Dear Cligs community,

As you may have noticed, I really appreciate your feedback. Ever since Cligs launched, comments, improvements, and suggestions have come to me through many routes. I got confused, and I don’t want to lose your valuable feedback.

So today I’m formalizing the routes of communication to make sure no idea gets lost:

• The first route is called We Want. We Want is where you, the community, suggests ideas, discusses them, and votes on them. And when an agreement is reached, I’ll see to it to make sure you get what you want. Use it for ideas and feature requests please!
• The second route is for API developers. For that, I want to dedicate the Cligs Mailing List to be the developers’ zone. This is where we can geek out and take code and APIs. Please subscribe to it (you’ll need a Google account) and tell me what you’d like to see from the Cligs API.

Of course, you can always reach me via the contact form for everything else.

Thanks for using Cligs!

Today a friendly Cligs user emailed me with a description of a weakness in Cligs. The weakness basically means that Cligs is suceptible to automated attacks that can potentially bog down the site. I’ve been thinking about a different but related issue, and today’s email prompted me to act quickly before someone not so nice does something.

So as of just now, the Cligs system has a built-in rate limit of creating up to 5 new cligs every minute. If you create cligs at a faster rate, Cligs will ask you to fill out a captcha form. A captcha is an image with a funnily-written image that you need to read and type into the form. Automated robots (bots) cannot fill out that form and so this check stops automation dead.

The question with measures like this is as follows: what is the balance between user convenience (i.e. not overly aggressive checking) and security (i.e. vigilant checking)? I set the balance at 5 new cligs every minute because it’s unlikely a human being would do that. Comments and thoughts welcome below.

They say the best way to make software better is to make as many as people use it and watch them break it. Well ladies and gents, you broke Cligs in a big way but now it’s fixed.

The Problem

For some cligs, when the owner browsed to the details page, the browser crashed. Immediately the culprit was noted to be the Flash graph. But what was going on?

The Fix

I’ve never seen a crash on the details pages and so I wanted to figure out how to reproduce the crash. That took a while but I managed to crash all my browsers using one particular clig.

A long search for the root of the problem led me to the way the y-axis was built by the details page when there are zero hits. The Cligs system gets confused in this instance but manages to eek out sensible data. The Flash graph itself though crashes when it receives this data.

The fix was easy: alter the output to the graph so that it doesn’t crash, which is what I did.

Thanks

I’d like to thank all the users who reported this problem, in particular Kris and István for going out of their way on the weekend to help me troubleshoot and confirm the fix.

Yep, even more updates. The key one is the ability to edit cligs. For now, you can edit the destination URL and the Title of the clig.

Title? Yes, cligs have titles as of the last major update of 3 days ago. The title is basically a way to name the clig in a human-friendly way. And the neat thing? You can add titles to your existing cligs, even ones you created before the recent updates.

The other two tweaks are:

• The Last 30 Days graph is now the more sensible left-to-right orientation of past-to-present as opposed to what it used to be of having the present on the right hand side of the graph.
• A +1 link to create a new clig for the same destination URL is now shown on the cligs list page.

And here is the best bit: all these three updates are requests from users like you. So come on, request the features you want!

Today’s update is relatively minor but nevertheless important: the Cligs Mobile version. I just installed a mobile device detector on Cligs. Now when Cligs detects a mobile device like a phone or a PDA, it sends a mobile-friendly version of the page.

We can debate whether the new mobile version is mobile-optimized or mobile-friendly. It’s not optimized and there are some things that it can do better. It certainly isn’t optimized for any screen resolution. However, it’s still perfectly fine and should work on a diversity of mobile devices.

Why do this? So you can check your stats on the go. Hey, I’m as addicted to the mobile web and the social media scene as anyone and I want my clig statistics wherever I am. It’s the future, and Cligs is ready

So how do you see it? Easy, from your mobile device, browse to http://cli.gs/ or any page really, and the Cligs system should automatically send you the mobile friendly version.

Obviously I don’t have many mobile phones and PDAs (and I’m a gadget freak), so I’ve only tested this on a small number of devices. Please test it with your devices and let me know if something is broken.

Note that the blog is not yet using the mobile-friendly version and will continue to show the design that was launched yesterday. That design is OK on a mobile phone but not ideal.

