If you're new to Performancing's PMetrics web analytics service - or simply haven't checked your stats panel lately - you might not know about some of the new "daily" features in the Dashboard section. You can see them in the screen snap below, in the green-highlit area.

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There's a lot of great new features in the new pMetrics, although some of them may not be as obvious at first glance. First we have a quick rundown of the major new features for the impatient. After that is a very detailed list of every single thing that's changed, which you'll want to read if you want to know everything that's new.

The downtime for this upgrade was longer than expected because we also had to fix the referrers database table, which was corrupted - the reason why everyone was getting weird searches in their visitors list. Another reason the the upgrade took so long was that we fixed nearly everything that we didn't like about the old database design. With as much data as we have stored, transforming it is a slow process. That aside the whole thing took considerably longer than we thought it would and we are really sorry for being unavailable the entire weekend. There is a 48 hour backlog that is currently processing and we should be all caught up by Tuesday morning.

Quick rundown

• Bounce rate - shown in "the basics" dashboard module. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who only have 1 action, and is typically a good measure of how interesting your site is.
• New visitor filtering interface, makes it very easy to find and analyze any subset of visitors. Filters work across multiple days now, although we are limiting it to 7 days max for the moment. When you use data export with any filters applied, those filters apply to the export as well. Screenshot
• New centralized area to manage all site preferences. Click the "cog" icon in your site's tab bar.
• Most active visitors - shows you the people who come to your site the most often within the specified date range
• Visitor hostnames and organizations - much more interesting than a list of boring IPs. We plan to add a site preference to always show visitors by IP for those of you who prefer that instead (we've had a few emails already)
• More accurate numbers for searches, links, and content
• Recent and Newest Unique for searches and links. Very useful to find new sources of traffic to your site, that won't get buried in the long tail
• Tracking code updates - pMetrics is now perfect for tracking Flash and Ajax sites - more info here. Also, you can now customize the "pause" length when someone clicks a download or outbound link (defaults to 500 milliseconds).
• API - all visitor and action filters work with the API now, they didn't before. (browser, os, country, page title, etc). We've also added all the new data types to the API (most active visitors, bounce rate, etc).
• Popular data pages (searches, content, etc) now have trend data just like the dashboard, including the ability to click the trend percentage and see daily history for that one item. Also added "next page" button so you can see beyond the top 50. I can't think of any good reason why I never did this before, because it's basically the most obvious feature in the world.
• Easier to name your visitors - when viewing details for a visitor, next to their IP is a link "name this visitor" which takes you right to the IP tagging page with the IP address filled in.

The long and extremely detailed version

New visitor filtering features

- Slick new filtering interface with popup menus, easy to add/change/remove filteres on the fly

- When you filter visitors, it also analyzes all of them and gives you useful summary data, and compares it to the site average for the selected date range. Pro users have the ability to compare it to another sub-set of visitors too instead of just the site average.

- Filters now work across multiple days! With the old system, if you were looking at "last 30 days" and selected google.com as the referring domain, it would only show you one day of results. This was intentional because the system was not optimized to support querying such a large span of data. It is much more optimized now - BUT - we're currently limiting them to 7 days until we can get a feel for how much impact they will have on our service with real world usage.

- Some new filters: custom data (e.g. usernames or emails), cities, screen resolutions, and links. (Links meaning, the full link someone used to get to your site - before you could only do this with the domain name. Now you can filter your visitors down to just the ones who came from the exact URL you input.)

- "Anything" filters, e.g. domain=* will only return visitors who arrived at your site from another site. This even works on custom data tracking, e.g. custom[username]=* returns only visitors who have a name assigned to them .... Partial wildcards aren't supported yet, but we plan to add them in (e.g. domain=*google* won't work - yet)

- The global maps page has the same filtering interface and options as the visitors page (as it did before with the old filtering interface).

- Actions page got the new filtering interface too, but the filters are obviously different. You can filter by page URL, page title, and action type (pageview, download, outbound, click). You used to be able to filter actions by the same criteria as visitors, such as country or web browser, but that really doesn't make any sense and has been removed. Page URLs and titles support ending wildcards, e.g. "/some/path/" would only return actions on that specific page "/some/path/", while if you entered in "/some/path/*" (asterisk on the end), you will get actions returned such as "/some/path/more/stuff/" and "/some/path/another/path/". ENDING WILDCARDS ONLY! (for now)

- When you use the data export feature while you have any filters applied, those filters will apply to the export as well! Works with both actions and visitors.

