Owner of Awio Web Services LLC,
graduate student at Drexel U.,
community advisor at SitePoint.
LATEST PROJECT: WP Review Site 2.0
WebsiteGoodies.com on WordPress
I just moved Website Goodies, my oldest site at 12 years, over to WordPress as its CMS, replacing dozens of poorly written, exploitably bad PHP files and even worse databases. Now I can manage everything from one place and, perhaps, even give the site some new content. It’s still popular as far as my [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Bringing the web stats to your site
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:
Google can’t buy enough brain power to ignore text ads
The SEO community’s buzzing over official word from Google that selling text links can hurt your PR and rankings. It’s truly sad that $600-a-share Google is willing to ruin its own search results because they can’t figure out how to differentiate paid ads from useful links. They’re not always different things, either, one of [...]
#3 news on Digg.com Technology
W3Counter’s Global Stats page is on the Digg.com home page for its 4th time in the past year. I wonder if it’ll make it to the Diggnation podcast a second time? It’s a shame I don’t run CPM ads since every time this happens I end up with something like 200,000 extra page views [...]
Back to the plan… which doesn’t include MS
I’m making the decision now before thinking about it wastes any more of my time. Indecision and anxiety takes a huge mental toll on me — it always has. I prefer to be sure about the future and have as little on my mind as possible. That drives many of the decisions I make, [...]
The decision keeping me from blogging…
Do I take the job offer no one has ever refused, or do I go to grad school full time and work on building my dream business? It’s only a hypothetical situation right now, but affirmed after talking to my recruiter today, it’s virtually guaranteed to be one I’ll have to make in less [...]
The future of Google
I spend more time writing on forums than on this blog, so I’m going to start sharing the more interesting threads I participate in here as well.
WebDesignofMaine: Google is number 1. I think Google is going to take over the world. Think about where we are as a civilization, the information age, and who [...]
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