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.

Your chance to earn money from GoSquared has arrived. Today we announce the release of our Affiliate program, which enables you to earn cash from promoting LiveStats to your audience. Upon referral of a paying customer, you'll receive a cut of up to 50% of the amount paid.

If you're already a member of GoSquared, you're already set up to start earning money. If not, sign up now and you'll be ready to start earning in under 60 seconds. On the Affiliates Dashboard, you're given a unique affiliate URL and a selection of banners we've carefully designed for you to use on your web pages to promote LiveStats to your audience. Every time someone purchases a LiveStats plan, you'll receive a tasty slice of the pie.

We've been busy

We've been working hard behind the scenes for the past few months, making countless improvements and feature additions to the underlying infrastructure of our system. Our improvements to infrastructure have been largely focused around increasing performance and developing a more scalable platform to build upon. The front-end changes have been subtle, but we're starting to roll out better navigation within GoSquared Account screens and between GoSquared apps such as LiveStats and Site Manager.

Map View for the Masses

Until now, Map View was only available to Standard and Pro users. Starting today, all LiveStats users will be able to experience the power of LiveStats' real-time geolocation panel first hand. Observe exactly where your visitors are browsing from, in the context of time of day, by navigating the beautiful interactive world map.

Dramatically Improved Performance

In our minds, performance is the key. That's why we always design our applications and the engines powering them with performance as a top priority. Recently we've made a bunch of tweaks under the hood to make LiveStats more streamlined. Now you can enjoy faster loading times as the LiveStats loading bar slices swiftly across your screen when the application starts up.

New and Improved Signup Process

We've redesigned the way new users get started with LiveStats. Implementing that tracking code can be a tricky business, so we do our best to guide them through the process in a clear and concise way when they first run the application. First impressions are the most important.

Check out the sign up and welcome process for yourself - sign up for LiveStats now.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 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.

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.

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.