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FeedBurner Stops Reporting Reach

April 14, 2008

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 [...]

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WP Calais Auto Tagger: Automatic Tag Suggestion For Your Posts

April 10, 2008

I just completed the WP Calais Auto Tagger plugin, the obvious first use of my Open Calais Tags class. It adds a tag suggestion box to your WordPress post writing screen which suggests tags based on your post content using the Open Calais API. The suggestions can be added to the post’s tag list [...]

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Auto-Tagging Content with Open Calais

April 7, 2008

Calais is a free web service from Clearforest, a Reuters company, that can perform semantic analysis on any English text. It uses natural language processing to extract concepts and relationships from the text. It’s been around for a few months, but there’s been very little developer activity around it, and even fewer completed applications [...]

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W3Counter Updated Thanks to CNET

April 3, 2008

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 [...]

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Multiple Applications, One Code Base

January 12, 2008

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 [...]

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Bringing the web stats to your site

October 14, 2007

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:

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Unintended side-effect of PayPal

August 31, 2007

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 [...]

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Monetization Plan for W3Counter

August 10, 2007

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 [...]

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Whoa. Authorize.net has a recurring billing API?

March 20, 2007

I was days away from signing up for a new payment gateway, maybe a new merchant account to get access to it, for a recurring payment API. The credit card subscriptions for W3Counter are a mess because it’s all done manually — Authorize.net didn’t have an API for their recurring billing feature, and I [...]

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Simple File-Based PHP Caching

January 3, 2007

Sometimes dynamic elements of a page can slow down page loading or use too many resources for re-running the code every page load to be practical. The sidebar of this site touches four databases to pull up the stats it shows, and the counter I just added to the header gets its count from [...]