We’ve noticed some odd things happening to some of our stats, and it’s been brought to our attention that some of you, our customers, are experiencing similar issues. The problem pertains to pages with Facebook’s “Like” button or any of their other social plugins.

Quietly duplicating requests.

Under certain circumstances, a page with a Like button can register one extra pageview for every button you have on the page. This is undesirable, because if you run a site with, say, ten like buttons on the homepage, you’ll see eleven pageviews for each and every time someone actually views the page, not one. Obviously this is going to completely throw off all your tracked stats and analytics. Not good.

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What’s this? A new GoSquared Help Sheet? Hell yeah!

We’re pleased to bring you a brand new GoSquared Help Sheet for your Node.JS needs.

What’s Node.JS?

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know, but for those intrigued, Node.JS is an evented I/O framework for the V8 JavaScript engine. It’s ideal for writing scalable network programs such as web servers.

We’ve been working on some exciting things with Node.JS, and we felt it was only fair to share our knowledge in the form of an easy-to-read Help Sheet.

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GoSquared is proud to announce the release of our GoSquared for Magento plugin.

Users of Magento, one of the premiere ecommerce solutions on the web today, can now integrate the GoSquared Tracking Code (GSTC) at the click of a button by simply installing the GoSquared for Magento Plugin.

The plugin is available to download for free over on the official Magento site.

How does GoSquared help Magento users?

For ecommerce website owners, it is critical to know what’s happening on your store right now. With other services such as Google Analytics – you can gain great historical reports about what has happened, but you don’t know what’s happening right now.

On Magento, GoSquared can alert you immediately when you are experiencing a traffic spike, and enables you to find out what product pages are gaining most attention. GoSquared can enable you to find out why your traffic is spiking – has Oprah just tweeted about your new line of shoes? Has TechCrunch just linked to your new lineup of iPhone cases? GoSquared helps you find out, so you can engage with the current audience with the added knowledge of where they’re from and what they’re viewing.

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Back in September, we wrote about how we dramatically improved load times of the GSTC (GoSquared Tracking Code), the snippet of JavaScript you place on your site to enable GoSquared to track your traffic. We made it asynchronous, non-blocking, globally distributed, and reduced load times by 80%. Now we’re back with another update.

This time we’ve focused on the actual JavaScript executed by the GSTC. We’ve been through every line of code with a fine toothcomb and optimised it for blazingly fast execution, and we’ve made some real breakthroughs. We’ve now reduced the total script execution time from about 300ms to an average of 10ms. Yes, you heard that right. We’ve made our tracking script thirty times faster. In fact, in some browsers, the tracker is more than a hundred times faster than before. And no, this is not a late April Fools joke.

Besides that, we’ve also done some clever optimisation of our code to reduce the size of the tracking engine’s footprint. It wasn’t easy, as it was pretty small to begin with, but we’ve managed to make the tracking JavaScript file more than 25% smaller. That means 25% faster load time across the board. Add that to our crazy execution speed improvements, and this means that while our tracking code was very unobtrusive before, its impact on the performance on your site is now barely detectable.

And despite the fact that we’ve reduce the size of the tracking engine, we’ve actually gone and added more functionality. We’ve added in a few new functions to make it easier to integrate GoSquared into your site if you have a lot of JavaScript. Take a look over at the full documentation of these functions, and have a play around.

And the best part about all these changes? You don’t have to do a thing. The tracking code you put on your website is still exactly the same. So you’re already taking advantage of these performance improvements, and can start using the new functionality straight away.

Note: In case it wasn’t clear – this was an April Fools joke, and is not a project we intend to actively develop going forward. We shall keep the page online for the memories, though, just like we did with FutureStats.

Building on top of the powerful foundations of LiveStats by GoSquared, we’re very excited to announce LiveStats 3D – an entirely new way to visualise your site’s traffic in real-time.

Extensive research and testing, combined with overwhelming customer feedback showed us that just “watching” your traffic unfold wasn’t enough. People wanted to feel their traffic. They wanted to experience that same punch-in-the-stomach feeling their servers experience in a traffic spike.

Attention Grabbing

Our Head of data visualisation and engineering at GoSquared, Mr. Tren Dee, explained that in the current climate of data overload, visualisations need to work harder to gain the attention of users.

With LiveStats 3D, we’ve made it impossible to ignore your traffic stats. LiveStats 3D utilises an initial draft spec of HTML6 (due for release later this century) to fully utilise your computer’s screen real-estate, processor cores, and memory to provide a truly immersive experience. *

Based on our experience from developing Futurestat’s traffic spike prediction engine, LiveStats 3D transcends the limitations of traditional two-dimensional space to provide a unbeatably unique statistical journey of marvel, wonder and awe. In end-user tests, we’ve actually seen people break down and cry due to such an incredible experience. The world is not 2D, so why should your stats
be?

