It was recently announced in the October Woopra State of the Union post that Woopra has upgraded their DNS architecture to simply the tracking JavaScript for using and installing Woopra on your blog or website to no longer require the ID number.

If you are installing Woopra manually with out a Plugin or add-on to your website’s program, the Woopra tracking javascript has now been reduced to a single standard line of code:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://static.woopra.com/js/woopra.js"></script>

If you are using https on your website, use the following JavaScript:

<!-- Woopra Code Start -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var _wh = ((document.location.protocol=='https:') ?
"https://sec1.woopra.com" : "http://static.woopra.com");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + _wh + "/js/woopra.js'
type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<!-- Woopra Code End -->

[* Remove line breaks *]

No website ID number is required, just this simple JavaScript. It is highly recommended that you update your Woopra JavaScript in order to take advantage of the new features.

The installation process for Woopra is now an easy three step process.

1. Step One: Activate Woopra
   1. Click Add a Website on the Members Panel.
   2. Type in the direct address to your website.
   3. Select the estimated pageviews.
   4. Enter the GMT time zone for you and your blog.
   5. Enter the Invitation Code in the form, if you received an invitation or approval code (required).
   6. Click Add Website.
2. Step Two: Install Woopra on Your Website
3. Step Three: Installing Woopra on Your Computer

In addition to these improvements, the Members panel on the Woopra website has been renovated with some easy-to-use new features.

• You can now quickly change your Time Zone without manually calculating the GMT reference time.
• You can now change the domain name if you change domain names or enter the wrong domain name, or want to move your Woopra account to a new blog (the old one will no longer be supported).
• URL Parameter Filtering helps you include or exclude portions of your URLs in order to aggregate statistics for those wishing to track specific pages, products, campaigns, or pageviews.

There are now a variety of Woopra applications for various CMS, blog, and website platforms for you to choose from, and many more are in development, making it even easier to use Woopra.

The Woopra development team has been working overtime to streamline installing and using Woopra, so stay tuned for more developments.

It’s funny what kinds of unintended uses can be discovered for new tools like Woopra. My latest discovery was the fact that you can actually use Woopra to help combat spammers on your site. Here is how I discovered it can work.

First of all, I’m using WordPress over on my personal blog. In the Woopra plugin for WordPress I’ve enabled all of the notification options including “Auto Tagging”, “Show Comments” and “Show Searches”. For a little more detail on what the options do, you might see this previous blog post on the addition of the search tracking feature.

After that, I simply set up a new Event Notification to give me an alert when a Tagged visitor comes to the site. Since I have “Auto Tagging” enabled in the WordPress plugin, any time someone leaves a comment they get tagged, and the next time they visit a page I receive a notification.

The other day I saw a notification pop up that said I had a known visitor on the site by the name of “Spyware Doctor”, which looked very suspicious to me. So, I clicked on the notification to take me directly to the detail listing associated with that visitor. What I saw shocked me!

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One of the most requested features for a while has been the need for SSL support. It’s especially important for clients running e-commerce sites who wish to track users through the site and all the way to transaction completion. Well, we’ve got some great news. Woopra now supports SSL encrypted sites!

There is one important caveat to get SSL tracking to work. You must update your Woopra tracking code to the latest version which can be found on your Member’s Area page.

Since SSL has now been enabled, I would like to remind developers that it’s possible to take advantage of our open API to pass real-time information to the Woopra client while tracking users in the Live view. For Example, the e-commerce engine could be made to output variables to Woopra using a very simple format such as:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var woopra_visitor = new Array();
woopra_visitor['name'] = ‘John Smith’;
woopra_visitor['email'] = ‘john@smith.com’;

var woopra_event = new Array();
woopra_event['sale'] = ‘Baby Buggy - $129.99′;

</script>

We need a few people to give it a try and give us some feedback, so if you’ve got SSL on a site and have been waiting to give Woopra a shot at it, now is the time!

Over the past several weeks the Woopra team has been extremely busy readying a new set of enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements. Today a whole series of these updates rolled out just in time for our October State of the Union.

Woopra Engine Updates

Although the primary method of accessing our statistics is the Woopra client, the Woopra Engines are the servers located in our data center that do all of the heavy lifting. They are fully 50% of the solution that delivers the live action results we’ve all come to depend on, and they’ve experienced a number of improvements in speed, reliability and usability since last month.

The most important Server update comes in the form of a completely new DNS architecture which offers multiple benefits to service management, including a radically simplified tracking script.

• The Woopra tracking javascript has now been reduced to a single standard line of code.

