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.

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 an hour now. I've also got a new website design in the works, as I seem unable to let go of it to an outside designer...

With room to grow once again, I've been working on the other features I planned for W3Counter back in the fall. The main task, which I hope will allow me to sell to bigger customers than my normal $5/month individual webmaster, is providing private instances of the entire service. The plan is to have three distinct products in the next six months — the hosted, individual service; a white-label private instance for designers, service providers, and networks of many websites; and a white-label version of the entire service for resale. Continued »

Considering I've been scheduling every hour of the day to get everything done for the past three weeks, I'm a little surprised SitePoint was able to expose me to their message enough times to get me to buy something. But they did, and it shows how effectively they market to their user base. I've barely found time to stop by the forums occasionally to check for spam in the areas I moderate, but the few trips to the site were enough that I've seen ads above the forums, on the site's home page, in its margins, in pop up ads, in targeted e-mails to me as a customer, in the blog and in a podcast. Continued »

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 people download and run W3Counter themselves — it's complicated to set up, with a complex database, a slew of cron jobs, and requires pretty recent versions of PHP and MySQL many hosts still don't offer. It's also unlikely to perform well on shared hosting, and I'm sure some would try to run it there anyway. Continued »

I'm still working on the widgets for W3Counter. I've have too many other things that need attention recently to bring anything to finished form, but at least I have 6 of the 8 planned widgets working and in testing. You've already seen pWidget, the page stats overlay. Here are a couple more: Continued »

The SEO community's buzzing over official word from Google that selling text links can hurt your PR and rankings. It's truly sad that $600-a-share Google is willing to ruin its own search results because they can't figure out how to differentiate paid ads from useful links. They're not always different things, either, one of many reasons why penalizing a site for carrying a text link is just wrong.

The search giant's argument is that too many people are buying links on websites in order to artificially boost their PageRank, a factor in determining search result ranking. Continued »

Every few weeks one of my advertising customers asks if they can split the hits from their ad campaign among multiple URLs without buying multiple campaigns. I had the free time over the holiday yesterday, so I made that happen. URLSplit does nothing more — you provide up to 7 URLs and get one like this back, which evenly splits the hits among the URLs you entered. The member area provides basic stats for all links you've generated. Built quickly and easily with, once again, Symfony.

The biggest problem that's surfaced with shifting the majority of orders to PayPal for payment is in tracking advertising. There's been a significant drop-off of hits to the thank-you page after making payment — customers are leaving after PayPal's receipt page without clicking the "return to site" button. Since the thank-you page is where the tracking code is for completed sales, it's showing a sharp drop in conversion while the number of sales has actually increased recently. Now I know that if I develop my own ad tracking software, it's going to need an API for other software (like a shopping cart / order fulfillment system) to send information about completed sales.

Continuing my trend of not taking any of the advice given, coming up with a new option instead, I don't plan to pick any of the choices I laid out for monetizing W3Counter. Missing from that list is what I am going to do instead — add more value to the paid accounts so that more users have a reason to pay. Simple solution, isn't it. Continued »