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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 letting [...]
$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 [...]
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 [...]
