ARCHIVES

Product in a Day: FeedLines

July 29, 2008

This is my first attempt at building a simple product of my own to sell, rather than a service or subscription. I watch the SitePoint Marketplace on an almost daily basis, and I see so many simple, turnkey sites sold and resold on a consistent basis. While the scripts behind these sites may seem simple [...]

AJAX Live-Updating Google Map

February 20, 2008

A new report I’m considering adding to W3Counter is a “Live Map” — a Google map that shows visitors arriving to your website in real-time. It updates every 3 seconds with an AJAX call, instantly recenting the map on each new visitor and popping up their information. I’ve had fun staring at it for half [...]

Results: PayPal as a primary payment provider

February 18, 2008

It’s now been just over 6 months since I made PayPal the primary payment method on my ecommerce sites in an effort to reduce losses to fraud (see Will 53% of customers switch to PayPal and Betting on Igor). It takes a long time to see the effects of something like this, since chargebacks tend [...]

Recommended Designers or Holding a Contest?

January 15, 2008

I need a new website for W3Counter, and I can’t design it. I need to reorganize the site and there are going to be lots of new service plans and features to show off.
I’m thinking of holding a contest at SitePoint, but I don’t know if I’ll get good results from this. I’m not [...]

Growing W3Counter

January 6, 2008

Like every year since spinning off W3Counter from Website Goodies in 2004, it’s exceeded its hardware capacity once again in December. Initially the service shared a Celeron 2.4/512MB server with all of my websites. It then grew into its own Pentium 4 3.0GHz/1GB server, then into a 2-processor 4-core Opteron/4GB setup. This time it’s outgrown [...]

Getting the most out of college

November 3, 2007

Midterms are over, assignments are in. I set up a wiki, Subversion repository, trac and Bugzilla for my senior design project team. Time to work on the business again. No time to sleep in, though… Saturday morning I’ll be up early for a workshop on testing business concepts at the Baida Center.
Drexel University’s Lebow [...]

GoDaddy: I’ll be easier on you from now on

October 21, 2007

I always recommend people stay away from GoDaddy when they’re looking for shared hosting. It’s not their primary business and they have way too many customers. The result is packed, locked down servers missing key features, and poor support from inexperienced technicians.
But at least they didn’t bungle up the VPS product like 1&1 did.

They want to buy — I better start selling

October 20, 2007

I’ve had a number of people come to me looking for a W3Counter plan that can handle more than the “Pro” plan. More websites, more pageviews, or sometimes both. If people are knocking on the door asking to buy, I need to figure out a way to sell what they want. I decided against [...]

Ouch, credit card fraud bites hard as ever

October 10, 2007

$3,000 disappeared because I didn’t notice the pattern for 4 days. Some fraudster attempted to place orders using 69 different credit cards before I closed all the accounts and refunded all the charges. Looks like this person had a large list of credit cards about to expire he was running through, since a few couldn’t [...]

Interviewed by InterviewsWith.com

September 14, 2007

I was recently asked by InterviewsWith.com to be one of their first interviews. That interview is now online and can be viewed by subscribing. The site reminds me of Josh’s FiveQs.com except it’s run by e-mail — a mail is sent out each time a new interview is available with a link to read it [...]