Need to see who's been on your website in the last day? Week? Month? Want to monitor your website's traffic without having to read a manual first? Want an elegant web analytics solution that updates in minutes rather than hours and works beautifully on all devices? Maybe you should check out Trends.

Since we first launched LiveStats, our web app for monitoring your website's traffic in real-time, we've been determined to figure out how to store historical data at a large scale. Due to the number of sites we serve, and the speed at which we store data for quick retrieval, it's been a huge challenge but we've finally figured it out.

What is Trends?

Trends is a web app for monitoring your website's historical traffic data. All the information you need is easily readable and quickly scannable with bold graphs and readable lists. There's a separate Widget for every metric (like referrers, visitors or top content), making it easy for the whole team to know what's been popular and what's not on your website.

Open Standards

There's not an ounce of Flash in Trends, or any of GoSquared. We're really proud of the graphing engine behind Trends. Because we haven't used Flash, graphs in Trends display just as well on your desktop as it does on your iPhone or iPad. These are the best charts in a web-based analytics service anywhere on the web.

Customisable Interface

The interface of Trends consists of a series of beautiful, easy-to-use Widgets. You can set up every Widget just as you want - choose the time frame for your stats, whether you want to look at a graph, pie chart, bar chart, or just the figures, and even move the Widgets around. Trends will change to suit you. The whole interface will stay the way you set it when you return - every Widget, every state, every time frame will be remembered so you can jump back in where you left off.

Part of GoSquared

As we wrote recently, Trends may be a separate app, but when you sign up to GoSquared you get both LiveStats and Trends as part of the package. You can sign up for GoSquared for free, or if you need more pageviews there's a series of affordable premium plans starting at just $9.99/month.

Check out the Plans and Pricing now - every plan has a 30 day free trial, and you can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time.

Enjoy!

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

We quietly launched a new web app into beta a few weeks ago called Trends. Trends enables you to monitor your website's trending traffic data from a single dashboard, with a separate widget containing graphs, charts, and tables for every metric that matters.

We've had some great feedback on Trends, and have continued to improve the app over the past weeks while people have been trying it out. Trends works great with LiveStats - which shows you what's happening on your website right now. LiveStats shows every visitor browsing your site, what pages they're on, which referrers have sent them to your site, and how long they're spending on each page, all in real-time.

What's New?

The price. Until now, we've been charging for LiveStats as a web app on its own. Now for the same price, we're giving you a whole new app - Trends, with incredibly accurate data recording, an intuitive and beautiful interface, and redundant data backups.

New Plans

We've also made a few changes to the individual Plans we offer. We've improved every Plan in a multitude of ways including the number of pageviews, and the number of features. Now every Plan comes with unlimited team sharing, SSL page tracking, Event tracking, and Map View with Geolocation monitoring.

We will continue to offer a free plan, and we've doubled the number of pageviews to 10,000 pageviews/month. We've also integrated a single, unobtrusive ad placement on the free plan. We're working with BuySellAds to ensure the ads shown in GoSquared's apps are consistently high quality and have as little impact on your experience as possible.

Already added a website to GoSquared and want to upgrade its Plan? Sign in and head to the Site Manager.

We hope you like the changes we're making at GoSquared. If you have any suggestions or feedback we'd love to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, or via email.

Here's some stuff we've been saying on Twitter, some of our favourite links, and some nice things people have been saying about us.

Don't design for early adopters - brilliant piece by @chockenberry: http://bit.ly/cCSbkq

Apple seems to be as leaky as a sinking ship right now - at this rate we'll be able to write Steve's WWDC keynote for him.

Seth Godin at his best - The last 10%, that's what people pay for: http://bit.ly/d9wFia

When the question being asked is "Windows XP or 7" you know Microsoft screwed up horribly somewhere in between. (via @mattpat)

Facebook redesigns privacy centre: http://bit.ly/diyz2p

Another beautiful site using #LiveStats: http://thebrandingfarm.com/ Welcome on board @thebrandingfarm!

MobileMe Mail Beta, a Visual Walkthrough by @spiralstairs - beautiful: http://bit.ly/c1FHYs

It's reassuring to see that even Steve Jobs has to deal with these kinds of email rants: http://bit.ly/cC9Zzn (via @sophiestication)

Loving how this modern software company have integrated Twitter into their sexy website: http://bit.ly/cJ3kuD (via @leigh & @Si)

New on Smashing - CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 Help Cheat Sheets (PDF): http://bit.ly/bA7Sx6 (That's us! Thanks again @smashingmag)

"http://www.gosquared.com/ #canofawesome" - thanks so much @th3hamburgler!

