We’re constantly updating the Pulse website with new features and improving existing ones. Our dev team works iteratively and releases these changes as and when they are ready to go live.
Rather than writing a blog post about each change, we’re introducing a new section of the website called ‘Release Notes.’
In the new Release Notes section, we’ll post details of any changes to the website that are not big enough to warrant a full blog post but that we think you need to know about. That way, you can keep up to date with the changes we’re making and check the history of a particular feature or piece of data.
IXP Tracker Updates
To launch this new feature, we’ve got some exciting improvements to the IXP Tracker to announce.
We’ve been examining how we use the source data from PeeringDb and have identified ways we can better process it to make the IXP Tracker data more accurate and useful for you.
Many of these changes came about as we rewrote the code behind the IXP Tracker, taking the research that was the starting point for the tracker and integrating it more closely with our core Pulse codebase. As part of this rewrite, we created a standalone library to manage the processing of the PeeringDb data, and we have open-sourced this library for all to see. If you want to know more about the exact logic we use to calculate the numbers in the IXP Tracker, or you want to run the analysis yourself, then it’s all there for you to download and install.
As a technical note, we decided to write this library as a standalone app for Django. We use Django as the basis for all our core code, and given that storing and retrieving data using Django is so central to the IXP Tracker, we decided it wouldn’t make sense to rewrite it as a ‘pure’ Python library. Django is a very popular Python framework and there’s a lot of amazing documentation available, so if you haven’t used it before and you want to install and run it, you should easily find some good instructions to do so.
See the Release Note for more details.