p.s. Here are some of the forthcoming additions to Pulse:

- hide User Agents from general reports (so they don’t take up as much space). This will be optional though as many people get a buzz when the search bots show up

- truncate/wrap long referer* urls (need this in order to prevent long urls from bleeding)

- add pagination to long reports

These have already been partially implemented so we hope to have them available in the next update.

* Did you know that “Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer. It is so common, in fact, that it made it into the official specification of HTTP – the communication protocol of the World Wide Web – and has therefore become the standard industry spelling when discussing HTTP referers.”?

Thanks Wikipedia.

Update 03/05/08: we’re back from the Miva Merchant conference and working on Pulse. Today we have added a product name field with sorting to the Product Stats, fixed a bug that arises when you are blocking IP addresses, and changed to Order Stats referer so that it picks up the initial referer–the site the visitor came from rather than the page that lead them to the checkout. (In hindsight, it’s obvious that’s what it should have been doing but these things sometimes get overlooked when you’re knee deep in the code!) There isn’t an update as yet as we also want to include a handful of other tweaks and fixes.

Here are some screenshots so you know that it really does exist:

Last year we attended the Rails Conference.  One of the speakers asked the crowd, a room of  maybe 1000 people, how many had blogs.  Very nearly 1/2 the crowd raised their hand.   I personally doubt that 500 people in that room really had something to say worth reading.  And I suspect the same can be said for most of what I  would really like to say (which is probably where all those other bloggers go wrong).  That said, I’m going to try to focus on what you might be interested in reading, mainly information on our modules and development (current and future).  Also feel free to make suggestions on subjects you’d like to hear me ramble on about.   At least that way I’m guaranteed at least one interested reader.

First up will likely be a discussion on the upgrade of Affiliate Manager to 5.x.

Michael Brock
a VikingCoder

We will have the documentation available for this next week (August 6 +)

For starters, here’s a list of our current schedule for Merchant 5 upgrades:

• Soft Goods 5 - currently under development, will do away with the need for the php bridging script needed for the earlier version
• Affiliate Manager 5
• ELM Statistics 5
• USPS Advanced 5

The order is somewhat fluid–sponsorship and/or high demand tends to drive a module up the list.

We are also seriously considering a template system for Merchant 5 and would like you feedback on this. Our initial focus will be on current users of our Merchant 4 template modules, allowing them to get the same look in Merchant 5. But let us know–Are you satisfied with Merchant 5’s inbuilt templating system?

In case you missed it, Phone Order Manager 5 was recently released, joining our stable of popular upgrades from Miva Merchant 4. USPS Advanced soon followed, rounding out high-level shipping modules for the most commonly used shipping calculators. We’ll have a 5.x version out later in the year.