woopra

I had a chance to sit down with our Woopra iPhone app lead developer Cesar Alaniz (follow him on Twitter @cesar_alaniz) today, and since we were going over the latest updates on the project we decided to create a video and share the news with everyone.

Here is your first sneak peak at the app. To answer two questions in advance:

1. We do not have an ETA yet on when the app will be submitted to the iTunes store. But I’d say… maybe 60 days or so from now. :-)
2. We do not have any other platform apps in development at this time (Android, Palm, etc.). Our intention is to get the iPhone app running before tackling other mobile platforms.

We recently shared reviews and highlights of Woopra, and a collecton of video reviews and tutotirals. Those are your words about how you use Woopra. Now it’s our turn.

Our small Woopra team has talked to thousands of people about Woopra, doing interviews, shows, press events, live demonstrations, web demos, and presenting workshops and training programs. Here are some of the highlights over the past two years.

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Shane from The Rabbit Hole has been working on the next version of the Woopra WordPress Plugin and has announced the first alpha test release for the next version.

If you are among the brave and daring WordPress users, we’d appreciate your help testing Woopra WordPress Plugin 1.5 Alpha (download). However, there are a few things you need to know, so stop by Shane’s announcement for details. You can leave feedback there and on the Woopra Forums.

Those details include that the Woopra WordPress Plugin now requires your server be running S.O.A.P., a very common server application. With help from Pranshu’s excellent work on the Woopra jQuery code, the Plugin now includes jQuery.

Initial tests show the Plugin is faster than ever, reducing the load on the WordPress Administration Panels as well as on your WordPress site.

Shane is working on new features including localization, flash charts, referrers sections, and improved error reporting.

Again, this is test version. We’ll announced the final release soon.

2009 was an amazing year for Woopra. We opened up our beta access to over 90,000 sites. We came out of beta the end of October, and were thrilled with the commitment and enthusiasm from all those who invested in Woopra with their financial support. We’ve improved Woopra’s speed and handling and optimized the Woopra JavaScript, and improved the efficiency of the Woopra Desktop Client and Woopra Web App. We reintroduced the Woopra Live Chat so it works across a wide range of browsers, totally revamped the Woopra Members area for customizing your Woopra plans and options, and launched our new Woopra Email Reports so you can have customized web analytics delivered to your inbox.

While the improvements in Woopra are often not visible, we’re working behind the scenes constantly to make improvements to Woopra. We love it when people have noticed the changes in features, speed, analytics, custom reports, and respond, especially by sharing glowing reviews, tips, and tutorials on Woopra.

We believe that our members speak louder than we can when it comes to describing and sharing their enthusiasm for Woopra. As we move into our third year of Woopra’s public release, we wanted to honor the work our members have done in spreading the Woopra word with a collection of your articles about Woopra from the past two years.

When you blog about Woopra, we learn more about how you use Woopra through the feedback you give us. If you haven’t chosen Woopra as your web analytics program, these perspectives may give you the insights to help you decide.

We love sharing them with other Woopra Members so they can learn, too. We tweet articles about Woopra on @woopra and share them here on the Woopra blog on a regular basis.

If we’ve missed your article or review, please let us know so we can include it.
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I’m very pleased to announce the creation of three special “coupons” now available to Woopra users to encourage you to use GoDaddy for domain registration and other hosting services. Of course, Woopra works with all hosting providers and registrars, but we are very pleased to pass along special offers from our partners which can save you money on complimentary services.

Going forward, there are three very simple links you can remember in order to rack up discounts with GoDaddy:

• GoDaddy.com/woopra1 will currently get you unlimited $7.49 .com domains
• GoDaddy.com/woopra2 takes 10% off any order!
• GoDaddy.com/woopra3 enables $12.99 standard SSL certificate registrations

I personally have about 100 domains registered with GoDaddy and am looking forward to being able to save a bunch of money on future domain acquisitions.

Hopefully you will all find these links as easy to remember and use as I do. Its as simple as adding “woopra1″, “woopra2″, or “woopra3″ to the end of GoDaddy.com! Yee-haw!

