News

We've added the ability to filter each of your dashboard lists such as Top Pages, Referrerals and Countries by simply tapping the filter icon () in the list heading. This allows you to quickly find specific items without paginating through the entire set. Give it a go.

Counting unique visits without using cookies is challenging. Cookies usually store a unique ID that allows web analytics services to distinguish you as a returning visitor or a first-timer.

Read how Cabin uses browser cache and last-modified headers to distinguish unique visitors on our Normally Notes blog: Counting unique visitors without using cookies, UIDs or fingerprinting.

Over the past few weeks we've improved Cabin's bounce rate tracking. Our new method is now more precise and reliable. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page and leaves without visiting any other pages on your site.

Bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of these single-page visits by the number of total unique visits on the site.

You can read more about bounce rate in our docs: Bounce rate

Today we've updated our CO2 calculations to utilise The Green Web Foundation's CO2 library. This has been enabled by the work explained in Sustainable Web Design - Calculating Digital Emissions, which is regularly updated to include the most recent research and information.

Our old method was explained in a previous post here.

What does this mean in your dashboard? CO2 calculations of your web pages are now considerably less (by ~60%).

Cabin has been running in closed beta for over 18 months. In that time we've served over 250 domains and around 6 million hits a month. This has enabled us to monitor and optimise all parts of Cabin to help reduce energy and costs.

It's now time to open up the service to the public and introduce two accounts: Free and Pro. Both accounts allow unlimited page views per month, but Pro offers some insanely good features, such as automatic CO₂ reporting, custom subdomains and custom events.

We're proud of where we are, and would like to thank every beta user that's enabled us to build this service. Please keep the feedback coming as we build and improve Analytics for the future.

We’ve changed the URL structure of public dashboards. They now use a unique id instead of the domain name.

Old:

https://withcabin.com/public/example.com

New:

https://withcabin.com/public/PaNSy9a0XOpn

This enables you to share the dashboard more discreetly and revoke and redistribute access at any point. It also prevents crawlers from discovering public dashboards.

This means that you should now update your public links if you publish it on the web. You can find the new link in your domains settings.

Today we've introduced custom subdomains to allow our users to bypass ad-blockers. This means that visitor's requests can be directed to your own subdomain instead of Cabin. This will improve the accuracy of your analytics if Cabin is ever blocked by browser based ad-blockers. Find out more in our documentation Custom domains.

We've now added weekly email reports to Cabin. These will land in your inbox every Monday morning around 8am (according to your domain's timezone). To enable reports for a domain, go to domain > settings > email reports. In the future we will create more advanced reports and add the ability to use multiple email addresses.

We're constantly working on improving the carbon analysis tracking. We've now incorporated the inspect view in a popup within the dashboard. Soon we will introduce a simpified page score based on the most popular sites on the web.

How does carbon tracking work?

Carbon tracking works by analysing all the files loaded on your website to calculate a total bytes loaded. Your page is only checked if:

1. It receives page views.
2. It has been longer than 3 days since the last check.
3. It has been modified. We know this by checking the page header last-modified and comparing the html against our last saved hash. This way we can save energy by skipping unnecessary assets if they haven't changed.

Determining how many bytes a visitor loads

Once we have a total bytes for your page we determine how much a visitor might have loaded by assigning them a percentage.

• Their first visit - 100%
• Their first visit to the page, but not to your domain - 50%
• Not their first visit to the page - 5%

Our carbon calculations essentially take the same approach as websitecarbon.com with a few tweaks.

We've now given referring Tweets their own section in your dashboard. From now on, new tweets will be visible here. Older Tweets will remain in the Referrals section.

Displaying Tweets on any website requires careful consideration as embedding content from social networks carries through cross-site tracking cookies that allow the social network to track your movements and fuel targeted advertising.

To stop Twitter tracking our users we've stripped our Tweet display to the bare minimum without using Twitter's preferred implementation. The Tweets on your dashboard intentionally don't include image previews or like buttons to protect your privacy.

We would like to extend a big THANK YOU to all the beta users on Cabin. Our private beta allows us to battle-test our service and ensure we are doing everything we can to optimise it - reducing bandwidth, costs and carbon consumption.

In recognition of this we will ensure your account is kept free to use.