The past five weeks since Woopra was first announced at WordCamp Dallas, it’s been a whirlwind. There have been tens of thousands of applications for a Woopra invite, and an invite even was sold on ebay recently. There are videos and podcasts showcasing Woopra, and the reviews are honest and, luckily, very kind.

Several new updates of Woopra have come out in the past five weeks, with another one due very soon, bringing with it not just bug fixes but some very exciting new features. The Woopra Sharing Access feature was just released and there are some great bells and whistles that should be in the next few releases. Get excited, folks. Woopra is getting better all the time.

General Woopra News You Can Use

John Pozadzides is running a contest called “My Woopra is Bigger Than Yours” on his personal blog inviting Woopra fans to post their Live numbers to try to beat his new record of 1,352 live visitors. Do you think you can beat that? Show off your live stats!

More than 10,000 approvals have been issued, and the waiting list is growing steadily. We need beta testers to report in and help us improve Woopra, so check in on the Woopra Beta Testers Check-In forum post and let us know how Woopra is working, or not working, for you in Bug Reports and other related sections in the Woopra Forums. Your help is much appreciated.
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Tyner Blain recently interviewed Woopra’s John Pozadzides about Woopra and the current publicity and approval issues, how Woopra works, and what’s in store in the future.

One of the key things John said in the interview is the amazement and challenges the entire Woopra team feels at the sudden popularity and attention:

Our biggest hurdle is clearly scaling the project quickly enough. We have tens of thousands of user requests in just a few weeks, and in less than 5 weeks the Woopra.com site went from practically no links to over 500,000 in Google, so the number of incoming requests continues to accelerate.

Luckily, with the amazing support of Layered Technologies and 3Tera to provide additional servers, we’re working on the scalability issues. We know Woopra is good and we’re eager to get access to everyone who wants it, so thanks for your patience as the Woopra team works hard to finish the initial beta test and moves towards a first release candidate.

This is the first of an ongoing series of guest articles which explore web analytics and using Woopra. If you would like to contribute to this series, contact Lorelle at Woopra.com with your proposal.

By Charles McKeever

Building a social networking community is a lot of hard work. To really make it work and make people feel like there’s someone on the other side of their monitor you have to stay on top of welcoming new members, responding to discussions, being aware of new groups, commenting on new photos and videos, and responding to support requests.

It’s true that alerts for all these events can be programmed into a system, but that takes time and money. You could use some form of email system to track what’s going on in your community, but using email to respond to requests can be tedious. Unless you have to be in your email all day, it isn’t very productive and certainly not all that interactive.

What I’ve discovered is that Woopra provides a crazy simple solution to staying on top of activity in my social networking site with event notifications.

Using Woopra’s Event Notifications

Woopra’s event notifications let me set alerts for when certain events happen on my website. An alert can be a sound, a custom on screen message, or both.

Alerts can be set by visitor identification, pages and referrers, and system specifications. This makes it very simple to track when community members are online, when new forum discussions, new groups, new photos, new videos, and new comments are added.

Event notifications also gives a real-time way of knowing when someone comes from a particular country or city. If community members are sensitive to certain time zones then this can be extremely helpful, especially when trying to build a community with an international member base.

Woopra event notifications are extremely flexible and offer a great way to stay interactive on your websites.

Here are the events you can flag within Woopra’s event notifications:
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We’ve had a lot of excitement in the last week with Woopra, so let me start with a recap of some notable events.

• We completed the mass approvals process early this week and now have well over 10,000 folks Whoopin it up!
• Great news for Mac users, Java for Mac OSX was finally released. It only runs on 64bit versions, so if you have an older machine your best option is still to run Woopra in Windows under Parallels.
• Lorelle announced a new series of weekly Forum discussions called Woopra Weekly. The first topic this week is “What do the numbers mean to you?” I’m really looking forward to these weekly discussions to better learn how to utilize information to more effectively drive my readership.
• Our friends at RocketTheme released Woopra plugins for Joomla versions 1 and 1.5.
• We released the brand new Woopra Sharing Access feature which allows users to grant access to their site statistics to other users. This feature has been highly requested, and it works great! I’m really enjoying it myself…
• I learned that the spam filter in the Forums was going nuts! There were a ton of comments marked as spam and not one of them was. So hopefully I’ve taken care of the problem, but it’s funny that no one complained!
• Meanwhile, we passed the 1,000 posts mark in the forums (up to 1,150 actually)! Considering there are only a small number of us, we still need everyone’s help to answer the newbie’s questions and help keep the forums friendly and open.

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Woopra Sharing Access (WSA) is a new feature that we have just released for testing.

Woopra Sharing Access is very useful for those who want to show their website activity to their advertisers, other Woopra members, co-authors on multiple blogger sites, and more.

Where else can this feature be useful? What about communities or networks of blogs. We run Woopra on Woopra to track all our fans’ activities, and to help us put Woopra to the test. Most members of our development team have Woopra running on their personal sites, including John Pozadzides’s One Man’s Blog, my Elie El Khoury blog, and Lorelle’s blogs. We use each others’ blogs to test Woopra - especially before all our new members started appearing with the premature release of Woopra invitations, who are now helping us find all the bugs we missed among our few testing sites! Thank you.

