We corrected and launched this early fix.

Thanks for your support.

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Tenth iteration of this plugin and there is still room to improve many things.

So what’s the new this week/version? In the surface not so much, we improved the User Agent Service database download service to be much more manageable and user controlled. At code level, we worked a lot to stabilize the code, making a framework with useful things for the following versions.

We also fixed some issues from previous version so if you are using this plugin for some time we recommend to update ASAP.

Download the version 1.6.80 from the Repository or from the download page.

Enjoy the new version, and tell us what you think.

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Statcomm is out again and it will give you new features set to test it out. Many things are in the making so if you find any problem, please tell us about it, through the contact form, or the forums or the WordPress Repository. (Currently the forum wasn’t moved yet, and still remains in forum.wordpressready.com)

So, what is this current release bringing to you?

Sprite Optimization

Since Statcomm uses a lot of images (an estimation suggest we are using around 750 different icons), the traffic between plugin host (your server) and the browser (your navigation software) could become relevant. A test showed that viewing the main window ,required about 40-50 server requests. It is not much, because the images are small (1k each one) but we started asking ourselves if we could improve it. We saw the Flag Sprite site and since we didn’t find anything similar applied to browser icons nor operative system icons, we decided to take advantage from ImageMagick wonderful capabilities and make our own version of sprites. By the way, we tested a lot of sprites generators, but many of them got limitations that discourage us to keep going (in our test the site CSS Sprites did the best work, although it fell short in some extra requirements)  That worked pretty well actually, and Statcomm 1.6.70 includes a ‘sprited’ version of flags, browser and system operative icons as well.

Does sprites improve plugin response? Indeed. A lot. The sprite does a heavy use browser cache, and consequent page refresh replaced server request by 304 (not modified) meaning your browser caches the images and reuse it several times without going to the server for more icons. In a regular test the request went from 40 requests to 26 requests and basically 88% (23 of remaining 26 request)are 304 requests(not modified). That was a huge performance improvement.

Also, we don’t need the icons any longer, so we replaced about 800 icons with only three mid-size images. Not bad.

Is there any disadvantage of using sprites? Well,  we don’t know(yet) how to zoom a sprite image using css. If you know how to do this, please email us with the answer, and we will add you with the plugin contributors. For the moment, we have to test some options , so we will try it out.

Instant Spy Feature

If you regularly want to find out more from particular visitors, you will agree that going to another page for seeing more user information isn’t nice at all. To overcome that limitation, we developed the Instant Spy tool. This cool feature allows you to find out more about users without changing to the Spy page. Just hover the mouse over the user IP and Statcomm will analyze the user , giving a detailed  information, including previous pages visits for that user. For tablet users, click over the user IP instead hovering.

To make this feature we took advantage of qTip2 javascript toolTip. We considered other alternatives, including the new WP Pointer Tooltip, but qTip2 won hands down with its awesome documentation, examples and forum, not to mention this feature should work with earlier WordPress versions.

While developing, we made some necessary measures to make this feature work. The Instant Spy feature will only work only if you download and activate the Maxmind database, since most of information will come from this source. If you have Maxmind deactivated, the Spy feature will tell you that (and it won’t work). Also, we dropped the hostip.info API switching to the Maxmind database. In our test we found that Maxmind consistently gives more accurate information than hostip.info and also much faster.

Some options for both spy tools (Instant spy and Spy Page) are available from the Options panel, so go ahead and give it a try of new Statcom 1.6.70

Thanks for your support & enjoy the day!

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It is time for a new release and things are quietly become hot here.

What is in it for you in this version?

• First version to offer Geolocation. To be honest, this is opening a new spectrum of widgets, features and potential uses. We are developing some interesting additions, and combined with the User Agent String database, you will be capable of doing incredible things. More to come in the following versions.
• We expanded the Last hits view to add Country, Region and City columns (only if Maxmind database is installed and enabled).
• We added flags for countries, using CSS Sprites.
• We added a way to download the Maxmind database. Ironically, our ip is usually banned for accessing the Maxmind database, returning a 403 error (forbidden). If you are getting the same problem, a workaround is to download the database from maxmind, uncompress it and upload to the def plugin folder. Then you can activate the feature on the option panel.
• The plugin will continue working normally even if you don’t have the Maxmind database, except added columns won’t be visible, that’s what we’re calling dynamic tables. Please take a look on the plugin help to find out more.
• We made some fixes. We found an incorrect spider detection which leaded to incorrect records. We’re thinking about making some tools to ‘normalize’ the current data, expecting to be ready to version 1.7.x
• We also corrected some issues with the translation. We’re using Spanish as ‘test language’ to find out which strings are not properly translated. Everything should work ok now. Note though other languages needs to be translated correctly.

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We were reading How to move your content to a new location and we expect the site traffic will go down. Try to make a traffic is a process, so domain changing always has its problems. But after reading a bit, we decided to shortcut the process. These were the final steps:

• Backup the site and database
• Copy backup to new domain & database
• modify records siteurl & home from wp_options table to point the new domain
• modify config.php to point to the new database.
• Access site control panel, but don’t browse the site yet
• Install plugin Search & Replace
• Replace any ocurrence of the old domain in the new database.

With these steps we are cloning the entire site and updating any possible link. To finalize:

• Go back to the old site and modify .htaccess with:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(Reference: How to redirect Old domain to New domain)

This force any link on the older site to redirect to the new one.

