Planned Downtime 2014-08-10

There's almost never any planned WunderCounter downtime, but tomorrow I need to migrate one of the databases to some new hardware. It would be hard to do this without downtime and still keep all of the numbers in sync, so there will be a short period of downtime tomorrow (August 10), probably between 7 and 10 AM EST.  It could be up to 20 minutes, but may well be less than 10.  Both the main WunderCounter site and the reporting area will be offline during this time.

This is necessary to get the databases of some aging equipment to a new server with SSDs and 8 times the amount of RAM which the database servers currently have.  The rest of the migration will take place slowly over the next week or two and shouldn't have any noticeable downtime.  Once that is complete you should see a boost in speed when accessing reports etc.

Browser Blocking Fixed

Browser blocking was accidentally disabled by a recent upgrade and several people have reported the bug.  I've just deployed a fix for this.  As part of the change I rewrote a lot of the internals and also added a lot of tests to ensure that future deployments go more smoothly.

If you notice any issues with browser blocking or anything else, please let me know.

If you want to enable browser blocking, you can do so via the links on your "Account Options" page, which can be found under the "Options" menu.

Dropping Support for MSIE 6, 7 and 8

I'm just in the process of redesigning members.wundercounter.com and I've made the decision to go with Bootstrap v3.0.0  This means the site will be mobile friendly right from the start, look better and be easier for me to develop and maintain.  That's the good news.  The bad news (for a very small number of you) will be that anything under Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (ie MSIE 6, 7 and 8) will no longer be supported.  I currently have some hacks in place to support these older browsers but the browsers are becoming less popular with every passing day and supporting them would mean holding everyone else back.

If you're still on an older version of MSIE, please upgrade when you can or, even better, download a more standards-compliant browser like Google Chrome or Firefox.  You'll thank me!

New Hardware

You may have noticed that the reporting has become a bit faster over the last couple of months.  I've moved members.wundercounter.com to brand new hardware.  I've quadrupled the RAM from 8 to 32 GB and the CPU is significantly faster.  I've also compressed the assets (CSS and JavaScript) to improve the page load speeds.

World Maps are Back

World maps are now back on your dashboard page (if you're not viewing on a mobile device).  They're generated daily, so they'll be an accurate reflection of where your traffic is coming from.  You can click on the map image to get a higher resolution (bigger) image to view.

Improved Browser and Robot Identification

This past week I've upgraded the logic used to identify browsers and operating systems.  You should find more information in your log reports as well as more robots which are identified.  If you find missing or incorrect information, please let me know.

The WunderCounter is based heavily on open source software and the logic behind the browser identification is freely available here.

Browser, Operating System and Device Icons

As of this evening, I've added some icons to the daily and page reports.  They cover popular browsers, operating systems as well as handheld devices (iOS and Android).  I've also switched to a more up to date browser parsing library.  I'll be checking the logs over the next little while and tweaking the icons and display values, but I also welcome any feedback on the look and accuracy of the new information.  Please feel free to contact me with any issues you may find, even if you think they're unimportant.  Every report (good or bad) is helpful.