New centralized area to manage all site preferences

- Managing site preferences used to be a pain, as they were scattered all over the place - some on your user page (which a lot of you never even see), and also some on the stats pages (like the dashboard prefs). It was a confusing mess, as indicated by the number of emails we got from people looking for these things. So we fixed it! There is now a new main tab on your stats page that takes you to the new site prefs section. From here, you can get info about your site (sitekey, etc), manage your dashboard, manage ip tags and filters, edit your site (timezone, domain, etc), and get your site's tracking code. All in one place. Much better.

Visitors

- Most active visitors. This shows you the people who have visited your site the most in whatever date range you have selected. If they have a name, it shows that and links to it, otherwise it shows and links to their IP. It's grouped by IP though, not username or hostname or organization. Grouping, filtering, and sorting by IP address is the most optimized way to do this, and since it's reading through so much data, it's the only realistic choice.

- When viewing visitor details, there is now a link next to their IP address "Name this visitor", which, you guessed it, takes you right to the IP tagging page with the IP address filled in. We've received billions of emails about making this easier. I agree the old way was horrible. Hopefully this will satisfy!

- When viewing your visitors list, the visitor's name is chosen in this order of priority: Username (from IP tagging or custom data tracking), Organization, Hostname, IP address. This gives you a lot more info up front about your visitors, since a list of IPs is pretty gosh dang boring and useless. When you click on a visitor, it used to always just link to their IP address, even if it was showing their username. Now it links to whatever is actually shown. If they have a name, it will filter you visitor list by that username to show all visits from that one person, even if their IP address is different between visits. If it shows an organization or hostname, clicking on that will filter down the list by that organization or hostname. If you want to see the details for just one visitor, click the "# actions" link to view their session. From their you can click the IP address to find all other visits from just that user.

- Visitors list no longer shows browser and OS icons next to each visitor, to give more room to the referrer and search data, and also the hostname/organization if applicable. You can still see anyone's computer info by viewing their details.

- Visitors list now has a visitor's search as clickable (to initiate filtering by that search), also you can hover your mouse over the search to see the full text instead of being limited to the first 20 characters or so

- Visitor hostnames - up to now you could only see the hostname for any visitor when you clicked on their IP or viewed a session. We limited it to this view because looking that info up is slow and saps resources. Now we are using a product from MaxMind to lookup the hostname for EVERY visitor automatically when we process that visitor's traffic. However, just like the geolocation product, it's not guarateed to be 100% accurate, because IPs are always changing hands - but it should be pretty good. Also, it's not a full hostname lookup, but just the top and second level domain. For example, visitors using Comcast cable internet will show up as "comcast.net", not their full hostname which might be something like "24-60-143-200.hsd1.or.comcast.net".

- Visitor organizations - this is another product from MaxMind that tells us the organization that this IP is assigned to. For home users, this value will typically be their ISP name (e.g. "Comcast Cable"), but otherwise should be the name of the company or corporation that the IP is assigned to, e.g. "Microsoft Corp".

- You can of course filter visitors by either of these two new criteria.

- Two new sub-tabs under visitors tab to view the most popular hostnames and organizations, also added as sub-tabs to the "Locale" dashboard module.

Much more accurate numbers for searches, links, and content

- Referrer and search data is now only logged for the first action of any visit, instead of any and every action. This prevents multiple counts for people who show up at your site, click a link, press back, click a link, press back, etc etc... Each time someone presses back, their browser sends us the referrer data again, even though it's no longer "fresh". We used to log this data and increase the count for the applicable link and search, but now we don't. Potential problem: every once in a blue moon you might have a visitor who shows up at your site, then a few minutes later shows up again from a search engine or link because they searched for something on your site after seeing it on your site. This new system will not log these links and searches, but we think the trade off is well worth it, and this circumstance is so rare it should not be an issue.

- Page titles - Unique pages are determined by a combination of URL and title, but non-javascript users don't send us the title. This has been a big problem, because the pages they view have been seen as unique from the ones everyone else views. Now when we get sent a page with no title, we try to find an entry in the database for this URL that has a title and we link to that one instead.

- Page URLs - Link #hashs are stripped off the end of URLs (for both your pages, and referrers) so that they don't get counted as unique. However, they are left on the end of URLs for file downloads, outbound links, and clicks, because these may be more relevant, particularly if you are using javascript on your pages.