When you arrive at the link you’ll see the discount reflected in the banner on the top left corner of the screen which should last for your whole sessions. Drop me a line if you find this useful or Tweet me and let me know @johnpoz.

Yeah! Some of you may have never noticed they were missing, and some of you may have never known we had them, but there was an often ignored Woopra feature that was on the list of things to update – which just got completely overhauled. Namely, the ability to get email reports for any of your site’s stats sent to you on a Daily, Weekly or Monthly basis.

NOTE: This is one of the features that only comes with the paid accounts. The reports generate a lot of load on our servers, especially when we are talking about thousands of them at a time. So if you are on the free plan you can bump up to Bronze for $5 per month and get these reports (among other things).

These stats are fully customizable, and you can choose who should receive them (multiple recipients is perfectly fine too), how often they should be sent, and even which particular stats should be included within the report. Oh, and in case I forgot to mention it, you can also generate an email report on demand whenever you need one.
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I have the unfortunate task of having to report an unusual server outage that affected some clients today. Earlier we noticed some errors coming from one of our core monitoring servers. Shortly thereafter, the server failed to respond. We escalated the issue to our hosting provider who immediately began to triage the situation. Unfortunately, the diagnosis was not good.

It appears that at some point in the day the server, which runs on the Linux operating system, experienced a Kernel Panic. This is the equivalent of the “Blue Screen of Death” in the Microsoft world – otherwise known as a non-recoverable system error.
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The Woopra FAQ has been updated. Months in development as Woopra improved and changed, we’ve worked hard to include as many of your support questions as possible. It also includes a basic Woopra Users Guide/Manual.

The core table of contents are:

• About Woopra
• Woopra Payment Plans
• Installing Woopra
• Troubleshooting Woopra
• Using Woopra
• Woopra Users Guide/Manual

Top 20 Most Frequently Asked Questions of Woopra

Here are what we have determined to be the top 20 questions asked of our Woopra support team:
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We’ve mentioned in the past that Woopra has a public API, and recently we’ve had a great number of requests for access to it. But access to any API is not without its drawbacks.

For example, we have no way to even imagine all of the potential uses that our community of creative developers will come up with to tie systems together with Woopra, and while we want to encourage this, no system can withstand a potentially unlimited onslaught of requests for its resources. (Example: Twitter’s API limit of 150 request per hour.)

As a result, we had to extend our platform to be able to meter access before we could fully release the API. And we are granting different levels of API usage to the different subscription levels, starting with 1,000 API calls for our Basic (free) accounts, and moving rapidly upwards for the paid levels. More information regarding API limits will follow soon…

The initial API documentation can be found here, and our first thoughts for the usage of this platform include:

• The creation of Woopra Widgets for websites in order to publicly display stats.
• The expansion of Woopra plugins for various CMS platforms to include embedded stats similar to the ones we created in the officially supported WordPress plugin.
• Integration of Woopra data within private back-end systems in order to build more powerful tools.

If anyone uses the platform to build tools, widgets, or anything else that the Woopra community might find useful I hope you’ll please let us know so that we can showcase your work and ensure that everyone hears about it. I’m more excited about the public release of our API than I have been about anything in a very long time.

So please… wow us with your creativity! I’m truly looking forward to it! Now the only question is – who will be first?

As I mentioned in the last post, this past weekend was Startup Weekend in Dallas, part of a global Startup Weekend event happening in cities all around the world. I participated in this event, and pitched an idea on behalf of Woopra to build an iPhone app.

Well, we did indeed have a team form around this project, and here’s a video with the latest updates.

Seriously, Do You Want This?

It was very expensive to sponsor this little exercise and proof of concept development. But the project is far from complete. Which means we’ll have to spend a lot more in order to bring the app to life. We have decided that IF we complete development on the iPhone app it will be free; however, as a business, it simply doesn’t make sense for us to do this if the demand isn’t there. We can put the resources into the development of other more widely requested features.

So if you really want us to commit the resources to continuing the iPhone app development now is the time to demonstrate it. Leave a comment below, or retweet this article. Based on the feedback I see, we’ll decide to move forward or not. I think we can all agree that if we don’t see enough interest in taking 5 seconds to respond to this post, people are not going to put forth the effort to download the app.