I’ve just updated the Open Calais Tags PHP class, which allows you to automatically tag content with Open Calais’ free semantic analysis API. It now uses the v4 API’s REST URL and no longer adds a semicolon to the end of each tag. It’s also been updated to support new entity types added since the last release of the class.

I also updated the two WordPress plugins I released using this class, WP Calais Auto Tagger and WP Calais Archive Tagger, so they should be in working order again as well.

If you’ve been meaning to use WordPress’s new built-in tags, but are too lazy to come up with a good list every time you blog, give the plugin a try. Comments, suggestions and bug reports are appreciated.

Not finding any other work to build on, I wrote my own PHP class for extracting tags from content with Open Calais’ API. You can get the source and read more here. This class takes a block of text or HTML, sends it to Open Calais or parsing, and extracts all of the entities (things like peoples’ names, companies, technologies, etc.). It returns a multidimensional array organized by entity type.

There’s more Open Calais can do, but I hope this class contributes something to those PHP developers that’d like to start using it but had no place to start with the lightweight documentation and eerily quiet official forums. I plan on putting this class to work as an auto-tagging plugin for WordPress posts. I still need some time to figure out how to integrate that into the new authoring interface of WP 2.5, which this blog is now running on.

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.

The last is something I haven’t discussed before, but not a huge leap from the white-label instances. With a billing module that allows an administrator to plug in their Authorizenet API key and PayPal account instead of using my own, someone could sell W3Counter under their own name at their own price easily. With the new architecture, their instance can scale as easily as mine by adding servers as needed.

I don’t want to maintain 3 separate code-bases though. That would be a major hassle to maintain, porting bug fixes and features between the three each time a change is made. I’d much rather have just one which can act as necessary through a simple configuration switch I’d only have to make when the instance is created for a new customer.

I’m doing this with Symfony’s filter chain. The settings for the main W3Counter instance upon which all the normal accounts run are set in the application’s settings file (app.yml in Symfony). These include things like the name of the site, logo image, colors, rows per page in reports and time zone. They also include switches related to whether the application is running in ‘W3Counter mode’, ‘private instance mode’, or ‘reseller mode’, such as whether the account area includes the ability to upgrade a plan and whether the signup form is enabled.

By adding a filter class to the chain before the execution stage, I can look up overriding settings in a configuration file or in the database. On the main W3Counter instance, these won’t exist, and the ‘W3Counter mode’ settings will remain in effect. On a private instance, they will be present, and the filter class can call the sfConfig class methods to set new values for all the settings before they’re read during execution or rendering phases.

In the future, another link in the filter chain can do the same for individual user settings. An individual user can override some of the application and instance settings with their own, such as their local time zone and preferred rows per page or color scheme.

A nice side-effect of writing the code for all this is that I finally have a back-end administration area for myself. I never take the time to write them for my own use; I just muck around with the database directly. Now I’ll have an interface for managing users, plans, and application options too.

I hope W3Counter’s users like the widgets. They’re as easy to add to a site as copying a single line of JavaScript, but completely customizable at the same time. Most of them will allow you to customize borders, colors, sizes and fonts with JavaScript variables. A nice interface with some color pickers and sliders should make creating a custom widget easy as copy-and-paste.

I like the idea of putting stats on your site. I’ve already got the “Popular Posts” on the right and the custom counter at the top of this blog powered by W3Counter’s API. There’s a bunch of statistics on other sites of mine in the footer. Now the less technically savvy, and free users that don’t have access to the API, can add stats to their sites and blogs too.

Unlike Google and investment-backed startups in the space, everything I do with W3Counter needs to consider cost. I don’t have the luxury of cash to burn in the name of innovation or just plain bloat. Widespread adoption of the widgets would take a toll on the limited server resources available to the site. At least implementing a cache was dead simple. Symfony saves me time again and again. Cacheing the full output of the widgets for every user with a 5 minute expiration takes exactly this much work:

/apps/w3counter/modules/widgets/cache.yml:
all:
  enabled:     on
  with_layout: true
  lifetime:    300

I build them anyway in hope that they might bring in new users and perhaps some new subscribers. And because I love to build things. That little interactive visitor map was a lot of fun.

I had to derive the formula to convert longitude and latitude to coordinates on a given size map image with an origin in the upper left. Then I had to find a mercator projection map of the world, the type of flat map that keeps latitude and longitude lines at right angles at the sacrifice of distorting the continents, or else a point in California might end up somewhere in the sea. I found one somewhere on a CIA site, and overlaid it to the vector map I wanted to use with 50% opacity and scaled my map until the continents lined up.

Then I wrote out the JavaScript to plot the points and attach mouseover functions to display the location in a partially transparent tooltip. It took a while but now I know how a service like Google Maps knows where to place its markers on a flat map given latitude and longitude.

$x = ($longitude + 180) * ($width / 360);
$y = (($latitude * -1) + 90) * ($height / 180);

W3Counter should be a model product for Awio going forward. It’s everything I want to be selling:

• Created in-house, so I can be confident in both selling and supporting it effectively. I have full transparency into how it works, so there’s no problem I can’t investigate and solve for a user.
• Costs, in terms of money and time, do not increase significantly with each new user.
• Operation is nearly 100% automated, and since it “just works”, support mails come maybe once or twice a month.
• Providing real value to every user. Unlike the advertising services, it’s free to try, and everyone gets something out of it no matter their experience level.
• Users love it. I’ve had a survey up after log in for over a month now, have received over 100 lengthy replies, and everyone is genuinely happy with it.
• All of these combined lead to a product that can be spread by word-of-mouth rather than paid advertising. I’ve never had to advertise the site, and new users sign up every day.

