Delicious: Proof that Symfony is a scalable framework

Back almost a year ago, top social bookmarking site del.icio.us, now just delicious, launched a preview of its version 2.0. At the time they announced it was built on the Symfony PHP framework, what I used for W3Counter. With almost a year going by, and rumors of scaling issues, I worried that perhaps Symfony [...]

The Website Revenue Maximizer Kit

I’m a little late mentioning it, but I was an expert reviewer for SitePoint’s latest kit, the Website Revenue Maximizer.
I got my name in the credits, a mention and screenshot of W3Counter in the appendix, and a few other bonuses for myself. It’s a huge binder and CD with information, forms and reference [...]

W3Counter Grows Again

It’s been about 7 months since W3Counter’s last hardware upgrade, adding a beefy dual-processor dual-core server to the mix. Now, 6,000 new active accounts later, the site’s slowing down during the day again, which means there’s not enough memory and IO bandwidth to go around. I just ordered two more powerful servers from SoftLayer. [...]

FeedBurner Stops Reporting Reach

It looks like FeedBurner’s API has moved in with Google at Google Code. Without an e-mail or a blog post, they made a few changes that broke W3Counter’s slurping of feed stats. Notably, they are no longer reporting the “reach” metric for some feeds, and it’s disappeared from the API reference… perhaps it was [...]

Blog Stats Plugin for WordPress

In addition to a visual overhaul, WordPress 2.5 added several new plugin hooks, including a widgetized dashboard. The new Blog Stats Plugin for WordPress adds blog stats to the dashboard, and makes integrating the tracking code into a theme simple.
It’s also the first use of W3Counter’s “visitor labeling” I previewed in October (spooky [...]

W3Counter Updated Thanks to CNET

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 [...]

AJAX Live-Updating Google Map

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 [...]

Another W3Counter Widget Test

Multiple Applications, One Code Base

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 [...]

Growing W3Counter

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 [...]