We feel we owe you an explanation and apology for the downtime of GoSquared yesterday (11th November.)
Note: Some techy stuff right here so if you're not too bothered about the ins and outs of domain name servers you may not care too much for this article.
Read the rest of this entry »
Today we're pleased to introduce the LiveStats Widget - the easiest way to share the number of people on your Site with everyone.
With this update to LiveStats we've also added a pane to get your GSTC (GoSquared Tracking Code) easily without having to email us and ask for it. Access the pane by clicking on the LiveStats Monitor - the area in the centre of the toolbar that shows you the total number of people on your Site. For help with any of the new features of LiveStats, and all the ones that already exist, check out GoSquared Support.
We also fixed an issue where Sites with a .info domain could not be added to LiveStats. Sorry about that.
We've worked on more performance improvements and we'll be letting more Sites in very soon. Those of you still waiting for your Sites to be enabled won't have to wait much longer we promise.
Wanna see what the LiveStats Widget looks like? Look no further:
What a week.
On Tuesday* last week, we finally released LiveStats into the wild - our web app for monitoring your Site's traffic in real-time.
Everything went exactly to plan until Thursday when our good friends at Smashing Magazine decided to tweet about us and the just launched LiveStats. We were really hoping to grow our user base after launch, but could never have imagined the response we would get from that one tweet - in under 10 minutes we received over 1,000 new visitors and in that hour almost 400 sign-ups.
400 signups to our blog wouldn't be too much of an issue, but those new 400 people wanted to add their Site to GoSquared and check out LiveStats for themselves. We thought we were prepared for increased load when we launched LiveStats, but we just didn't expect so many Sites, and so many Sites with such high traffic levels joining in such a short period of time.
Let's not forget that a substantial number of our 400-or-so new users also had more than one Site. You get the message - we were swamped.
There was no way we were going to let any of our lovely new members down, so we went about implementing an extremely long, and still growing, list of performance & reliability improvements:
Today we're pleased to announce the launch of LiveStats - a web app that lets you see the traffic on your Site in real-time.
Learn more about LiveStats now at http://www.gosquared.com/livestats/
LiveStats is a web app that lets you see who's browsing your Site right now. Without any plugins (like Flash or Silverlight) or any applications to download, LiveStats updates in real-time showing you who's browsing and which pages are being looked at.
It doesn't do graphs. It doesn't do trends. It doesn't do segmentation. It doesn't do event tracking. It tells you everything you need to know about who's on your Site - right now.
We're guessing you already use an analytics solution of some sort - many use Google's Analytics, or Mint by Shaun Inman. These are great for seeing how your traffic has been doing over a period of time in the past. LiveStats isn't meant to replace these tools, but work alongside them.
It turns out there aren't many tools that give you simple, useful information like the number of people viewing your site, and what pages they're browsing. LiveStats makes it really easy to get this information quickly - the number of people on your site right now is clearly displayed in the toolbar, and every visitor is represented by a row in the list below.
You can instantly scan the LiveStats interface and see which visitors have been browsing extensively and which have come and gone quickly. Click on a visitor's row to dive deeper into their browsing experience and see more information about them such as what browser they're running, which operating system they use, their screen size, the language they speak, and which country they're from.
For those of you who have been with GoSquared for a while, you'll also notice a completely rewritten interface. We started from the ground up to build a strong foundation for a new suite of web applications that will help you run a better website, and build a stronger business.
Thanks,
James Gill, Geoff Wagstaff, James Taylor
(a.k.a.) The GoSquared Team.
P.S. We haven't completely forgotten about advertising - we can't wait to tell you what we have planned for November.
A while ago we said we were working on some things.
On Tuesday 27 October we'll be launching LiveStats, a web app for monitoring your site's traffic in real-time. It's been in private beta testing for around a month and we've been improving it with feedback from a number of sites.
On Tuesday we'll be giving access to the first 100 people that apply. Just visit the GoSquared homepage on Tuesday to apply.
Thanks,
The GoSquared Team
Last week we attended Future of Web Apps London, a fantastic conference that the great guys at Carsonified put on every year for web developers to meet, chat, and learn about what's going on in their field.
We attended FOWA London in 2008, but this year we came only days away from missing out on all the fun when all attempts to get discounted passes failed. That is, until we took a look at the Media Temple blog and their "Are you a FOWA geek?" competition... And yes, we entered (after much persuasion from people already happily attending the conference).
After piling our desks with every last piece of tech equipment we had lying around our respective pads, taking a photo, and tweeting it to the world, all we could do was wait. Wait and hope no one judged us. Confidence grew as (other than Geoff and I) only two more entries had been posted - for 5 tickets. Things were looking promising! Saturday morning involved waking up to a DM from the guys at MediaTemple congratulating each of us on winning, followed by jumping up and down yelling WOOP WOOP WOOP. We'd done it!