Searches and Links: Recent, and Newest Unique.

- Recent is just a log of all searches and links to your site, newest to oldest (similar to what used to be sub-tabs under the Actions tab, except presented in a much better fashion now. The old way was really just an ugly hack). "Newest unique" means searches and links that have led someone to your site for the very first time (since you installed pMetrics). This helps you identify new traffic sources, and also makes sure you don't miss any "long tail" items. If you're looking at "today", it shows you the newest 50, no matter when they occured. However, if you are looking at the past or a specific date range, then it will only show the ones that occured within that time. Note that this won't work for dates prior to today, as previously we were not tracking the date/time that a link or search first occured. This also means that searches and links you've already had will show up in "newest unique", even though they technically aren't. So this feature won't be much use for a few weeks until most of your common and popular searches/links get tagged as new. Patience!

Tracking code updates

- You can now customize the length of the "pause" when someone clicks on a download or outbound link. It currently defaults to 500 (milliseconds, aka, 1/2 second). To change, set a global javascript variable called clicky_pause_timer (timer, not time) to the value you want, e.g., var clicky_pause_timer = 200; This must go BEFORE the tracking code on your site. The shorter you set it, the more likely that the data won't be logged, because there may not be enough time for the visitor's browser to contact us before moving to the next page. It's a trade off, but now you have the power to tweak it to your liking. Previously, the only option was to completely disable it.

- Those of you using the clicky.log() function - there is a new action type, "click", that is also the new default if you don't specify a type. This makes more sense than defaulting to "pageview" because typically if you want to track when someone clicks on an item, I have trouble thinking of a scenario where that should be counted as a page view. Clicks have a new icon in the action log, they show up with the mouse icon (same icon as in the main "actions" tab). There is also a new "clicks" sub-tab under the content area, to show you the most popular clicks. Most of you probably won't be using this but some of you will.

API

- All visitor and action filters work with the API! For visitors: country, city, language, browser, os, resolution, domain, search, link, hostname, organization. For actions: title, href, action_type [pageview,outbound,download,click]). All values must be URL encoded. For "global" types of data, e.g. things that are not specific to your site only (country, city, language, browser, os), you do have to type them in exactly right, which is unfortunate since you don't necessarily know how we have them stored. e.g. you might try "browser=msie" and get no results, because we have it stored as "Internet Explorer" so you would have to do "browser=internet+explorer". We plan to add in some flexibility here, and also have a list for you to download of all the official values.

- All new data types have been added to the API (bounce rate, most active visitors, recent unique links, etc)

Other minor features, tweaks and bug fixes

- Bounce rate - percentage of your visitors who only viewed one page. This is shown in "the basics" on the dashboard, and also when using visitor filters.

- Popular data pages (searches, content, etc) now have trend data just like the dashboard, including the ability to click the trend percentage and see daily history for that one item. Also added "next page" button so you can see beyond the top 50. I can't think of any good reason why I never did this before, because it's basically the most obvious feature in the world.

- Time has always been rounded to the nearest minute, which is fine for large values, but a bit obnoxious for smaller values such as individual visitor times. Now we always display the seconds for all time values that are less than 24 hours. Also, the minimum time for a visitor is now "5s" instead of "less than a minute".

- On the dashboard, in "the basics", previously you couldn't click the trend link for "total time spent" and "average actions/visit" to see their history. Now you can!

- When viewing daily trend data for one item on the dashboard or any of the other pages that support it, each date is now a hyperlink that will take you to the visitors page for that date with the appropriate filter to instantly view and analyze those visitors. Confused? How about an example: You are viewing daily trend data for visitors from google.com. You click the date "Mon Jan 14" - this will take you to the visitors page, with the "domain" filter set to "google.com" for Jan 14.

- Our date math for selecting entire consecutive months has been fixed. Huh? Ok, sorry this gets a bit confusing as well... Say you were viewing the entire month of Dec 2007, that's 31 days. If you viewed the actions subtab on the dashboard, it would show you the total number of actions in that period, and then going back previous periods too. Those previous periods used to be based on the number of days in the selected period, which means it would be the 31 days before Dec, 31 days before that, etc. Obviously not every month has 31 days, so the selected ranges were a bit odd. This has all been fixed so if you view an entire month, all the previous period before that are whole months as well.

