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 for building and profiting from websites. It covers everything from affiliate programs to flipping websites like real estate and came out last month. Check it out!

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. One will replace a current database server in order to move everything to a single physical location (less latency between the web and database servers), and another to expand the database server count to 3. Since I rearchitected the software to a database partitioned over multiple servers during the last upgrade, all I need to do is plug the new ones into a config file once they're built and online. Continued »

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 harder to track than they thought.

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 visitor labeling). By using the plugin instead of inserting the tracking code manually, the names of any previous commentors on your blog is picked up from the cookie WordPress sets and passed on to W3Counter.

Creating a dashboard widget was surprisingly easy. Of course, most of the code isn't in the plugin — I just fill the widget's box with an iframe that pulls up the stats from a specially formatted w3counter.com page. Some JavaScript trickery passes in the width of the box on your screen — if it's narrow, you get two columns of stats, but if your window is approximately 800 pixels or wider, you get three.

If you're using W3Counter on your blog, and have upgraded to WordPress 2.5, download it now.

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 »

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 the hard drive IO capacity of a single server, evidenced by maxing the IO wait stat on `top` and the daily afternoon site slow downs. Continued »

It takes me so long to do so little with Photoshop. Still feels like it's missing something too. Next thing I need to do, at least, is some CSS text replacement with images for those cruddy people still running IE6 with no anti-aliasing and without my favorite 'Trebuchet MS' font.

I won't have much time to get anything done over the next few days, so no updates for W3Counter users next week. I'll need to spend tomorrow and Monday working on assignments for classes, then studying for a few mid-week midterms I'm wholly unprepared for. Continued »