The best thing? Other than not having to pay a penny, we won VIP Dinner tickets as well as conference passes!
MediaTemple hired out the vaulted cellars of the wonderful Gaucho restaurant in Piccadilly for an evening of chatting, wining and dining with the who's who of the web. We were lucky enough to be sharing a table with Kevin Rose (Digg), Britt Selvitelle (Twitter), CTO of Moo.com, and loads of others! Just incase you don't believe us, here's unflattering proof on Flickr.
The dinner was great - so great that we didn't back home 'till 2am. This made waking up at 6am on the Thursday somewhat challenging.
Up at 6am bright and early - that's dedication to web apps.
Don't even go there.
Unlike last year we managed to get there on time for the start of the conference, which we're very glad we did as Kevin's talk on "Taking your web app from 1 to 1 million users" had some useful tidbits of info for startups.
Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.
One of my favourite talks was from Francisco Tolmasky of 280 North on their upcoming awesome app for building beautiful interfaces in Cappuccino.
Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky from Carsonified on Vimeo.
The Guardian talk stood out for me in highlighting just how far ahead they are on the web compared to most other newspapers. The Guardian have been busy building a platform, sharing their information through open APIs to distribute it further and deeper than they could possibly achieve if acting alone.
Brit from Twitter made an awesome entrance by kneeling down to the audience and proclaiming "I LOVE WEB DEVELOPMENT" just before announcing Twitter Labs would be coming soon (which rapidly became RT'd by everyone in the audience).
We had a great time on Thursday evening meeting, dancing, and talking with some of the dudes and dudettes we met at FOWA in the day, introducing Kevin Rose to the finer points of Cockney Rhyming Slang, and learning that some of Digg's employees really don't know their way around London.
Gary V's talk on NOW being the time to get out there and start your web company was, for me, his most inspiring yet. No one else on the web manages to give me such motivation, such "why not" attitude to give everything I have to the business we run. If you haven't wateched or listened to a talk by Gary before, I beg of you to watch the one embedded below - you'll be glad you did.
Shortly after Gary's talk, the Gary and Kevin show commenced. Involving stage diving, butt flashing, geek dating, a Kanye interruption, and live Twitter commentary, the Gary and Kevin show put Live Diggnation to shame.
All in all, FOWA London this year was awesome. If you couldn't make it (for whatever reason), tickets are on sale for FOWA Miami right now.
P.S. Sorry the post a little delayed - we kinda came down with "FOWA Flu" shortly after returning which put us out of action for about a week. We're all better now and working full steam ahead on the next version of GoSquared. See you soon!
For a while I was forced to connect to FTP (an installation of VSFTP) on our EC2 server using Active mode, because passive mode refused to work. While this is OK for FTP clients that can be configured to use active mode, other utilities such as screen capture (e.g. Jing) and the wordpress auto-upgrade could not work with active mode, causing all sorts of erroneous malarky.
If you're getting errors such as "227 entering passive mode... Connection [Failed/Timed out]" this may work for you
We're attending Future of Web Apps London again this year. We've been working solidly for the last few weeks to get some cool things ready for the event. We've mentioned it before, but the next version of GoSquared is just around the corner. This time we're going all out to ensure advertising with GoSquared means business.
The new stuff is really beginning to take shape and we can't wait to show it to you. If you're attending FOWA, don't hesitate to get in touch so we can meet up, we'll show you what we've got so far if you want.
A lot's been happening around here, and we've even gone and made some t shirts to celebrate. Geoff and I will be wearing them at FOWA if you wanna check 'em out 
If anyone's keen, we may get a few more printed - just get in touch if you're interested.
Oh and we hope you like the business cards. Thanks for stopping by and see you tomorrow if you're at FOWA!
We've shown you how to make pie with Adobe's vector drawing application, but how about those times when you need to give someone a cake?
Let's start with a new document (obviously) - choose web if that's what you're planning to use the final image to your site as this will ensure all measurements are in pixels and colours are set in RGB. The canvas size doesn't matter too much either, but 800x600 makes sense in this scenario.
To start the basic shape, use the Ellipse Tool (L) to draw a stretched circle with vaguely the same dimensions as those in the image. Make a couple of copies of this, and drag them off the canvas for now. Make another copy by Alt dragging the circle directly below by about 150 pixels. Also hold down Shift while dragging to keep the duplicate copy of the shape aligned to the original.
So Apple's Media Event (on the memorable date of 09.09.09) is done and dusted, the new iPods are on the shelves of every Apple Store you care to visit, and iTunes 9 is most likely sitting on millions of people's desktops.
But what's changed? I'm pleased to say quite a few things, in varying degrees of magnitude. Most of the changes to the iTunes app itself are subtle, but could be good indicators of where Apple's UI intentions are heading. Then there's the iTunes Store which has seen its biggest overhaul yet. There's no shortage of design tweaks to have a look at and learn from.
