Monday 20 August 2012

Improved Error Management

Errorception turned 1 on the 15th of this month, and I thought I would do a major release for the birthday. However, you know how all software projects go. Fortunately, I'm only 4 days late. That's not too bad, right?

Automatic closing of errors

Starting today, all errors that haven't recurred over the last month are automatically marked as closed. This has caused the average list of open errors to reduce by over 70%!

The huge never-reducing list of errors was turning out to be quite the de-motivator, so I wanted to have a no-hassles way of keeping the list trim. The one month period is quite arbitrary, but most likely sufficient to ensure that the error has indeed disappeared.

And you can close them manually too

Errorception will keep working for you in the background, closing errors that haven't occurred in a long time. However, nothing beats the pleasure of manually marking an error as closed. Errorception hasn't provided that pleasure so far, but now you can clear your list as you please.

Re-opening errors

If an error was closed, and then for some reason occurs again, Errorception will re-open the bug for you. This way, you can keep your errors list trim, while we work in the background ensuring that you aren't missing recurrences.

Ignoring errors

This has been a highly requested feature. If an error isn't something that you can fix, usually the case with third-party embedded scripts, you can now ignore the error. Occurrences of such ignored errors will still be recorded, but will be tucked away from the main error listing to help keep your list clean. Just a quick reminder: we have always been ignoring errors automatically for you, based on several criteria. This ability has now been exposed to you as well.

And much more

The stuff listed above is just the biggest of the features in today's release. There are several small enhancements too. After all, this release has been in the making for almost two months! Poke around see if you can spot them.

Feedback welcome as always!

6 comments:

  1. great list of features! looking forward to trying them out.

    I'm getting some errors from error ceptions code in my log though!

    'Object doesn"t support property or method "log" '

    in beacon.js
    browser is IE 9.

    looks like you may have left a console.log in the code somewhere or something

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    1. Thanks, Patricia.

      I just double checked to make sure there are no log lines in beacon.js. If you are using the snippet from your settings, which uses the script at https://d15qhc0lu1ghnk.cloudfront.net/beacon.js, you can see that there's no .log in there. It's very weird that you get this error. Could it be that you get this error either with some other beacon.js file, or when an error is actually recorded?

      (I do a console.log when an error occurs so that you know that the error has been posted, but it's with a ``if(window.console&&console.log)`` to ensure that there are no errors.)

      Delete
  2. Hey Rakesh,

    It looks like it was something at the users end interfering with the site working properly. Looking at the user agent, they have a malware/toolbar that i've seen cause other weird errors as well.

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  3. Nice work!
    One thing I would like to see added in the future is an API so we can integrate the reporting into other projects. Is that something that is planned?

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    Replies
    1. Yes! Haven't actually started work on an API, but Errorception would be incomplete without it. Will be working on adding one soon.

      I didn't understand the bit about "integrate reporting into other projects". Do you mean taking the errors from Errorception and putting it into another bug reporting system? (I'm totally fine with it, but I want to understand how you'd use the API so I can build it accordingly.)

      Delete
  4. Cool. Yeah something like that.
    The support staff for some of our products are not all at the same company / don't need to see every error and we could target different alerts from the data received at different departments.

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