The point is that we all work together, so we can now share our website traffic information with each other, since we are part of our own community and team. This isn’t a feature for everyone, but it is great for those who want and need to track more than one site and want to share their Woopra statistics. We’re sure you are going to come up with even more reasons to use Woopra Shared Access - and we expect you to share them with us.
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In the Woopra Forums, we’ve started a new discussion called the Woopra Weekly. Each week, one of the Woopra team will be posting a discussion topic, challenge, or thought inviting you to have your say.

This week’s topic is: Woopra Weekly: What do the numbers mean to you?

We’re asking you to help us understand how you use the numbers. For many, the numbers are just a glorified score card. It’s fun to watch them go up and down, skyrocket up, or dip down below. But we want to look deeper into the numbers to see what they really mean in the context of your website or blog’s content, appearance, monetization, marketing, and the decisions you make in and around your site?

What do the numbers really mean to you and how do you use them?

So join us and have your say in our Woopra Weekly chat.

Woopra sets the time according to your time zone in relationship to GMT/UTC time.

To set your time zone in Woopra, log in to the Woopra website and go to Members > My Websites > Time Zone. Click on the number to change it.

The number is a postive (without the plus sign) or negative (with a minus sign), the number of your time zone relative to GMT/UTC.

To find out your time zone number, see Time Zone Converter and The World Clock – Time Zone Converter and search for the time zone in your area.

Some areas may be off by an hour due to recent changes in daylight savings time laws, so check your Woopra desktop client to ensure it is tracking the right time and change it accordingly.

The activity level on the Woopra Forums has skyrocketed since the early pre-release fun, announcement of the start of mass approvals to use Woopra, and the release of Woopra Beta 1.1.1.0. We’re eagar to hear from you, get your feedback and input, and you are helping us improve Woopra every day.

Got an idea about how to improve Woopra? Tell is on the forum in the Feature Requests section.

Having trouble with the Woopra Installation Guide? We’ve luckily had only a few reports of problems installing Woopra, but there have been a few issues, especially with those using older versions of Mac and all of us awaiting the release of Java 1.6 for Mac. Check the Installation section in the Forum for more information and tips, and to ask for help, on installing Woopra.

If you are having trouble beyond installation, we have several Forum sections to help you. For issues dealing with your blogs and websites, see the Web site issues section. If you’ve found what you think is a bug or problem with the program, let us know in the Bug Reports section. For general overall troubleshooting, see the Troubleshooting section.

If you just want to talk about Woopra, where you think it is going or meet up with fellow Woopra users to ask them how they are using Woopra, visit the General Discussion section of the forums.

If you really want to share your love for Woopra, we have the I Love Woopra! section. This is where Woopra users can post reviews with links to articles, blog posts, video, podcasts, and more.

If you want to be a part of the active team of Woopra beta testers, we ask that you check-in and let us know of your interest. We will be talking to you a great deal about how to make Woopra better.

For those still awaiting approval, we’re working as fast as we can to approval Woopra members in small groups as to not overwhelm our servers during this delicate testing phase. Remember, Woopra is under development and we may have to stop the approvals soon for testing purposes, though we are working hard to avoid making that decision. The more diverse the group of users, the better the input for improving Woopra.

There is a lot of activity going on in the forums, and a lot of answers to your questions. So go check out the Woopra Forums and tell us how we are doing and how you want us to do better.

As Lorelle recently reported, an updated version of the Woopra client software was released into the wild today, and it really is fantastic. Elie and Jad have been working miracles during the course of this last week, each working about 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, to bring us all new features, bug fixes, and my personal favorite - massive speed improvements.

In fact, I just can’t get over how much faster Woopra is now. I mean, I wasn’t complaining before… but it feels like everything happens about 500% quicker. Is it just me, or do you guys notice this too? Anyway, we all owe these guys some love for their hard work and sacrifice. It seems to be paying off nicely.

Now for the bad news. While our technical staff was sleeping, we’ve developed a DNS problem that is affecting some people, but not everyone.

Which brings me to the main point of this post… well over a thousand new users have been approved in the last 24 hours - with thousands more to come tomorrow, and a lot of you are going to be looking for those downloads. Please give us a few hours to get the DNS issue straightened out if you, like me, are experiencing any issues. Personally, I’m heading to bed now that it’s 3am and I’ve put in my 15 hours for the day!

The latest version of Woopra is available for download. Those with approved access will receive the update automatically when they log into Woopra. If you haven’t been alerted to an update, log out of the program and then log back in and it should automatically upgrade.

For those awaiting approval, many are being notified as you read this that they’ve been approved. We’re approving users in small groups, testing the new servers to ensure the transition goes smoothly, for all parties involved.

Woopra New Features

The new version of Woopra has many new features and bug fixes, though it continues to be in beta testing and development. The features currently include:

• Over 40 different statistical events and analytics.
• Geographical maps of visitor locations.
• Monitor active and high traffic posts and pages.
• Live tracking of visitors through the site.
• Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
• Easy monitoring of multiple sites.
• Extensive API system for plugins and add-ons.
• Ability to export analytics data to CVS file for spreadsheet analysis.
• Search specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points…to start.

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