Improved Twitter Integration with the Dick Bar

Also coming in LiveStats 3D, we have completely overhauled Twitter integration. Overwhelming feedback from everyone** who loved the Twitter Dick Bar suggested LiveStats was incomplete without such functionality. Now that Twitter has decided to remove the Dick, ahem Quick Bar from the native iPhone client, we felt it was our duty to keep the functionality alive and kicking for the user base that
desires it.

Learn more about LiveStats 3D now! And watch the 3D video on YouTube.

* Fully immersive experience requires 3D red/green glasses.
** Ev sends his regards.

There are a lot of new database systems popping up that can be interpreted by the newbie as “memcache, but with persistence”: MemcacheDB, Membase, redis, Project Voldemort etc. I’ve seen the term “persistent Memcache” being thrown around a lot, which is an oxymoron in itself, as the term “persistent” undermines the implied ephemeral nature of a “memory cache”. We must be careful not to mislead those impressionable by buzzwords into adopting the wrong technology for the wrong uses.

It’s not uncommon to hear the comparison “like a persistent version of memcache” being thrown about, and it is understandable why it is used. While brave new ground is being covered by these new DBMs, this simile acts as a straightforward introduction to these new technologies and how they work. If you’ve worked with web development or MySQL for any tangible amount of time, chances are you’ve had experience with Memcache and its simple key/value data model. So it’s a great technique to help tame these wild and mysterious new technologies so that we understand them better in terms of what we already know.

However, we must be careful not to let this comparison transcend the fundamental differences between these systems. I fear that many regard “persistent Memcache” as a drop-in replacement for the original Memcache so that they don’t need to worry about cache timeouts or its ephemeral nature. Whereas the important distinction to make here is that these systems are databases, and Memcache is a cache, and nothing else. For best performance, it is important that both are still used in a way that complements their design and intended usage. I am worried this likeness will foster poor data model design, as developers feel more secure with interchangeably using their caches as databases, and vice versa, adopting the wrong technologies and software design paradigms on this premise. Sure, many of these “NoSQL” persistent databases can be used as a cache, but to engineers building high performance systems, it is important to keep the distinction in mind to avoid unnecessary overheads.

Set up Fluid

First, go grab yourself a copy of Fluid for OS X completely free. Learn more about Fluid. Fluid lets you create “site specific browsers”, essentially a browsers that are dedicated to individual sites that you can run as if they’re a native app on Mac OS X. Once you’ve downloaded Fluid, start it up, and you’ll see a window asking you for a URL and icon.

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Drew Wilson just released the latest Valio Bundle, and we’re proud to be featured alongside a number of other fantastic apps and resources that help designers and developers rock.

What does $49 get you?

We won’t list everything here, but some of our favourites on the list include:

• LittleSnapper by Realmac.
• Smaller for minifying your CSS and Javascript.
• Vinilla – beautiful UI elements for your designs.
• Pictos Font by the man himeself.
• GoSquared – 2 months of the Standard plan. By us.
• Plus a whole lot more.

That’s 2 months of GoSquared Standard (worth $19.98) included alongside a package with a total value of $438!

This awesome offer is only available this week until Sunday so get it while you can!

* This deal is only available to new users, sorry to all of you wonderful existing members – we’re doing lot more to keep you happy. Promise!

Update: The Valio Bundle deal is now over! Sorry if you didn’t get a chance, you’ve gotta be quick in this game.

Today we’re releasing Map View (beta) into GoSquared’s Labs. Check it out.

What is Map View?

Map View is the same beautiful map that you will instantly recognise if you’ve been using GoSquared LiveStats. We’ve cut out everything else to leave just the map – allowing you to show off the locations of all your visitors to anyone you want without the worries of showing email addresses, user IDs and other personally identifiable information.

How does this fit in with my business?

Map View is ideal for large screens and projectors. We received a ton of feedback from customers who wanted to run just the map from LiveStats on a big screen in their office or their reception area. We also realised it’d be beneficial for everyone if we could offer Map View to those who wanted it, without the extra burden of all the extra information around visitors, pages, and referrers.

Do I need a GoSquared Account to try out Map View?

You sure will, if you don’t have one already. You can sign up for GoSquared from just $9.99 per month, or have a play on the free account right now.

Perhaps we’re crazy. For 3 days only this week we’re offering 12 months – that’s 365 whole days – of GoSquared Plus (normally $24.99 monthly) for just $50.

What does $50 get you?

• 500,000 pageviews per month for 12 months.
• Full access to LiveStats for real-time traffic monitoring.
• Trends for those who are allergic to Google Analytics.
• Unlimited real-time traffic alerts for traffic spikes and lulls.
• Monitoring for up to 5 sites.
• Team sharing with as many colleagues as you want.

We’re really excited to be able to give this away at such a discounted price – but we can’t for long! This offer is only available this week until Friday. Get it while you can!

Get 12 months of GoSquared for just $50 on AppSumo now!

* This deal is only available to new users, sorry to all of you wonderful existing members – we’re doing lot more to keep you happy. Promise!

Update: The AppSumo deal is now over! You’ll have to be quicker next time.