This has been requested for a long time, and I’m glad I can deliver on it now: Users tend to have Cligs accounts with lots of cligs (in some cases hundreds!), and they forget where they used a clig or why they created it. Today’s new feature fixes that.

The new Notes section found in the Summary Tab of each clig’s analytics page allows you to write some notes about your clig. Good?

It gets better. The notes are also searchable using the cligs search function.

Oh, one more thing: you can write HTML notes if you feel you need to. This allows you to write properly formatted lists (e.g. to-do lists as reminders), organize your thougths with proper headings and subheadings, and more. Basically, Cligs does not limit what a note should look like.

So what do the notes look like? Here is a note I wrote about this morning’s post about the new anti-spam and anti-malware checks:

As ever, contact me if you have feedback or thoughts on how to improve this and other Cligs features.

Deep inside the heart of Cligs, there is now a much improved and much more strict checker against spam and malware. This builds on the previous system which failed to detect some things a few times in the past few weeks. As always, if something slips through (no checker is ever perfect!), please contact me with the details and I’ll take care of it manually.

Important: As it’s an automated checker, it might falsely think something is wrong with your submission when nothing is - it can happen. If that happens, please contact me with the details and I’ll tweak the checker.

Like the Cligs bot checker and any automated system, this system will be under constant review and improvement to make sure Cligs serves its users and the internet users well and safely.

How it works: It uses public lists to check every time a URL is created to see:

• If the IP address of the requester has been black-listed.
• If the destination URL has been black-listed.

Earlier today I introduced a much faster List View of all cligs. The new List View fixed a few bugs and improved the loading speed of the cligs for accounts with lots of cligs and associated data. However, it removed the hit counts from the list, and this was never a permanent change.

The balance I’m trying to strike is between:

• Building a resource intensive page quickly enough so that browsers don’t hang and the connections don’t time out
• Useful functionality that Cligs users want

I won’t choose and as of now, there are two variations of the List View:

• A Fast List View without hit counts for large user accounts. This is the default list view.
• A Slow List View that includes the hit counts for users willing to wait while a very big page loads. If your have lots of cligs with lots of hits, it is very likely this view will time out.

You choose which one to load depending on your needs!

I have no doubt this will not close the story. Please continue to email me feedback and I’ll take your thoughts into consideration to evolve this feature. Pagination is probably the next improvement.

There is no easy way to put this: a lot of users absolutely hated the new black design that became public when Cligs moved. Words like “claustrophobic” and calling the interface “not clean” were used to describe the UI. Shame, as the interface is much better laid out to present the analytics, and also has space for new analytics to be added in the future.

This brings us to the crux of the problem: people have been (mostly) lashing out against the colors, not the layout. Yes some users gave specific feedback about the layout (and even the fonts in use!), but it’s mostly about the colors.

So as of now, Cligs has a modified theme: it’s has a white background and has a few colors changes to make it work with this major change. Not only that, the black is gone from the page background but also from the clig analytics square/tabs.

This really makes the pages feel different, and I hope you continue to give feedback. You know where to find me.

Carrying on, there is a new Cligs List View. This view is where you can see a table with all your cligs in one place. The previous incarnation of this page was slow and had a couple of bugs. These are now fixed and the page loads much faster.

I’ve added a total clig count to the top of the view so you know how many cligs are in your account (this count will be visible on other pages too in the near future).

Part of what makes the page load faster is the removal of the hit count for each clig. This was causing all sorts of browser and server issues; most notably Firefox used to hang when loading the data for accounts with a large number of cligs. On my personal account for example, I have ~900 cligs and that always made Firefox hang half way through loading and now it doesn’t.

Two new improvements for existing analytics today:

Improved Bot Detection and Analytics

This improvement has multiple parts, and each will affect the analytics massively:

• Cligs can now detect thousands more bot clicks than previously, which dramatically improves the analytics.
• Unfortunately, for now this detection is only for cligs created from now onwards. There is more to do to make the bot detector even more accurate, and the better detection will be applied to your older cligs too then.
• Important: The Cligs analytics (the Executive Summary, Geo Analytics, Referrers, and Social Media) now only show human clicks. Bot hits are completely ignored unless you’re specifically looking at the Bot Analytics tab. The upshot is that your click counts will be significantly lower, as the analytics are now ignoring a large part of the traffic. To see the total traffic, the breakdown is shown in the Bots analytics tab.
• I’m keen to hear your suggestions and feedback on this feature and the analytics in general. Please just let me know your thoughts.

Bug Fix: Referral Analytics

A user noted an inconsistency between the total traffic reported in the Executive Summary and the total traffic reported in the Referrers tab. On investigation, I found that the referrers reporting was not returning the full list of referrers as it should, and that’s now fixed.

Several people reported that cligs was not letting them edit cligs, be it titles or destinations. Others were reporting issues deleting cligs. Both should now be fully working.

Please continue to report any bugs and inconsistencies and unexpected behavior. It’s impossible to test for every single use case and work flow variation, and so if you see something please report it and I’ll take care of it. Thanks!

A few users have been reporting problems with logins (still!), and after a lot of troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to some kind of issue between Cligs and Internet Explorer 8 and Cligs and Safari. Firefox and Chrome were always happy to let users login normally, but IE8 and Safari didn’t.

It took me a long time to figure out the problem as I wasn’t able to reproduce it until earlier today. I’m happy to report that all my test cases of failed logins are now fixed, so I’m confident this will apply widely to all affected users.

Apologies for the delay on this one; the slowness to reply was due to my inability to see the problem first hand.

To boot, the fix makes some Cligs run much faster. Not a bad start to the week!

A small minority of users have had problems logging in, and a lot of people had their logins being constantly dropped. The former is being fixed as we speak and the latter is fixed now.

For the dropped logins: Cligs required you to regularly login even if you had just logged in minutes ago. This was a silly default setting in PHP which I corrected. You may need to clear your cookies for this to work, as browsers can get confused with multiple logins like this.

For the account problems: as I said on Twitter, some user accounts did not transfer correctly to the new server. I figured out why and now all accounts are being rei-mported. I expect all of them to be completely imported in the next 2-3 hours, but most likely it will be sooner - it’s just going through the accounts one by one and so your account is very likely to have already been imported. Worth a check.

Again, please clear your cookies! Thanks!

The new server is doing really well, and so I’ve switched back on the real-time analytics without any problems. I’ll keep watching it, but I’m very happy with how it’s going.

Next up is the logins issue.