Finally some additional work will be needed, for example ,adjusting Google Analytics, Twitter account and so on. And the forum too.

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We decided to update our plugins according this decision. Version 1.6.52 of Statcomm does not come with any significant improvement except linking to the new domain WPGetReady.com which now is working, but there is nothing in it until this weekend. The same applies to Text to Custom Fields 1.1 updated to 1.11

So is it necessary to update the plugin in my blog to Statcomm 1.6.52 or Text to Custom Fields 1.11?

It is optional, but unnecessary. We recommend just wait to next weekend or monday when we expect to deliver the version 1.6.60

So, What’s In 1.6.60 For Me?

StatComm 1.6.60 will introduce Geolocation. We are currently combining two APIS (User Agent String and MaxMind) to get the most accurate and complete info from the incoming traffic. This improvement is opening up the plugin into a new full spectrum of possibilities. You can expect new widgets based in this new capabilities (we’re expecting to release them in versions 1.6.70-1.6.80)

This is a huge improvement, and we are currently making the transition as smooth as possible.

Stay tuned, thanks for you support.,,

And enjoy the day.

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Did you know that…?

• Currently there are aproximately 175 different browsers (included mobile ones) without counting every different version of each browser? In fact, the mobile era brought a new breed of browsers which were added to the always growing browsers list. From Android, passing through Blackberries, Kindle, Motorola, Opera, Nokia, or Polaris to mention a few, the browser business is hotter than ever.
• There are around 440 different spiders crawling the web 24 hours to get all your blog data indexed? (and not counting different versions of each one!) Rigth now your site is getting indexed thanks to multiples bots scouring the web.
• There are at least 91 different Operative Systems (without counting service packs or numbering versions)?
• - There are at least 130  Ip addresses you should ignore when analyzing where your users are coming from?

(Data estimation from User Agent String info)

When you are surfing on the web, you are identifying yourself. Well, sort of. Your browser
is providing some pieces of information to every web site you are visiting such as browser version, your Operative system, your default language, and so on.

But the web is not just users. There are many software all around, crawling the web, collecting information
from here and there. This programs also have its own ‘signatures’ to identify them.  There are spiders, crawlers,
feed readers, scrappers, email clients, libraries, vaidators , even anonimyzers…you name it. Each one is providing a signature with information.

This signature (aka User Agent String) is where StatComm analyzes to provide an accurate vision of incoming traffic. Identify the pieces of information is crucial to understand the traffic.
But here is the problem: every browser has its custom signature and you can expect more and more browsers and new versions in the horizon. That is making  more and more difficult to indentify rightfully the proper signature.

User Agent String Info  to rescue.
The site provides a nice way to give information directly from a UA string, so you can play with the features that site provides.  But there is more: UAS Info has an up-to-date database you can download to analyze incoming UAS and also many programming examples in several languages to test the features yourself.

StatComm currently has implemented a class to retrieve UA database and use this information to provide an accurate view of the incoming traffic.

So we’ve decided that User Agent String Info will be the first winner on the donation project. (More about The Donation Plugin Project here)

Congratulations to Jaroslav Mallat for his commitment work and thanks for your help to make StatComm more accurate.

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StatComm 1.6.50 released

StatComm  v1.6.50 is ready for download from the download page or in the WordPress Repository.

What is in it for you?

• Uninstall option: v1.6.50 has an uninstall option to delete options value. Note though the data collected in the tables won’t be deleted yet.
• Restful service handling user agent database updates: there was a major overhaul on the class providing updates to user agent database.
• Statcomm warns you if you are trying to install in Wordpess versions below 3.0. Consider updating WordPress instead.
• Enhanced end user and developer documentation.
• Introduced file log library
• Introduced status panel.
• Correction to capability feature: a user cannot set a permission level above its current capability. This ‘pseudo-glitch’ allow a user to accidentally set a permission level higher than himself, resulting the user cannot access to the plugin anymore.

Thanks everyone. Enjoy the day.

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What is in v1.6.50?

• Correction to capability feature: a user cannot set a permission level above its current capability. This ‘pseudo-glitch’ allow a user to accidentally set a permission level higher than himself, resulting the user cannot access to the plugin anymore. Big ooops.
• Uninstall option: v1.6.50 has an uninstall option to delete options value.
• Restful service handling user agent database updates: there was a major overhaul on the class providing updates to user agent database.
• Few fixes detected from users.
• Enhanced user and developer documentation.

We’re expecting to launch the version this weekend , so stay tuned and thanks for your support.

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According to the schedule, StatComm 1.6.40 is evolving toward more stabilized code.

• Few deprecated functions deleted/resolved/updated/optimized
• Around 50 warnings resolved. The plugin should work without errors even setting debug=true
• Many minor glitches solved.
• New Setting API class override older code. This would allow a easier improvement and follow WP developing recommendations.
• Setting capabilities simplified: You can choose from Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author,Contributor & Suscriber.
• Improved Last Search Terms view, more information and links corrected.
• Fix: bad delimiter in regex expression solved.
• Last version was 1.6.31, and since 31 > 4 we had to make the 1.6.40 instead 1.6.4 for numbering order.

In parallel, we are developing an improved service to update the user agent database. If everything goes right, that should be ready in 1.6.50 version , that is within a week.

Stay tuned, enjoy the day.

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