Spring Cleaning and Making way for HD3

Published January 9, 2012 by Richard Uren

Right now we’re putting the finishing touches on HD3, our new detection system. To get on the HD3 advance notice list simply drop your details into this form. The new system is a complete rethink of how a high performance detection system should work.  You’ll be able to run it from your servers or ours and its blazingly fast.

HD3 uses a new API with a new schema (in plain English that means both data format and the way its queried are different), however there is legacy mode for queries on our servers, so you’re not left high and dry when migrating from HD2. If you’re using Javascript, with that little code snippet you paste into the tops of your web pages then nothing will change.

Some existing features of Handset Detection are not coming along for the HD3 ride. Effective immediately we’re cancelling the Affiliate System for both developers and referrers. Payments will continue until July 2012.

We’ll be replacing the affiliate program next week with a referrer program. Each friend of yours that uses the service will earn both you and your friend 2500 bonus detections each month.

Happy Detecting.

Related posts:

1. Upgrading Mobile Analytics
2. Ruby on Rails API Kit goes gold
3. New Website Goes Live

New Detection Clusters

Published December 8, 2011 by Richard Uren

Over the next few weeks we’re making a few big changes to our network to improve efficiency and performance. There will be no service disruption however IP addresses of server groups will be changing while we shuffle our computing power around and upgrade servers.

To minimize the impact on folks with Handset Detection IP addresses in firewalls we’ve created api-corpfw.handsetdetection.com as a drop in replacement for api.handsetdetection.com. This allows us to dynamically add and remove ip addresses to our existing api.handsetdetection.com alias and keep api-corpfw.handsetdetection.com as a fixed set of IP addresses. Dont worry if you dont know what that means (its really just a note to corporate IT departments acessing our API directly).

To kick things off we’ll shortly be bringing on line 176.9.20.58 & 69.64.68.80 – Woo Hoo ! :-)

Image Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/yallen33

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1. Upgrading Mobile Analytics
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3. New Website Goes Live

Cut down on device detections with this handy javascript tweak

Published November 24, 2011 by Richard Uren

Kudos to Sterling who wrote in a while ago with this handy tweak. Using this you can place  javascript on each page of your website without chalking up extra detections plus it loads the script dynamically. Genius ! Thanks Sterling.

(function () {
    'use strict';

    var head, script, siteid, domain, internal, mobilesite;

    siteid = YOUR-SITE-ID-GOES-HERE;
    domain = new RegExp('DOMAIN.com', 'i');
    mobilesite = 'http://m.DOMAIN.com';

    head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
    script = document.createElement('script');
    internal = document.referrer.search(domain);

    script.type = 'text/javascript';
    script.src = 'http://api.handsetdetection.com/sites/js/' + siteid + '.js';

    if (internal === -1) {
        head.appendChild(script);
    }

    script.onload = function () {
        if (HandsetDetection.ismobile === true) {
            document.location = mobilesite;
        }
    };
}());

Get the Gist of it.

Image Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/peternijenhuis

Related posts:

1. Our Mobile Detection API – Now serving from a location near you
2. Optimizing for Mobile Websites : The 3 Template Trick
3. Handset Detection in 2 easy steps.

Server issues resolved, Making Amends and HD3 Launch

Published November 17, 2011 by Richard Uren

Earlier this week Handset Detection experienced intermittent outages, delayed service and high network latency (for the non technical people out there thats basically all bad).

The actual problem was a 3 fold combination of a traffic surge (which we would usually have ample capacity to handle) combined with a caching bug and the accidental removal of a default device profile by one of our handset maintainers.  The system, when looking for this default profile, would rebuild the device cache and save it. However the bug caused caches to be rebuilt 5 times per second (placing an extremly high load on our servers), rather than once every 8 to 10 hours. Combined with the traffic increase it was enough to have a serious effect on our service.

At the time I was sure the problem was traffic based and so ordered lots more servers. Thats what operations guys like me do, I see servers struggling and think, ‘Well, there’s been no software updates, and traffic is up, therefore ‘Get More Servers, That’ll fix it’ – And it did. Then we fixed the real problem and all those shiny new super fast servers went virtually idle .. .. .. So, rather than begging for a refund with our hosting suppliers (good luck) we figured a better use would be to give something back to our community, by way of an apology, or an amends.

So, From Monday November 21 until December 26th Handset Detection will be uncapped ! Thats right unlimited detections from November 21 right up until Christmas (well Boxing Day technically) for everyone. Hooray ! and sorry for the hassle. (Note : You’ll still get quota email notices but you can safely ignore them).