- "Referrer" is now spelled correctly in all places, except API output variable names, which will be changed upon the next API release. I place all blame on Apache for corrupting my otherwise stellar spelling. I'm not alone: http://www.google.com/search?q=apache+referer+spelling

- You can enter in "*" for site mirrors, which means traffic will be logged for any domain (good for sites with lots of sub domains). Better sub-domain support will come in the future.

- Feedburner icon only shows up in the tab bar if you have it configured for that site.

- IP tagging page - now you can click on the name or IP in that list to view all visits by that name or IP.

- Dashboard trends - for "today" trends, these have always been estimates, and not hard figures. They would be too intense to calculate otherwise. This has understandably caused confusion for some of you. Now, when you hover the mouse over a trend, it will say e.g. "~500 yesterday". The ~ signifies it's an approximation and not an exact figure.

The following new features are for premium members only!

- Hostnames
- Organizations
- Bounce rate
- Most active visitors
- Visitor analysis when you have filters applied.
- Visitor comparison analysis (comparing two subsets of visitors ("Pro" only))

Well, that's it. Enjoy :)

There's a new version of pMetrics ready to go with tons of new features, but I was holding off on releasing it because I'm so busy at the moment. Part of this release copies all data from existing database tables into new tables, because they are now formatted differently and much more optimized. Fixing the referrers table would take a while because it is so big, and it's basically part of this new release anyways, so I'm going to bite the bullet and start the transformation for the new pMetrics tonight, probably around 7 PM USA PST. We have a lot of data to chew through so I expect it to take around 24 hours. After that it will take another 24 hours or so to catch back up with real time data.

Sorry for the short notice, but you will be thanking me kindly when you get to play with the new release. In development for nearly 3 months now, it has a ton of great new features that make the product truly wonderful to use.

A number of you have reported some rather odd and typically pornographic searches appearing in your visitors list. At first I thought sites were just being linked to the wrong search ID in the database but after analyzing a number of sites I don't believe this is the problem. If it was, it would be affecting everyone, but instead it's only affecting some of you. How many I'm not sure but we've had about 5 people email in about this.

I will be looking into this over the weekend. Based on the patterns I see, I believe someone is spamming the service, rather than it being a problem with the database itself. But, I will let everyone know what I find out and when I get it fixed.

We've had a new server ready for a while now, but we're so busy, we were being lazy about moving the service over to it. Then the past couple of weeks, things went down the toilet. The old server was (still is) dedicated to all things Performancing, but pMetrics wasn't the only processor hog onboard. Along with some other high traffic sites, it also handles a ton of email. pMetrics became a very sad panda. It couldn't keep up with real time anymore because it just wasn't being given the love and attention it deserves from the precious CPU. There were big holes in your traffic, stats were not updating in real time, etc - I'm sure you noticed.

So we decided we had to take action, even if that meant taking the service at the worst time possible (the middle of the week). We could have kept it running until the weekend, when we wanted to do it, but because of the problems it's been having, there wasn't any point to that.

It was only supposed to be about a 12 hour ordeal, but it turned into 48. Part of the problem was that the servers are in different locations, so transferring the database between the two takes a long time, even compressed. I managed to screw it up twice, which means the entire database was transferred 3 separate times. Talk about efficiency! Ugh. That alone cost at least 10 hours of time. There were some other headaches the server was causing me too, some legitimate, some absolutely stupid, but that's how these things go. I now know how I won't be doing this next time. Hopefully, I'll get it right.

We are of course very sorry about all of this. We are offering partial refunds to all paying premium members to make up for it. $5 to to Blogger accounts, and $10 to Pro accounts. If you would like a refund, please send an email to support@performancing.com. Be sure to include your registered email address so we can lookup your account.

Or perhaps you're understanding of our pain, and realize, hey, these things happen - after all, we're not Google, we don't have a 100 billion dollars and the top PhD's from around the country working for us. That'd be cool too. We're not exactly lighting our cigars with Benjamins or anything.

So anyways, everything is just peachy now, but we're giving pMetrics a chance to process a 48 hour backlog of traffic before we open it back up again to the public. When it does open up, it won't be fully caught up yet, so expect some holes for at least another 24 hours until it's all done and good.

I am very sorry for how awful pMetrics has been recently, it's completely unacceptable to me, and to you too, I'm sure. There are many factors contributing to these problems and NONE of them will be an issue on the new server, because it will be dedicated to nothing but pMetrics, which is how it should have been from day one.