As I type this, I’m uploading a new batch of updates for Cligs. These are major updates, and they change (for the better!) how some things work:

• A brand new design. Yes it’s finally here. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s so much of an improvement that it needed to be used ASAP.
• An improved cligs list and a much much improved cligs details pages. There are two new datasets shown now:
  • A graphical (in Flash) line graph that shows you the hits per day for the last 30 days
  • The latest sightings of the various search engine bots (Googlebot, Googlebot Mobile, and Yahoo! Slurp)
• A new bookmarklet that also captures the title of the page, not just the URL. Why is this useful? Well the title is easier to deal with than a URL by us humans, and it makes the cligs list page much cleaner and easier to browse.
• Public cligs! Yes, now you don’t need to be logged in to create a clig. The downside is that you cannot keep a public clig’s statistics private. Right now no one can view a public clig’s statistics. There is a good reason for it and it will become apparent in the near future

As always more is coming and I always welcome your feedback!

I’ve been noticing a set of 404 (not found) errors showing up in the Cligs reports: People were requesting cligs but instead of forwarding them on, the Cligs system was saying it can’t find the clig in question, and so it returns an error. This was happening mostly from Plurk referrals, but also the odd Twitter one too.

Digging in deeper, the problem became obvious. When someone shares a link in Plurk, they have a bug that detects the actual link the wrong way. Take the following two example plurks:

"…hey check this out http://cli.gs/abc123"

"..hey my site (http://cli.gs/abc123) is cool…"

What happens (and this is the bug) is that in the first case, the link is detected to be http://cli.gs/abc123 while in the second case it is http://cli.gs/abc123). So in the second case, what the Cligs system gets asked about is not really the clig in question.

The Fix

Given this and other less common but similar 404 errors, I’ve just went live with a tweak that tries hard to compensate for this problem. Basically if you feed it something that vaguely looks like a clig but isn’t quite right, it tries to decipher if there is a real clig in the request. If it finds it, the Cligs system treats the request as it would normally.

Feedback on how this fix is working (or not) is most welcome at the usual place.

I’ve been busy updating Cligs with features requested by everyone who’s been using the service over the past few days, and also tweaking it based on the feedback.

The most important (visible ) changes are:

• New and improved cligs lis page. The old page is replaced with a more user-friendly and useful list of cligs. The cligs are now grouped by destination URL. So if you have many cligs pointing to the same destination, they are now listed together. For each clig in the list, the total number of hits the clig has received is show. Also, the total hits in the group, i.e., the total hits to the destination URL from all the cligs, is also shown. This is the start of many new additions to the summary page.
• You can now delete cligs! This was the most requested feature in the feedback I’ve received and now it’s ready for you to use. The deletion has an important caveat which is explained below.

What Happens on Deletion?

Before you delete a clig, note the following:

• This action is irreversible!
• The clig will start returning a 404 Not Found error when requested.
• The association between your account and the clig ID has been deleted from the database.
• Of course, the clig will not show up in your clig list any more.
• The only thing not deleted from the clig’s record is its ID so that no other clig in the future will get the same ID.
• The clig’s hits are also kept because they are part of the Cligs traffic statistics.

More updates soon. In the mean time, if you have any questions, please ask in the comments below. And of course, more feedback welcome.

Over at SEO Scoop, commenter Al asks a very good question:

In your example of creating multiple cligs, why would you need to do that when you mentioned above it that the analytics includes referral information?

The answer is tracking the sharing (spread) of the clig over time. Let’s take an example.

Suppose we create two cligs, say Clig1 and Clig2. We share Clig1 in a Facebook account and share Clig2 in twitter. Our referral stats initially show that Clig1 gets its traffic from Facebook and that Clig2 gets its traffic from twitter.

BUT: What happens when we start seeing Clig1 getting traffic from twitter? It basically means that someone reading your Facebook profile shared the same link on twitter. This sharing is a very important event in tracking how viral links are and because we know where we seeded Clig1 we know exactly what happened. We can go look for the first twitter statuses that mention Clig1 and we track the spreading of the link. The reverse spread (from twitter outwards) can be tracked for Clig2.

To rephrase this: because we know where the cligs were first shared, we can track their movement throughout the social media world. This helps us add more information to our analysis, and that’s why we need a clig for each initial seeding share, one for each social media account.

Yesterday I managed to do my first ever online video and to many people that’ll be the first time they hear me talk. The video is a demo of Cligs showing the main points and details.

Problem: Compression and whatnot managed to massacre the screen but the voice still works. So I’ll embed the video here for now, while I figure out how to upload it without breaking it.

Cligs Demo from Pierre Far on Vimeo.