These are the major websites and other projects I’m working on right now:
W3Counter Live Web Stats
I regularly blog about updates to the fourth major version of W3Counter, my subscription web stats service. The latest version, in closed beta testing around March 2007, was rebuilt from the ground up with the Symfony PHP framework. It’s a challenge in extracting the maximum amount of information while minimizing the cost of recording and analyzing raw data from sites the service tracks. W3Counter provides real-time analysis of over 8,000 websites, handling over 150 queries per second. I also produce the popular Global Web Stats report every 10 days based on aggregating data from all of the tracked websites.
WIKIWIP: What I Know Is What I Publish
WIKIWIP is a project I’m involved in at Drexel University creating a wiki to formatted document converter along with several other Computer Science students. We expect the program to convert complex wiki documents to either LaTeX or XML and XSLT which can then be converted to a PDF or other formatted document format for printing and sharing. WIKIWIP is meant to facilitate collaboration on printed documents such as books.
Open Calais Tags
A PHP class for interacting with the Open Calais web service API. Open Calais is a free semantic tool for extracting concepts and relationship metadata from English text. This class allows a PHP developer to pass in a string of text and receive back an array of categorized entities. It’s useful for tag suggestion and auto-tagging of content and released under an open source license.
WP Calais Auto Tagger
A WordPress plugin using the Open Calais Tags class to suggest tags in the post writing interface based on the contents of the post.
WP Calais Archive Tagger
Another WordPress plugin which goes through all the posts in a WordPress blog and adds tags using the Open Calais Tags class. It can process more than 100 posts per minute.
DG Review Site Plugin for WordPress
The DG Review Site (DGRS) plugin for WordPress allows you to turn your blog into a powerful review engine. It’s flexible in design and presentation so you could use it as an additional interaction feature for your blog to collect reviews of your posts, or to drive a product/service review site where your users contribute the reviews.
Activity Stream Plugin for WordPress
I developed Activity Stream to be able to track and publish my activity on “web 2.0″ sites from my own blog. The linked page and the sidebar block are both powered by this plugin, which polls APIs and RSS feeds of these sites given my credentials on a regular basis, maintaining a local database for performance. I didn’t see interest from others in using this, so I’ve never released the code. I plan to do so anyway when I find the time to polish it up.
Blog Printing
I’ve started development on a service which makes printing blogs more convenient for both publishers and readers. It takes a number of posts from the RSS feed of a blog and combines them into a single formatted PDF document that can be printed for offline reading. The publisher needs to do nothing more than provide a button or link to print the blog, and the reader can choose what posts they wish to print as a single document. I put this on hold before my last job but plan to complete it at some point, especially as I may be able to use what I learn doing so in the WIKIWIP project.
Advertising Tracking and Analysis
A yet to be named service for tracking the results of online advertising. This service is still in early planning although some development work has been done to facilitate real data collection to test correctness as I build. I’m still figuring out the unique angle to make this worth completing… if it’s just the same as what’s already out there, that isn’t worth building.