We have had a new database server ready for over a month but because of many other things happening at the same time, the move has been delayed more than once. I'm SO excited to report that it will finally happen as of tomorrow (Wednesday). I would prefer to do this on the weekend because there will be some downtime during the move, but the most important thing is to get the service running smoothly again as soon as possible. If that means downtime during the middle of the week, then that is the cost, and at this point, any cost is worth making the service good again.

On a happier note, a new version of the software has been in the works for nearly 2 months now, and it's got a lot of great features. It is planned for release in early January, and I promise you will love it dearly. There will of course be a huge post about it when it's ready so stay tuned...

I use Google analytics to track my blog stats. But since I've been more involved with Performancing and I like the community here, I decided to check out Performancing Metrics (PMetrics). I installed it on one of my blogs. I've been playing around with it for the last couple of days. It's a good stats program especially if you want to see the activities of your visitors more closely.

Candy Addict shared a post about using PMetrics to find out email information. Here are 10 other cool things you can do with this interesting application.

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Performancing Metrics (aka pMetrics) Gives you an amazing amount of detail about the visitors to your site. In some cases, it's the same data you get from other packages, but it's easier to get to and understand in pMetrics. In other cases, it's the kind of data you don't get elsewhere (easily).

Here's an example of a piece of some interesting information I gleaned from pMetrics. I run a candy blog and many times when we review a product, I have a contact with the company already and I email them when we write about one of their products (you do this every time you mention or review a product on your site don't you?). Recently, we reviewed a product and I had no contact with the company so I went to their site (let's call it abc-company-xyz.com) and found a generic contact form (no actual email address), so I filled it out letting them know we had reviewed their product.

The next day, I'm looking at pMetric's Top Referers for the day and I see a link from mail.abc-company-xyz.com and when I click on the pMetrics link, it shows me the full link is
http://mail.abc-company-xyz.com/exchange/sue.smith/Inbox/Candy+Addict+review+of+our+product.EML?Cmd=open - what do I get from this? My email got routed to someone named Sue Smith (name changed) and she can more than likely be contacted at sue.smith@abc-company-xyz.com - I now have an email address for someone inside the company and I can email her directly now.

Another example of email-related info I get from pMetrics: I can see what links to my site that people are emailing. How? On the Top Referers page in pMetrics I see various links from webmail sites like by102w.bay102.mail.live.com, us.f820.mail.yahoo.com, webmail1.webmail.aol.com, etc. Click on the link and you will see the visitor's info then click on the actions link and the first action (their arrival on your site) is the link that was sent in an email to them.

To see even more, change the url in the browser on the page that says "Visitors from us.f820.mail.yahoo.com" and remove the beginning subdomains (us.f820 in this case) so the URL just has mail.yahoo.com in it and you will see all emailed links that were clicked from Yahoo mail.

You should realize that this doesn't show you every link to your site that was emailed - only the ones that were actually clicked in a webmail application.

Please accept our apologies for the pMetrics downtime this week. We had an unexpected but serious database corruption that took a long time to fix, much longer than anyone anticipated. We should have been more vocal about this, as we have in the past, and will try to do so next time. It kept seeming like it was almost fixed, and then something else would happen. Time flies and here we are two days later.

But things are finally back to normal again... well, except for the fact that you have several days of traffic missing. But don't worry, we still have it, it just hasn't been processed yet. Being that pMetrics is more focused on the present than the past, we are giving your new traffic priority. The traffic that's missing should show up in your account within several days.

The pMetrics database server is really feeling the burn right now. You have probably noticed it is an hour or more behind real time for much of the day. We're not ok with this. One of our biggest selling points is "real time", right?

We have an awesome new server that should easily handle three times the current load. pMetrics will be moving to that within 2 weeks time. It's not quite as easy as it may sound, as we have to ensure a seamless transition and not lose any traffic data! This requires quite a bit of preparation. Just know we are aware of the slowdown issue and working to fix it.

pMetrics is coded to work in a multi server environment - the current hosting environment doesn't allow that easily but the new one will. As we grow more in the future, we will be able to add more database servers to accommodate, quickly and easily.

Thanks for listening!

We have an awesome new widget for pMetrics users, available on our Goodies page. This was created by a third party (Scott from Curious Concept) and uses our API to grab all the data. It's very well done and closely mimics the pMetrics dashboard in both looks and functionality. I would include a live copy of it in this post but no javascript allowed unfortunately :( There is a screen capture to your right, though.