An absolute abundance of quality, free vectors for download on @lovevectorfree: http://www.lovevectorfree.com/

Developing with #Wordpress? Get this awesome Help Sheet-as-a-wallpaper by @quicklycode: http://bit.ly/ax6Crw

Really liking the Lobster font by @pabloimpallari: http://www.impallari.com/lobster/

Beautiful piece of writing by @zeldman: http://www.zeldman.com/2010/05/11/life-is-beautiful

Follow us

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@JamesJGill
@TheDeveloper
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We're pleased to announce the release of the LiveStats for WordPress plugin for WordPress blogs.

WordPress site owners can install this plugin to easily implement the GoSquared Tracking Code required to use our traffic monitoring apps. The plugin is available from the WordPress Plugin Directory and future updates will also be made available there.

Note: If you've already integrated the GSTC into your WordPress theme's template files, you should remove it before installing the LiveStats for WordPress plugin.

Due to the nature of the web apps we build, we're constantly working with time-related logic, and have built up a small collection of functions to help ease the pain with these calculations. This particular function is useful for breaking down a unit of time, represented in seconds, into its constituent days:hours:minutes:seconds, the former two of which are omitted if not applicable.

Read the rest of this entry »

We're pleased to bring you the 3rd version of the GoSquared CSS Help Sheet, and a brand new CSS3 Help Sheet.

With the VI Help Sheet we released last week, we redesigned our Help Sheets for a much better result when printed on paper, while ensuring they still don't look too shabby on the screen of your Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad.

We've put together a Help Sheet specifically for CSS3. We've covered most of the basic options now possible with CSS3, but there's a ton more we couldn't fit in, so we've linked to a couple of handy articles such as this post by 456 Berea Street on CSS Selectors, and this piece by Paul Irish on Font-Face.

So what are you waiting for? Download them. Print them. Stick 'em on the wall and get creative!

New to GoSquared?

For those of you new to GoSquared - we design and engineer web applications for site owners to monitor their traffic and earn more money from their Site. We run Liquidicity, the blog on design & technology to share our thoughts and content with wonderful people like you in the hope that one day you'll use our products.

As always, if you find any errors or typos or anything like that, please drop us a note in the comments.

Get the CSS2 Help Sheet PDF (230KB)

Get the CSS3 Help Sheet PDF (221KB)

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We're really pleased to bring you another Help Sheet. Introducing the VI Help Sheet for all you Linux loving developers out there.

It's been a while since we released our set of web development Help Sheets for PHP, HTML and CSS, so we thought it was time to release another. This one should keep a lot of developers happily coding away into the early hours of the morning.

So what are you waiting for? Download it. Print it. Stick it on the wall and get commanding.

As always, if you find any errors or typos or anything like that, please drop us a note in the comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we're incredibly excited to announce an entirely new product from GoSquared - FutureStats.

We've been working on our second app for many many months, and we think you're gonna love the features we've been sweating over. FutureStats is the ideal companion to anyone already using LiveStats.

Spike Prediction

One of the most challenging issues of the web 2.0 era - the traffic spike. Until now it's been impossible to predict when you're going to receive your next flood of traffic from Digg, a Fireball, or Twitter. Worry no more.

Twitter Reaction Forecast

Worried that what you're writing will be controversial, poorly received, or simply just ignored? Find out in advance how the Twitterverse will react to your Site's content, even if you haven't written it yet.

Member Prediction

Accurately predict the number of new users you'll receive tomorrow, next week, or next month. Even find out their names and emails before they ever signed up. All you need is FutureStats.

PredictionEngine

Patent Pending technology to predict the future of your Site's Stats with 100% Accuracy.

As you may know, dividing by zero can have dangerous, dramatic, and undesirable effects. Don't believe us? Go and try it out, but don't write to us if your computer explodes and destroys your entire neighbourhood). At GoSquared we discovered that if we divided by zero under specially controlled conditions, we could create a small but effective wormhole in the fabric of time and space. By maintaining this wormhole in a high-energy plasma state we are able to pass electrical signals between here and any time in the future we wish. And by ensuring that the other end of the wormhole is continuously connected to a high-speed internet connection, we are able to retrieve browsing data for websites at any time in the future.

In order to cover our energy costs, however, we are not able to enter the product into a free beta to begin with*. From today we are introducing a basic plan (two weeks into the future) which starts at $50,000/month, scaling up to our unlimited plan (watch your browsing stats right up to the end of the universe), priced at just $1337bn**.

Update

This, in case you didn't pick up on it and were blown away by our sudden ability to predict the future, was an April Fools joke. We'll keep the page online, though, for the memories.

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