as many people as you wish. We really think people in teams working and developing on the same Site are going to love this - whether you're at the home or the office you'll be able to see who's on any of your Sites with LiveStats.

If you're signed in to your GoSquared Account, check out Site Manager here.

That's all for now folks, we hope you like it.

Peace,

James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
A.K.A. The GoSquared Team.

Our elevator pitch with Hermione Way of Techfluff.

What a way to kick off 2010 - our first video appearance on YouTube.

Check out LiveStats if you haven't already, we hope you like it.

Another little pre-Christmas treat from us at GoSquared - the iMac in all it's glory, in vector form.
Read the rest of this entry »

If like us you've been noticing decreased SSH terminal responsiveness on your server recently, or high CPU usage by a process called "mingetty", you'll want to know why this process is eating up your valuable CPU time and stop it doing so!

Read the rest of this entry »