We've been a little quiet on the product announcements recently. That's mainly because we're working on some big enhancements that are coming soon, but in the meantime, in addition to a ton of bug fixes and minor enhancements here are some changes that we think you're going to love.

Map Styling

Since we released the custom maps widget in June we've been bombarded with requests for enhancements. Top of the list was the ability to change the size and colour of map points. Well now you can!

Updated documentation can be found here but, in short, you can either add the size (1=tiny 10=large) and colour attributes next to the coordinates of each point or, for greater control over appearance, simply add a CSS class to each map point and upload a CSS file with the required attributes for that class to define the point's colour and opacity and it's stoke attributes.

Look out for country and region map zooming in the next couple of weeks.

Chartbeat & GoSquared Maps

If you're using real-time web analytics services chartbeat or GoSquared you can now see the location of your most recent visitors on a beautiful Geckoboard map. WARNING: Watching this update can get very addictive, but if you're a real-time map junkie like me then you're going to love it!

Private RSS & Atom Feeds

In addition to regular, public RSS and Atom feeds that you've been able to display on your dashboard for some time, from today you can also display private feeds that require a username and password. This is great news for customers of tons of services out there that offer protected feeds and getting them on to your board is a snap. You can find the RSS and Atom widget under the "Notifications" category.

That's all for now but we're looking forward to hearing what you think in the comments below.

You can use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

A few weeks ago one of our customers asked for the ability to filter data returned from Google Analytics, they wanted to see pageviews for specific URLs on their Geckoboard status board. Yesterday we quietly rolled out that feature to all customers and I wanted to show you how you can use it to filter both dimensions and metrics from Google Analytics.

You can find lots of in-depth information on how to write Google Analytics filters on Google's documentation page but for now I want to run through a couple of practical examples.

To start, let's create a new Google Analytics widget: New widget >> Web Analytics >> Google Analytics. You'll notice a new (optional) field called "Filters" on the widget configuration screen. Entering filter parameters in here allows you to filter by almost anything including multiple dimension and metric filters together.

Let's start by adding a filter to show only pageviews by Firefox users from the United States. Use the following settings in the widget configuration

• Metric Category: Visitors
• Metric: Pageviews
• Filters: ga:country==United States;ga:browser==Firefox

Breaking that down, we're using ga:country to restrict pageviews that came from the country "United States". We used the operator == here which ensures it's an exact match, but there are other operators we can use including =~ which matches based on a regular expression. An example of this might be to add a filter to restrict pageview numbers where the URL matched a regular expression.

If you want to restrict the pageview metric to only URL matching ^foo (i.e. your URL starts with foo), add the following filter

ga:pagePath=~^foo

To match ^foo OR bar$ (url starts with foo OR ends with bar) you need to use a comma to separate terms: 

ga:pagePath=~^foo,ga:pagePath=~bar$ 

To match ^foo AND bar$ (url starts with foo AND ends with bar) you use a semicolon to separate terms: 

ga:pagePath=~^foo;ga:pagePath=~bar$

This doesn't scratch the surface of what's possible with Google Analytics filters but a look at the documentation and some experimentation should get open up a ton of possibilities.

Don’t forget, use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

 

This is something I've been looking forward to announcing for some time now. Welcome the latest addition to our custom widget types -- the custom map widget!

Many of you have been asking for a way to visualise anything with a geographic element including the location of current site visitors or dispatch addresses for recent orders on your dashboard, and now you can.

If you're feeling creative you can knock out a script to connect to the increasing number of location aware web services with APIs and see location data side-by-side with your key business metrics on your Geckoboard status board.

We're starting with a custom widget only but many existing integrations will have a map widget added soon, stay tuned for further updates.

Check out a live map widget here.

Version 1 of the map widget accepts:

• Lat, long coordinates
• IP addresses
• Host names 

It renders the location of each point on a beautiful map which updates frequently. We even have some new widget sizes for these maps so you can really show it off.

We're currently testing further input types such as city and postal codes and I expect these to drop very shortly. In the meantime, check out the documentation in our support forum and get started on your own geo-feed!

Don’t forget, use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to find out about all our updates and news.

I'm excited to announce that you can now upload almost any data you want into one of four custom data widgets.  That's right, instead of waiting for us to integrate every service you use (which we want to in the fullness of time) you can just do it yourself!  With a little scripting knowledge you can see data from any service with an API on your Geckoboard status board.  But the possibilities don't end there, you can also free up data locked inside your own databases or bespoke applications for display on your status board.

Find out more about the Geckoboard Custom Data Widgets API in the API documentation which also contains example scripts to get you started quickly.  

One Geckoboard user who has already done just that is @steveWINton (Steve Winton) who wanted a couple of social media widgets that Geckoboard does not have (Twitter follower count and Facebook fan count).  Not only did Steve go out and build them for himself, he's also made them available to all Geckoboard users (no coding required) - you can see Steve's instructions at http://j.mp/geckowidgets.

That's not all we've been up to since the last update, more highlights from the past couple of weeks include:

• Google Apps Email support
• Google Apps Calendar support
• GitHub support
• "All Projects" view of Basecamp milestones & to-dos
• A raft of bug fixes and minor enhancements
• Some changes to streamline the addition of widgets
• Titles for clocks and limited Daylight Savings support
• Bigger text boxes

We're just getting into our stride and have many more integrations and improvements being actively developed and yet more in the pipeline.  The one I'm looking forward to most in the coming few days is Foursquare widgets; location information should suit a status board well I think!

As ever, a huge thank you to all our beta testers whose patience and generosity is really driving the product forward.  If there's something you're desperate to see on your status board please drop by the Feature Request forum and let us know, or why not try plugging it into a custom data widget yourself? :)