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

Moments ago we launched a new version of FEEDJIT that we’ve been quietly working on for months – which is why this blog has been so quiet. It has some incredible new features but the most exciting one is simply this:

We are sending your blog new Visitors!

Tonight we launched the Geoblogosphere. It lets you see which FEEDJIT blogs are popular in your city or any city, state or country in the world. If your blog is popular in your town it will appear in the Geoblogosphere for your area.

FEEDJIT is used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers world-wide. And across all those sites we track hundreds of Millions of readers. So a few months ago we decided to shove all that data into a database and ask it a simple question: What are people reading in my city today? And the answer we got was incredible! When fires were raging in California we discovered a Fireman’s blog with satellite photos of the fire. When the Seattle Sea-Fair was on, the most popular blog in Seattle was about the Hydro Races.

We’ve added a few controls on the right side that help you find local blogs you’re interested in. Check out the Language Filter. Try setting it to a foreign language for a US city or state and you might be surprised at what you find.

If you’d like to see what people are reading within 10 miles of you, change the radius from 60 miles down to 10. You may find a few neighbors who blog.

In the interests of keeping our site child safe, we’ve included an Adult Filter which is enabled by default.

The  second major new feature is:

You can now use the Live Traffic Feed Anywhere!

We launched a new version of the Live Traffic Feed tonight that works anywhere. Literally, anywhere you can paste an image tag. You no longer need your own domain and if your blog host doesn’t allow Flash or Javascript than that’s fine too! The widget is an image that we generate dynamically on our servers each time you load it. So it’ll run anywhere you can put an image.

We got a lot of requests for this from folks on Wordpress.com, MySpace.com and Microsoft’s Live Spaces, so it’s here!

Just like our Javascript Traffic Feed, the Image Traffic Feed widget is fully customizable.

Best of all it includes FEEDJIT Live. Once you’ve installed it, simply click the widget to watch people arrive on your site in real-time.

We hope you enjoy the new features and we’d love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think by sending us a message on our Contact Page.

Have a great week and we hope you enjoy the new visitors FEEDJIT sends you.

Mark.

Moments ago FEEDJIT launched a major new version. I’m busy writing a full blog entry announcing it. Check back here in a few minutes for more…..

Mark.

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

A few days ago Tony Bishop who runs bishfish.co.nz in New Zealand sent me an email. If we had a marketing department I doubt they could have written a better ad for our Popular Pages and Recommended Reading widgets. Here’s Tony’s email:

*snip*

I put Feedjit Visitors Also Liked widget on all 7oo plus pages on my website www.bishfish.co.nz around 3 or 4 months ago and the results have been astounding:

• Time on site per visitor has nearly tripled
• Number of return visitors has more than doubled
• Pages visited per visitor has nearly quadrupled
• Advertising revenue has more than doubled

To say I am a happy Kiwi would be gross understatement – thanks for a great product!

Tony Bishop
New Zealand
Website: http://www.bishfish.co.nz/
Blog: http://www.bishfish.co.nz/bishonfish.html

*snip*

Glad to hear it’s working out for you Tony. If you have had a great experience with one of our widgets and have some data to share, we’d love to hear about it! Email us at support@feedjit.com.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO