You may have had some trouble accessing Freckle from Europe the past 24 hours. We’re very sorry!

It looks like a major backbone internet provider, Cogent, is experiencing major outage issues.

Freckle the application is up and running just fine; our hosting company is running just fine; but the connections between you, and the hosting company, may be in tatters, if your ISP uses Cogent somewhere up the stream.

Unfortunately, Cogent’s connectivity issues are the equivalent of the Icelandic volcano: they ground a lot of people, and there’s not a lot that can be done about it. Changing our hosting provider would not even make a difference.

Our hosting provider is working with Cogent, and here is their status blog on the issue. Unfortunately (again), Cogent themselves are remaining silent, so we don’t know anything more at this point than you do.

This totally sucks. Thank you so much for your patience and classiness.

We know it’s not really a solution, per se, but if you’re scratching your time down on paper until Freckle is back up, you might enjoy using our PDF/ paper time tracker that we made for people who love printable planners. You can still download it (because our blog is not affected by the outage due to a nice coincidence).

Download PDF (260k)

Thank you so much for bearing with us!

We’ll post updates as soon as we learn anything.

The post European Networks: Cogent Disrupting Freckle appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.

Well, I can admit when I’m wrong.

Hooray for numbers! I like facts!

Visitor Locations

It’s true that American traffic has been the single largest unified segment of our traffic, at 41.4%, but we’ve been receiving significantly more non-US traffic than US traffic (the remaining 58.6%).

Our long tail is really long, petering out with a lot of “one hit wonders” (sorry!) from 15 countries such as Latvia, Estonia, the UAE, Iran, Afghanistan, and Mauritius.

I’m a little surprised.

I don’t know if this is typical or if it may be because we’ve got the attention of more Europeans, thanks to our being in Austria. The fact that the 3rd highest country is Germany is not surprising to me due to the sheer strength of the German design and indie web industry.

Browsers

Unsurprisingly, Firefox dominates, with IE low down on the ladder at about 6% total for all versions. Safari is only 19%, though, and I thought it would be higher.

Google Chrome’s actually got a very respectable slice with 7%, a greater market share than all types of IE combined. We hadn’t devoted much time to testing in Chrome but now that’ll change.

Traffic Sources

We had a couple “traffic events”: David mentioned us in a tweet. We got mentioned on “Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com and “Ajaxian”:http://www.ajaxian.com. We were #1 on Delicious popular for a short time. Screenshots of our front page & app have made it onto a number of design gallery sites (the kind without commentary—like “CSSMania”:http://www.cssmania.com).

Interesting findings:

• CSSMania sent us more than twice as much direct traffic as Lifehacker (& more people signed up, too)
• Ajaxian sent us yet more direct traffic than either of those two—to the tune of nearly 4 times more than Lifehacker
• Delicious popular is a big source of traffic, despite the fact that people almost never talk about it in the same breath as more showy “today’s hot link” sites (e.g. reddit, Digg, etc)
• While Google Reader by far has the lion’s share, long tail on RSS feed readers can stretch on for miles

When we heard about the Lifehacker post, we were sure we tried to prepare for an unexpected flood of incoming traffic—thankfully, it wasn’t the case.

I’m intrigued by the Direct / Bookmark vs Links numbers shown here. (Social Media includes Twitter, and RSS Readers can’t identify the many homebrew or low-profile web-based ones.)

I can only assume that many of the Direct / Bookmark visitors are, in fact, coming from desktop-based RSS readers. Or else people sure do talk about us a lot to their friends.

Lessons:

The US simply doesn’t have a monopoly on edgy web stuff, even if it appears to be the case. We sure have a lot of international visitors. (We’ve noticed some of our most active customers are, too.)

We won’t lose much if we stop supporting IE 6, which we planned to do. (We’ll just be sure to announce it clearly first.) Thank god.

I really wanted to avoid a big launch. We intentionally avoided creating a build up, etc., etc. It mostly worked.

Our stats software

FYI: The screenshots are from our Clicky account. We use it to supplement Google Analytics & are quite happy with it.

The post Stats week 1: What a lovely long tail you have! appeared first on Freckle Time Tracking.