The Alpha Test of IzeaRanks, and tracker engine that feeds it, has gone really well. We’ve had a very high uptake within izearanks.com, and most importantly of all we’ve had some great feedback.

By far the most pressing issue has been with the accuracy of the data that we track and report. Lots of people have said that our numbers are significantly lower than those reported with other analytics tools like Google Analytics and SiteMeter. We’ve worked very hard to identify why this would be the case and come up with solutions. I’m happy to report that the solutions are now live, and you don’t have to do anything at all to update your blog to receive the new script.

First, the previous version of the tools waited for the entire page to load before it started to send us data. However, some of you have blogs that take a while to load. You might have a lot of content for example, or perhaps you have a lot of third party plug ins on your blog, all of which add to the load time. The end result is that visitors to your blog may move on to the next page before the page has finished loading. As a result, the ITK never fires any data to us.

We’ve changed all that. First, we reduced the size of the ITK by 25%. Later today we are also going to compress it, resulting in a reduction of 85% in total from the old version. Second, we changed the code. The new code now fires data in two stages. As soon as the script is loaded, data gets fired at us to record the site visit and page view. Then, when the rest of the page finishes loading  the second part fires letting us track activity on your in and outbound links etc. The end result is, of course, more accurate visit recording.
We’ve also got some plans in place to speed up the physical delivery of the Javascript to your readers, but I’ll talk about those in a later blog post.

We also noticed some serious problems with the way Microsoft’s Internet Explorer works with our script. First, Internet Explorer would not recognize the name we gave to the embedded form in your blog. The Javascript creates an embedded form which it populates with the data to fire at the tracker server. Since IE would basically ignore the name we gave the form, the ITK would fail to fire any meaningful data at the server. Obviously this caused the bulk of the low traffic complaints we got, and we’ve fixed how we work with forms in IE now. In addition, we’ve changed the way we batch up the information to send to the server to make it more compatible with blogs that use XHTML instead of plain old HTML. The old way didn’t work too well with XHTML blogs and so, once again, we got lower numbers than we should have.

Finally, on the server we had issues where people with ultra high security settings in their browser caused the ITK to fire blank data at the server. The server, stupidly, didn’t know what to do with the blanks and ignored the entire record. Once again, that meant more low numbers, and it’s been fixed.

I’m still looking at an issue relating to synchronizing blog records between IzeaRanks.com and PayPerPost.com and I’ll be blogging about the work on that when it’s ready to go. For now, I hope you enjoy the changes we’ve made to further improve the ITK and move us a lot closer to getting this thing out of Alpha Test.

Posted by Peter Wright at 03:33 PM in Development , Featured , IZEARanks | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)