Happy 2009!! We’re back from the holidays and working hard again. A few minutes ago we launched a feature that you’ve been asking for for way too long. You can now manually set your location. So if we’ve guessed your location incorrectly or if you’re away from home but want to have your home city appear, you can visit http://feedjit.com/changeLocation/ and manually change your location.

We’ve added a link to this feature in the Live Traffic Feed’s “Options” menu. We’ve also put a link on the Geoblogosphere pages.

Enjoy – and as always let us know if you have any feedback by visiting our Contact Us page.

Mark Maunder – Chief FEEDJIT

During the past 2 weeks we’ve had a few reports of Firefox users not being able to see Feedjit. Today with some help from one of our users we’ve figured out that the problem was with a Firefox plugin called Adblock Plus. Adblock lets you block ads based on a configurable list. The most popular list is called EasyList and this list inadvertently was configured to block Feedjit’s Live Traffic Feed.

I filed a bug today with AdBlock and Wladimir, the creator quickly redirected me to Rick who maintains EasyList. Rick quickly fixed the problem and users of AdBlock and EasyList should get the update in the coming days and will see their live traffic feed once they receive the update.

If you’re impatient and want the problem fixed immediately we recommend you disable AdBlock until you receive the update.

Thanks to Rick and Wladimir for helping us to resolve this issue so quickly.

Mark.

If you’re new to Feedjit, Feedjit Live is the real-time component of Feedjit’s live traffic feed. We’re currently testing it and will be announcing it on the home page in the coming weeks. Click “watch in real-time” at the bottom of the live traffic feed to see Feedjit live. You can visit Feedjit’s own real-time traffic stream here.

We rolled out a few bug fixes and improvements to Feedjit Live this evening. You’ll notice the ads are gone. We’ve removed them for now because a few users reported that they were interfering with the way the Feed worked and causing it to not load occasionally. We’ve also fixed:

• A few missing flags,
• International characters in locations
• A bug that caused the feed to freeze if the title of the landing page contained certain characters

Please let us know if you have any more feedback, suggestions or bug reports by emailing us at support@feedjit.com.

Feedjit is growing a little faster than we expected so we’re going to do an emergency hardware upgrade this evening to make sure we can keep up with you all. Our service will be unavailable for approximately 20 minutes tonight starting at around 10:30 United States Pacific time. Please email us at support@feedjit.com if you have any questions or need more info.

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder & CEO

OK, we should have launched Feedjit Live with timestamps. In fact it was incredibly dumb of us not to. I know this because 30 of you who have never met each other and are in many different countries all over the world emailed us independently asking for the feature after we launched. So….

WE’RE SORRY!!!!

As of right now Feedjit Live has timestamps, both in your own local time and as the amount of time elapsed. (Seconds/minutes/hours/days ago) And it’s dynamically updated so you don’t have to refresh the page.

If you’re a nerd or a geek (I’m both nerd and geek) then it may interest you to know that the ’seconds ago’ number is calculated from the time the page-view or click is logged by our servers. So you can tell how long it takes to travel from our servers to your web browser. Usually it’s less than 1 second so the first number you’ll see as the new event is appearing in your browser is zero seconds.

So you can use this to tell exactly how real-time the data is that you’re getting – and unless you’re on slow modem connection or in Antarctica in a blizzard with a polar bear chewing on your satellite antenna… it should be very very real-time!

Keep the awesome feedback coming!!

Mark Maunder- Feedjit Founder & CEO

We’ve taken all your great feedback during the last few days and baked a new version of Feedjit Live which we’ve launched today. You can view Feedjit’s own live feed here and you can visit our home page to get your own completely real-time website traffic feed.

Some of the highlights in the new version are:

• Column titles explaining what the icons mean
• Better icon alignment
• Moved all the options to the top of the feed as buttons
• Put another ad block on the right side of the feed to help pay rent and keep the lights on
• Moved the entire page up slightly so you can see more entries
• We also fixed a bunch of things on the server side including some great performance improvements.

Keep the feedback coming by emailing us at support@feedjit.com – we read every email we receive and (while it may take a few days) we reply to every one.

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder & CEO

Shhh! We added a new secret feature to the live traffic feed that is still mostly hidden. If you scroll to the bottom of your traffic feed and click ‘Options’ you’ll see a new option to “Watch in Real-Time”. If you click this you’ll be taken to a page on Feedjit that lets you watch people arrive on your website in real-time. We’ve even added sound, so you can hear people arriving without having to watch the screen.

If you don’t have a live traffic feed yet, click here to watch visitors arrive and leave Feedjit.com in real-time. Then visit our home page to get your own live traffic feed complete with truly real-time stats.

We’re calling the feature “Feedjit Live” and we’re very excited about it. It’s possibly the first browser based real-time analytics available on the web. And like everything Feedjit, it’s completely free and you don’t even have to register to get it.

It works as follows: Your browser connects to our servers and then quietly waits. When a visitor arrives on your website, we detect it and our servers instantly ‘push’ out the new event to your browser and you see it immediately (and hear a “bonk” sound if you have sound activated).

We’re currently in a Beta test phase so please email any bugs you find or suggestions you have to support@feedjit.com. Enjoy!!

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder & CEO

This evenings maintenance was completed as scheduled. Please let us know if you have any problems or suggestions by emailing support@feedjit.com.

Regards,

The Feedjit Team.

Feedjit will be unavailable intermittently from 6pm Pacific time for a 6 hour window on Saturday May 24. For our international users, the 6 hour window starts at:

1am on Sunday May 25th GMT/UTC

10am on Sunday May 25th Tokyo time

We are performing a major upgrade to our systems. We will try to minimize the amount of time during this window that Feedjit is unavailable. As usual this will not impact the performance of your website. The only potential impact is that your Feedjit widgets may not appear on your website during this window and the Feedjit.com website may be unavailable during this time.

We will do our best to avoid interrupting the service during this maintenance window.

We are performing this scheduled maintenance to upgrade our systems and software. This will ensure that Feedjit widgets continue to provide you with the excellent performance and fast load times you’ve come to expect from us.

Please email us at support@feedjit.com if you have any questions or require any further information.

The Feedjit Team. <support@feedjit.com>

Vanessa Alexander, the author of 52signals has recently become a Feedjit user and has written a great blog entry about Feedjit.

Melissa who runs Creatively Mine recently discovered Feedjit and is loving it.

Caroline recently became a Fan of Feedjit.

Phos Tan is discovering new things about his traffic with Feedjit.

FunkyMomma is also a Feedjit user and asked a few of her quietly anonymous readers to speak up and they did.

These are just a tiny fraction of the blogs during the last few days who have mentioned Feedjit. We do a regular search using Google’s blog search engine to find blogs who have mentioned Feedjit in the last 24 hours. So if you have something to say about us you can either email us directly at support at feedjit dot com or just share it with your users on your blog and we’ll probably find you.

Have a great Tuesday, may crowds of new visitors arrive on your blogs this week, and I promise I’ll try to blog here a little more than once a month (!!!)

Mark Maunder – Feedjit Founder.