woopra

Woopra Continues To Improve

Early this morning, John P. published the state of the union for the month of October for Woopra. In this latest round of news, John lets us know that their is a slew of speed enhancements to the service overall thanks to a brand new DNS architecture. Also in the post, Woopra users will no longer have to type in their SITE ID into the Woopra configuration as it is no longer needed. This has allowed the javascript code to be reduced to a single line.

On top of all that, members can now configure their time zone, rename their website and configure URL Query parameters. I’m especially grateful for the timezone configuration as my stats would reset to the next day at 8P.M. EST which was a little annoying.

There is also word that Woopra will be developing an iPhone application. I’m sure Woopra and iPhone make for a perfect match. Last but not least, a revamped client is coming down the pike that will contain campaign and ad tracking. Two features that I think many bloggers will love.

Woopra To Close Beta Registrations

A post published by John P. over on the Woopra blog is stating that Woopra will be shutting down beta registrations once they reach 50,000 monitored websites. As of October 8th, Woopra was monitoring 45,000 websites. Once registration is closed, there is a possibility that the media will blow in response but John gives a series of explanations as to the reasoning behind the move.

  • A 50,000 site “beta” is certainly a big enough sample to work through bugs and take suggestions.
  • We have a number of projects underway that we need to turn our attentions to temporarily and this will allow us to focus on core improvements as opposed to continual expansion.
  • We continue to hear from the community that you’d like more personalized attention, and pausing the site additions will ensure against further dilution of our current limited resources.

Once the Woopra team gets their ducks in a row, they will replace their site approval system with a personal invitation system in which current Woopra users will be able to send invitations to friends and family. Woopra was unofficially announced back at WordCamp Dallas about six months ago and since then, the sky has been the limit for the amount of success and growth that Woopra has experienced. Keep it up John!

Woopra 1.2 Has Me Wooping For Joy

If you haven’t opened up your copy of Woopra yet, do so soon as they have released version 1.2 of their analytics client. This new version has finally fixed a long standing problem I’ve had with Woopra since the release of 1.1 and that is the referral com null redirection error. I’m happy to say, that feature works properly now.

After installing and running Woopra 1.2 for the first time, there are two things that you should notice right off the bat. The first, Woopra now has a new desktop shortcut icon.

New Woopra Desktop Shortcut Icon

Although the icon is not a drastic change, it has a slicker appearance than the other one.

The second thing you’ll notice is that Woopra now has a dashboard area or a homepage. I call it a dashboard because its purpose reminds of me of the WordPress dashboard. This is where news from the Woopra site is displayed along with advertisements on the right hand side. The advertisements are not that distracting and I feel this is one of the ways Woopra will be able to provide a tiered (paid for / free) service.


Click on the image to see the full size

The dashboard also provides at a glance information for each site you have configured to use Woopra. The dashboard contains information such as the live visitors, pageviews, and visits along with a mini bar graph for visual stats.

Other things that are new with Woopra:

  • Support for Machines Running Java 1.5
  • Map Customization
  • Color-coded Visitor Map
  • Analytics Filtering Improvements
  • File Menu Standardization
  • Live Visitor Counts on the Website Tabs
  • New Login System
  • Highlighted Tabs During Site Visits
  • Significant Memory Handling Improvements
  • Database Improvements Resulting in Multiple Speed Enhancements
  • Changes Implemented For Future Updates

So far, I’ve been pretty happy with this new release. If you have upgraded to Woopra 1.2, let me know what you like most about the new version. If you would like to read more about the features in Woopra 1.2, be sure to read the official blog post which goes into more detail.

Woopra 1.2 RC2 Now Out For Testing

Woopra.com LogoWhile traversing the web, I noticed that Woopra 1.2 RC2 had been released and is now being tested by the public. Mac users on older operating systems who have not been able to use Woopra because of Java 1.5 will be pleased as this new release should fix that issue.

Some other things worth mentioning:

  • The Woopra main dashboard “home” view is improved and will showcase the Woopra Blog and a summary of your websites.
  • Major improvements in speed, stability, CPU performance, and less memory leaks and crashes, with even more efficient code coming your way.
  • Woopra Connection Handling for servers.
  • Ability to add your logo to the Woopra map.