Adding ads, throwing in tons of teasers, reducing limits… these all detract from what I want W3Counter to be. I don’t think compromising on quality will convince users to upgrade. The real reason few people upgrade is because they don’t see any compelling benefit of doing so. Those that have upgraded did it because they have more than one website — tracking more than one site from an account is a good benefit, but most users only have a single site, and most sites fall within the usage limits of the free plan. The stats-by-RSS benefit isn’t something most people understand, let alone want to pay for. Only a few hardcore developers make use of the API. There’s little left being offered for that $5 to $15 per month.

So what can I give?

It won’t be more reports – I don’t want the free users to feel cheated by not having access to vital information. I want to treat them so well they fall in love with W3Counter and want to upgrade just out of thanks – if only they didn’t have to pull out their wallets. They should be on the brink of doing it at all times, such that when they check out the list of reasons to upgrade, when they see these new reasons, they’ll follow through.

It won’t be date range selectors, or bigger log sizes, or even bigger limits. The business model won’t support free users if the few paid users use drastically more resources. $5 a month doesn’t buy new hardware for that user. The benefits shouldn’t require lots of resources for me to provide, but they must provide value to the users nonetheless.

For starters, I think these two features would add a lot of value to the type of user willing to pay for a low-cost web analytics solution:

1. Export any report to CSV or Excel format. Suddenly the reports have more business value at little cost to me. They currently don’t print well due to the Flash graphs and paging, and can’t be easily analyzed outside the website. They can’t be taken offline or easily sent off to a manager for a status update. Exporting all the data for a report at once in a print-friendly, import-friendly format can provide all this.
2. E-mail any report, and schedule e-mails of any report, to any number of e-mail addresses. This could be easy as a scheduler to run the export, attaching an Excel spreadsheet to the mail. More premium users than not use the daily, weekly and monthly summary e-mails. Now they can do the same with the reports they are interested in. They can get these reports without checking the site, and other relevant parties can get reports without having access to the account or learning to use the site.

I have some other ideas along these lines, but I don’t want to talk about them just yet. Combined with higher usage limits, SSL tracking code, and e-mail summaries, I think this could make a decent feature set to target small business. The type of business without a full IT staff, without a budget for enterprise-grade analytics, and for individuals that treat their sites as more than hobbies.

Aside from improving the features and plans pages of the site to better sell the benefits, I’m thinking of doing some direct mail selling as well. I think if done right, it can come across as something unexpectedly delightful instead of a put-off. I would need to start collecting addresses from free users on signup. I’d send a letter (heavy paper, professionally designed, screenshots and all, like a printed webpage) welcoming the user and highlighting some features, including the premium ones.

I’d also throw in a couple W3Counter stickers. People love free stuff — the inclusion of the stickers can change the perception of the letter into a positive instead of a possible negative. Stickers don’t appeal to everyone, but I think that W3Counter has a certain feel to it that wouldn’t fit the type of person to be turned off by stickers in the first place. It’s bright and shiny. The stickers are perfect for sticking to a laptop lid or computer.

They serve two more purposes – continually reminding the user about W3Counter, and as a trigger for word-of-mouth advertising.

1. They’re shareable. With a handful of stickers, the recipient will be likely try to think of someone to give some to before throwing them away. New people get exposed to the service.
2. They’re a conversation starter. I don’t expect people to get super excited over stickers, but if even a single blogger were to write about it, that’s a new link and new vector for continuing the word-of-mouth advertising.

I haven’t thought this all through yet, but I think I’m on the right track with the plans. I won’t be implementing any of this until after I’m back in Philadelphia in late September. That gives me time to think of more premium features worth paying for, ways to get users to think about them, and continue building on the idea of adding direct mail to the strategy.

Then I revisited SitePoint’s forums, where I’m only active about 3/4 of the year. I spend a lot more time there when I’m working than when I’m in school, and have only been checking private messages there regularly.

I read a post by stymiee, one of my favorite members and another great contributor to the forums there, and noticed his signature: Authorize.Net releases their Recurring Billing API – GET THE CODE. I was amazed. Authorize.net had created a recurring billing API and not even mentioned it in the announcements list that shows up whenever I log in to my account there.

I’m very, very excited about this. I don’t have to switch gateways, and I can get W3Counter’s accounts in order. The only way that was ever going to happen is with automation which I can now do. So, along with a server move, I’ll be upgrading the upgrade code. Things are looking up for the hosted service.

That makes this a good time to provide a little update on the downloadable version… it’s falling behind. These past three months haven’t provided as much free time as I had hoped. I took way too many classes to devote the time to a big project considering I need a decent amount of time just to keep the whole business running. The process of finding a new job sucked up a good bit as well, and getting ready to move is taking up some of the free time I have right now during finals week (the rest goes to studying for finals and completing final projects and papers, of course).

I’d like to get back to it and finish it since there’s still demand for the product, but I can’t put a date on it. I am actually hoping to see an increase in “free time” after moving to the west coast simply due to the time zone change. If I can start my days early enough to leave work before 4:30ish, I’d be able to join the occasional World of Warcraft raid on an east coast server to relax (or a few rounds of Gears of War on the XBOX 360 which I’ve finally gotten around to turning on once or twice), then still have hours left afterwards to get something done.