One last thing from me today. Whenever issues like this crop up folks always ask about a stand alone detection service, to run on their own servers. Early in the new year we’ll be releasing our HD3 in memory detection engine and device database for stand alone use. Its wicked fast and now has the caching bug fixed :) To get on the launch list please drop your details into the HD3 Launch Notification form.

Image Credit : Chantal W. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nanjenchan/

Opera Mini, Access/NetFront, Openwave classification updates

Published October 23, 2011 by Richard Uren

Today we’re performing device updates which might have an impact on how you use Handset Detection.

Previously, unidentified Android handsets running Opera Mini would return Opera as the vendor and Mini 5 as the model along with Opera and Mini 5 as the browser, with Android as the OS.  After the todays update we will return Android as the vendor and Generic as model with Opera as the browser and Mini 5 as the browser version. The same applies to Access/NetFront, Openwave and any other mobile based browsers.

This is more keeping in line with our policy where specific hardware can not be determined that it be referred to as having either a generic vendor or generic model.

Image Credit : KCIvey @ flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/kcivey

Related posts:

1. Upgrading Mobile Analytics
2. Ruby on Rails API Kit goes gold
3. New Website Goes Live

Mobile analytics migration complete

Published October 19, 2011 by Richard Uren

Migration into our new mobile analytics system is almost complete, we’re just catching up on the last few days of processing now. One unintended side effect of delaying processing during migration was that customers who’s accounts ticked over during the migration windows are now getting slugged for last months detections in this month, which, well, isn’t fair.

So we’ve reset everyone’s detection counters to Zero on their main accounts only (the detection quotas are only accounted for off your main account). Hooray ! If you would like your site counters reset as well then let us know and we’ll hook you up.

We hope you enjoy the new system.

Image Credit : Shazwan @ Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/photos/shazwan

Related posts:

1. Upgrading Mobile Analytics
2. Ruby on Rails API Kit goes gold
3. New Website Goes Live

Upgrading Mobile Analytics

Published October 15, 2011 by Richard Uren

Flowers by Peter Gorges

Hi Folks, Its been a while. We’ve been busily building out our new Mobile Analytics system which I am very happy to announce will go live shortly on our servers. Highlights include a massive speed improvement (up to 1000x in some cases), flash free charts (instead of a blank box on your swanky new tablet you’ll now get a sweet, informative, chart) plus mobile browser and mobile language stats – which we found lurking about the place !

You’ll know the upgrade is in progress when you see this orange message on the login screen :

Hi, We are presently upgrading analytics. The full upgrade will take 72 hours.
See our blog for more information.

Like the message says, the upgrade itself will take 72 hours. That’s a theoretical 72 hours, factoring in things as best as we can judge them. Worst case it might run to 96. Records will be migrated from most recent to oldest, so your 30 day stats should be fine after 5 or 6 hours. Close to 120 million MySQL records needs to be examined, tweaked and cross referenced before finding their new home in our shiny new MongoDB servers. Its all scripted of course so we don’t have to do that by hand ! Phew. :)

This is a complete rewrite, from the ground up, and it paves the way for us to do much more interesting things with mobile analytics in the near future. We hope you enjoy it.

Analytics will be online during migration however you might find inconsistencies in totals while the migration is in progress.

Detection services will not be affected by this upgrade.

Image credit : Peter Gorges @ Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/petergorges)

UPDATE : Upgrade delayed until Monday 3pm Central.

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New Detection Engine live Wednesday August 3rd

Published July 26, 2011 by Richard Uren

Over the last two months we’ve been secretly developing a new detection engine. Two weeks ago we plumbed it into the service and began testing. On Wednesday August 3rd 2011 I am very excited to announce that we’ll be taking it live.

Its leaner, more accurate and much easier for us to maintain than our current system.

There’s nothing you need to do to use the new engine, all detection services will use it automatically.

Happy Detecting

Richard

Detection quotas rollover issue.

Published July 26, 2011 by Richard Uren

We are experiencing a problem with rollover of detection quotas at the end of account period. All monthly limits have been reset to zero while we trouble shoot the issue to keep the detections a flowin’.

Cheers

Richard

Update : The period rollover issue has been fixed – Keep the reset counters as a few free detections on us. :)

Operations Mailing List, Updates, Outage Notices

Published June 22, 2011 by Richard Uren

We know you rely on our infrastructure and timely information is critical when problems occur, so we’ve set up an Operations mailing list.

The Operations list will get emails when we push major updates, run server maintenance, add new equipment, experience outages or degraded performance. Essentially its anything of an operational nature which might have an impact on the system.

So go ahead, drop your email into the form below to keep in the operations loop. It strictly for operations only, and you can unsubscribe at any time.