Seriously now - head over to the Goodies page and play around with the demo running on that page, fall in love, then get it installed on your site, or on iGoogle.

If you're interested in developing your own widget, here are some relevant links:

API documentation
Submission guidelines

Enjoy!

I am happy to announce the release of version 2 of the pMetrics API.

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Those of you who are just looking for a great way to display blog stats in your WordPress Dashboard, read no further. Sign-up for pMetrics and then download the plugin.

But connoisseurs of innovative technology take note. Performancing is today releasing what we see as a major step forward in WordPress plugin technology. The innovation that we are introducing is at the level of fundamental architecture and can be generalized for numerous applications. We demo the technology in our 1.0 pMetrics plugin release.

Several months ago over at College Startup, I wrote a post over at College Startup entitled Open Source Priority #1: One Click Updates. The general idea behind the post was that we should move beyond the old-art of software updates (deleting, downloading, unzipping, re-uploading). The old-art is especially problematic when running dozens or hundreds of blogs.

After making that post, I realized that I should do something about it. Enter Sean Hickey from Headzoo. I explained my ideas to Sean and asked him to execute this new software architecture, using the pMetrics API in the hopes of killing two birds with one stone: 1) making a killer demo and 2) giving pMetrics users an expandable, auto-updating plugin

In a nutshell here's what the pMetrics plugin offers:

1. Auto-updates (this option can be toggled on and off)
2. One-click installs for added functionality
3. One-click removals (deletes files off the server)
4. Blog stats in your WordPress dashboard
5. Latest searches display
6. pMetrics rank display
7. Auto-installation of pMetrics javascript code

Coming Soon

8. Auto-installation of affiliate banner in sidebar
9. Blog sales page with detailed pMetrics statistics
10. Feedburner integration

and much more...sky's the limit.

Download the plugin now

pMetrics looks like it has been assigned a strong PR 6 in the August 2007 toolbar rollout. That means that the early-bird advertising rates have now expired.

But don't fret. You can still get great deals on both text links and graphic ads on a subdomain that has over 885,060 backlinks. Leverage our 4,000+ pMetrics users and massive backlink strength to jumpstart your business quickly and efficiently.

Pro and Blogger pMetrics members can pick up a link for $45/month. Non-paying pMetrics users get a link for $59/month. Everyone else can get a link for $79/month.

Just get in touch with me at ryan@performancing.com to get your ad campaign started today.

Some great updates to the new dashboard have just been released! New features include being able to set a few preferences for how trends are calculated, being able to pick and choose only the modules you want displayed, and being able to choose how much data is shown within each module. We also released some new modules, one for FeedBurner, and some others that are designed to closely mimic the functionality of the "old" dashboard, for those of you who liked that. Google Maps will be coming soon.

Now, we have decided to create a new page for all the customizing you want to do, rather than have the "live" dashboard be customizable. I know that it may be handy to be able to change the dashboard as you are using it, but realistically most people will set it once and leave it be. Having it on a seperate page also saves us from forcing you to download an 80KB JavaScript file when you load the dashboard. That speeds up loading time for you, and saves a bit of bandwidth for us.

So just click the pencil icon in the top right corner to access this new screen. At the top is a preference box to customize trend calculations, which includes if you want Today's trend to take into account the time of day, as well as being able to choose if you're single day trends should be compared vs the day before, or vs the same day last week (e.g. this Monday vs last Monday). There is also a preference to permanently choose the "old dashboard" as your dashboard of choice. But before doing that, please keep reading to learn how you can make the new dashboard look like the old one. Screenshot

Below that is all of your currently active modules, shown in a simplified form, and a new third column called "disabled". You can drag modules into there to remove them from your dashboard, or take them out of there to make them live again. Each module also has its own drop down box that allows you to choose how many results you want to see within that module. Screenshot

Unfortunately, we had to wipe everyone's dashboard layout, because it was incompatible with the new one. But don't worry, we're positive you would have wanted to use the new customization screen anyways, so no hard feelings! Plus, we added the ability to copy any site's preferences and layout to all of your other sites, so that will end up saying you a lot of time with any new changes you make!

The new default layout only displays "the basics", links, searches, and content, which is what most people care about. "Locale" and "Computer" are interesting, but relatively stable, so by default they are no longer shown.

There is also a new "layout presets" area that includes "old school dashboard", which closely mimics the layout and functionality of the old dashboard. Everyone who dislikes the new dashboard, we encourage you try this layout and see if it works better for you!