  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.woopra.com/js/woopra.js"></script>

• Users will no longer be required to keep track of or enter Website IDs into plugins such as WordPress, Joomla, vBulletin or other CMS platforms. Indeed, the old Website ID and Code links are gone from the Member’s area and are no longer required in the javascript.

This simplification will allow designers and developers to recycle code from one site to another without needing to take site IDs into consideration.
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For the Woopra WordPress Plugin version 1.3.8+, we have included the needed code for translations. You may download the POT file, which is needed for translating. This file on the SVN will always hold the current version translation file.

For any questions on how to ‘translate’ the POT file, follow the instructions on the WordPress Codex.

Please send all translations (zipped) to ‘shane [at] bugssite [dot] org‘ including, Your Full Name, Your Website. Send only completed translation files. Check this post to see if your language was received and validated.

Note: Subject should be ‘Woopra Translation - <Language>‘ otherwise it will get rejected.

Thanks in advance by helping out the Woopra Community!

Hubert Streitenberger put out a little app based on the WordPress plugin code, called Woopra 4 iPhone which reformats the Woopra stats specifically for the iPhone. Everyone I’ve shown it to thinks it’s cool, so we want to thank Hubert for his effort and generosity and also spread the word about it’s availability.

Hubert’s original post is available in German, but in case you can’t read it, here is the Google translation to English.

It’s very easy to install, and although I didn’t test it with any other platforms I think that this applet will run with any PHP based site - not just WordPress. Hopefully someone will give it a try and let us know.

I got it up and running as follows:

1. Download and unzip the Woopra 4 iPhone installation files.
2. Open the Config.php file and edit these three lines to replace your site’s URL, Site ID and API key (found in your Member’s area):
   
define('woopra_host','www.YOURSITE.COM');
define('woopra_api_key', 'XXXXXXXXX');
define('woopra_site_key', 'XXXXXXXXX');
3. FTP the entire Woopra 4 iPhone directory to a secure location on your server. You can shorten the name of the directory if you want, and even put it in your root, but keep in mind it will not be secure unless you password protect it.
4. Visit the directory you just uploaded in your iPhone!

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It hasn’t been long since I gave the September State of the Union address, and reported that we were monitoring over 40,000 sites. At this time we have almost 45,000, and we are planning to close the registrations when we hit 50,000 sites (which could be any day now).

It’s likely that once we close the registrations there will be some commentary around the Web regarding this move, so I wanted to let everyone know in advance that it’s coming so there are no surprises.

The rationale for closing the beta is as follows:

• 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 we’ve made progress on client updates, bug fixes, and feature requests - including a campaign management system, SSL support and a billing system - we will move into the next phase of our development.

At that time, the current approval system will be replaced by a personal invitation system in which current Woopra users will be given the opportunity to send invitations to friends and family.

Such a system will allow us to issue only as many invitations as we have infrastructure deployed to handle, and thus ensure that service levels are not degraded by overpopulation of the systems.

On a personal note, when we initially unveiled Woopra at WordCamp Dallas (at the end of this lecture) just 6 months ago, we never could have anticipated the amazing amount of support that you have all given us. On behalf of Elie, Jad, Lorelle and myself… Thank you!

Two quick updates for WordPress users.

1. If you’ve had any problems with showing the Woopra stats in your WordPress dashboard please update your WordPress plugin as we’ve fixed a critical bug that prevented a few of the engines from displaying. It’s likely that this update will resolve any outstanding issue.
2. Today we released another modification to the plugin which adds support for displaying user search terms within the Live area in the Woopra client. This plugin works with either the embedded WordPress search, or with embedded Google searches.

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Greetings everyone! Over the last few days we have had some performance issues with a few of the engines. The majority of users are unaffected, but then again there are a bunch of us who have been seeing the effects. (Higher traffic sites have noticed a greater performance hit than low traffic sites.)

If you have noticed any of the following symptoms, they are all related to the issue I’m describing:

• Inaccurate reporting - You are seeing an abnormally low number of visitors to a site.
• Slow client loading - You notice that the client is taking a long time to connect, or timing out.
• Client screen partially blank - You are seeing your site’s stats, but parts of the client are blank.

We wanted to share the update with you all in case anyone is worrying. The slowness issue has been resolved, though you may see a little more slowness on particular sites within the next 24-48 hours or so.
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It’s been a busy few weeks since my last update back in August, so lets move on to the latest updates to keep everyone nice and informed.

First of all, on behalf of the entire team here at iFusion Labs, I’d like to thank all of you for the phenomenal growth Woopra is experiencing. It’s very humbling to be part of a project like this, and I found the following graph summed up what things have been like around here for the last few months.

It’s hard to believe that we are just getting started! So, here is the latest news:
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