724,359
It's a fairly big number, about three quarters of a million I'd say.Quite a nice number when that's page views in one day on dabr.co.uk! Thank to the 25,000 visitors that came to the site on Sunday and decided to send out 135,000 tweets :)
If you read my personal blog then you already know I'm a huge fan of Google Analytics - It really is the daddy. It tells me a lot of things about how people use my sites but it failed me in one way recently.
It told me that there was a 45% drop in visits to dabr.co.uk from Indonesia that lasted 20 hours last month (one day basically). You can see the little drop on January 6th affecting the total visits graph above. But what it couldn't do was tell me why.
That's where Twitter came in. After tweeting my interest in what happened on the 6th Jan in Indonesia, it was revealed that an important soccer match occurred on that very day: Indonesia vs Oman. Could it really be a soccer match that caused such a drop?
A while later I was told that one of the major telecoms providers had serious downtime - and that's something I can investigate in Analytics. After playing around with a custom report I found a 100% drop in usage from that provider during the exact period. Without a doubt this must have been the true cause.
A recent addition to Analytics is "annotations", which gives me the ability to label this anomaly for future reference just in case I forget. Thanks Google :)
Incidentally, the drop had such an impact on Dabr's overall stats because of one simple fact: visits from Indonesia make up almost half of all traffic to the site!
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Howdy folks,
Happy New Year and all that :)
I've got a fair few updates to share with you but, to save confusion, I'm going to drip them out over a couple of posts...
First up, in chronological order, I bring news of a setting that has been active in Dabr for some time but is only just worth talking about now the Nokia N900 is starting to take off and you guys need a decent mobile web app for twitter...
'Big Touch' and 'Portrait' mode right? Right. Well, today's N900 firmware update brings portrait browsing at long last (as predicted in our last post), but what of Big Touch?
Take a look...
See the difference?
David enabled this some time back in December and, although the graphics aren't perfect they do make the interface a little bit easier for those on high-res screens.
You'll find the Big Touch mode in the settings section of Dabr, go have a play and let us know what you think! :)
Cheers,
James
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I've been running Dabr in 'touch phone' mode on my Nokia N900 for some time now and, in lieu of a definitive Maemo Twitter app, a fair few early adopters are enjoying it just as much as I am.
Imagine my happiness when I read this today:
John Loughney, aka '@j_loughney', is a certified 'Maemonaut at Nokia' over in California and to see him a) tweet how much he likes Dabr himself and b) hint at just how awesome it is on the N900's yet-to-be-released portrait mode... well, that makes us very, very happy indeed!
:)
Thanks John!
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One of the key reasons David and I started @Dabr - aside from the lack of mobile twitter features - was our mutual dislike of poor ads being served up to us on other 3rd party mobile twitter websites.
This - in part - is one of the keys to Dabr's success.
Recently we were asked if Dabr was up for sale. We hadn't thought of selling before and the offer took us by surprise, however through time and lengthy discussion we agreed that the amount offered was not enough and also, the terms were not to our satisfaction.
So today, just as an experiment, we're rolling out trial ads on a very specific part and version of the site, namely: the login page of the desktop version of Dabr.
We're going to check back next month to let you know how we're getting on and hopefully the ads shouldn't be too intrusive.
Please, do let us know if you have any feedback.
We're listening.
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In case you missed it, Twitter announced an update to their mobile site today and, while David's been toying around with the look and feel, I took some time to analyse the key differences between this new (and much needed), refreshed version of mobile.twitter.com and Dabr.
First, let's take a look at the new mobile twitter page:
They've really made an effort on a brand level, you do feel like you're using twitter (which is a good thing), and they've also introduced their own 'mentions, favourites, direct message' filtering. The 'buttons' for these filters are a good size and would work well on a touch device, however - although this works OK in practice - there is still a lot more you can do here.
Compare the above to Dabr (in touch mode) and - smaller buttons aside - you get a much richer experience
The user page for @BenjaminEllis (my example here), now displays his URL, location, friends, favourites and lists. In fact, the only thing that is missing from Dabr at this point is the 'Get Texts' option that is on the twitter screen further up the page.
David and I have had many conversations about how we improve the experience for Dabr users and are constantly trying to refine the site and are very careful about what changes we do and do not make. It's a hard balancing act; trying to maximise the overall usability out of such small screen estate while also trying to keep things as simple as possible and - while we applaud Twitter for finally getting their act together ;) - we still think that there are a number of areas where Dabr wins out.
When you see the two side by side, you might be tempted to agree -
What do you think?
This next grab, originally taken to show off the differences between mobile twitter search (not currently working!) and Dabr search (with 'save as default search' option), also goes some way to explaining our commitment to mid-low level handsets.
You can find the 'normal phone' option in your settings tab..
Remember twitter: not everyone has a smartphone.
Your thoughts, comments and feedback are welcome -
Thanks for dropping by..
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I don't mean to tread on any copyright toes here, I'd just like to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Dabr as an open source project.
This screenshot shows Dabr modified slightly to take on the appearance of Twitter's new iPhone/mobile site. It's a working copy on my local machine, not just a photoshop'd image. You can read more about their new site on the Twitter blog.
Of course this is a proof of concept and not available as a real option available on dabr.co.uk. If any designers would like to improve Dabr then let me know and I'll see what we can achieve :)
James is working on another blog post to show a side-by-side comparison of Dabr and Twitter's new mobile site too. Stay tuned.
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As per Twitter's own homepage:
"1 DEC is World AIDS day. Help turn Twitter (RED)™. Follow @JoinRED to find out how."
We're doing our bit here at Dabr by introducing the new #red theme.
Help turn Twitter (RED)™, use the #red setting.
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It always amazes me that even with hundreds of thousands of hits every day, Dabr users can still cause spikes of traffic.
Thanks to the 6,273 users that tweeted 75 thousand times yesterday. You guys made the server stats jump up to 527 thousand page views in one day!AND... those numbers don't even include the many copies of Dabr across the web, just dabr.co.uk.
(The graphs are based on tweets about stats on the old server, combined with real stats from the new server. To just see stats from the new server check out the other graphs)
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