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W3Counter Updated Thanks to CNET

April 3, 2008

Some time this morning someone submitted W3Counter’s Global Stats report to Digg with a headline about the increase in Linux market share. The story crossed the threshold for a front page listing but was auto-buried… perhaps because that page has already been on the front page at least 4 times this year.

A CNET blogger wrote it up soon after, essentially just linking to the Digg story and the report itself. Now the CNET story’s reached the front page of Digg where the original URL couldn’t — nothing stops Diggers, eh?

In the time between the first story and the second reaching Digg’s front page, I was able to finish and test the new code for upgrading accounts with Authnet’s CIM API. With that, I pushed out the new website and code (sans a few minor things I want to test over the weekend that I commented out links to).

Even with the layer of indirection, W3Counter’s seen over 15,000 extra visitors so far today. I expect it’ll probably see at least 3 times that before this is over as reddit, stumbleupon and other social sites are starting to send the secondary traffic directly to the report. Now I can see how the new website does at attracting signups and upgrades.

If you’re reading this on my site, as opposed to a feed reader, hold Shift+W on your keyboard for 3 seconds.

Categorized under: Marketing, W3Counter

4 comments

  1. April 7th, 2008

    Darren wrote —

    Hi Dan, found your blog through SitePoint! I might have to switch to W3Counter if you have cool widgets like that that allow me to view stats from the website! That takes the cake!

  2. April 13th, 2008

    ChrisM wrote —

    Just to let you know, your IP>Country Flag code doesn’t appear to pick up/translate my Kazakhstan based IP address. Also, have you considered installing a ‘Subscribe To Comments’ email type plugin?
    I’m not at home right now, but your auto-tagging plugins look really useful, thanks for all your hard work.

  3. April 13th, 2008

    ses5909 wrote —

    Thats pretty cool Dan. How was the CIM integration? I haven’t done it yet.

  4. April 13th, 2008

    Dan wrote —

    Not bad. I’ve always tested Authnet using my live account, not a developer account or test mode. I just run my own card for a dollar and void it. Testing CIM that way turned out to be a little dangerous.

    When you submit payment information to CIM, you get back different reference IDs to use when you want access to that profile or payment info in the future. If you submit the same information again, you get an exception back telling you it’s a duplicate… but if you haven’t written code to capture those IDs yet, or the code doesn’t work, you could end up with info stored but no way to retrieve or delete it since you don’t have the IDs.

    If I wasn’t dumping all the output to the screen, I could’ve ended up permanently storing my own credit card with Authnet and having no way to retrieve or delete the associated payment ID. I’d never be able to buy from my own sites using CIM again since I wouldn’t have the payment ID and submitting it again would give me a duplicate info exception.

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