Thank goodness a new version appears to be on the horizon as I have had nothing but trouble with the software since they released 1.1. For example, when I click on the Currently Viewing link, I get a com null redirection error. No idea why that is and it has driven me up the wall. Others have reported the same issue in the forum. Woopra was a blast to use, but ever since 1.1 was released (should of been codenamed party pooper) I’ve opened Woopra less than 3 times a month.

I know quite a lot of you have jumped on the Woopra bandwagon. Have you had a positive experience with 1.1? Did anything break? Has the coolness factor of Woopra disappeared?

New Version Of Woopra Released

Woopra Logo

Excellent news for all of you lucky enough to be able to use Woopra as your statistical analytics package. The Woopra Client is now up to version 1.1.2.1. This new version contains a number of bug fixes alongside some new features.

One of the reasons which might of taken this client update so long to be released is that, according to John P. the client update works hand in hand with the back end architecture of their servers. In other words, the client update comes out at the same time that their back end undergoes an update.

Three features which become immediately apparent are as follows:

  • The live map view now displays the page that a visitor is reading as they view it.
  • The calendar has been updated to a cool new extremely easy to select slider bar.
  • We’ve added multi-monitor support to the full screen live map.

New Woopra Calendar

Despite the new features and the bug fixes contained within this release, 1.1.2.1 is considered a minor release with a major version scheduled to be released within the next three weeks or so. Also worthy of mentioning is that all users who have been waiting to be approved should be approved by tomorrow evening. After the approvals, Woopra will have a testing base of over 20,000 users. That is 20,000 users which didn’t exist over 2 months ago.

Relax Its Just Me

ChatInviteIf you have visited this blog anytime after May 2nd, 2008 you may have noticed a pop up appear on your screen similar to the one shown on the right. Now, you might think this is a popup, an advertisement, perhaps even a malicious piece of code being executed on your system. The good news is, its none of the above. This notification is an invitation sent from my Woopra client, to you, to try and initiate a conversation between webmaster and blog reader.

Woopra is a sweet new analytics tool that goes a few steps above and beyond the Google Analytic offerings. One of those is the ability to initiate a conversation with the people who are browsing your site. So here is how this works.

If you use the WordPress Woopra Plugin, Woopra will have the ability to automatically tag visitors to your website. In order for visitors to go from being an anonymous IP address to name and email address, visitors need to leave a comment on your blog. When visitors leave a comment on your blog, they have to submit their name, email address and URL. Once this information is submitted to the website, Woopra strips that information and tags it to that IP address. Now you might be wondering if this is a BIG BROTHER snooping over you type of scenario. The truth is, it’s not. When you leave a comment, you are submitting that information voluntarily to the website. This is how Woopra explains it:

Virtually every site on the Web tracks users via cookies. Until now the only sites that had the resources to analyze and act on the data were large companies like Google and Amazon. Woopra brings this power to the masses.

So, if you visit my website and you previously left a comment, the following screenshot shows you what I would see:

Woopra User Tracking

My name is Jeffro on my own blog and that is what I have used to write a comment or two on the website. Also within this window of information is the ability to look up my browsing history on the domain, manually tagging the visitor, all of the information related to my browser, ip address ect, email address and you’ll even see my gravatar. That’s right, Woopra has built in Gravatar support which is pretty nifty.

So when a user browses jeffro2pt0.com and I initiate a conversation with you, this is what it is supposed to look like:

Woopra Chat In Session

Two way conversation between web master/visitor. Now, I’ve gotten many reports that when user’s have clicked on the popup to initiate the chat, it doesn’t work. I have no idea why this is. It could be related to firewall settings on your computer or could be that, it doesn’t work. The good news is, the Woopra team is going to be reworking the chatting feature of Woopra. They plan on redesigning the Woopra popup as someone mentioned it looked like spam and they also plan on implementing a feature where site visitors can initiate a chat session with the web master instead of vice versa only. I think that would be pretty darn cool if that became a reality. That would eliminate the need for the shoutbox and it would give you one more way of getting in direct contact with me.

I hope that this information doesn’t affect your mindset in terms of commenting on this blog. If you don’t want this information to be available to me, you can always delete your cookies from your PC which will make you anonymous to Woopra. The personal identifiable information presented to me within Woopra is for my eyes only. So rest assured, your user data won’t be strewn across the net.