ZeptoBlog

Now here is a real geek thing to do. So my Mom has this web site that that I have been helping her with but the hosting service that she signed up for is charging her an arm and a leg for the webspace and they provide very little in the way of configuration tools and service. So, what do I do? Of course I go out and sign up as a webspace reseller and buy web space in bulk. So let’s think about this, my mom’s site needs about 2 megs of web space and a database. So, of course, I buy 10GB of web space. Now, I’m not going to charge my mom for all of that web space. I have a plan.

I will sell the extra web space for cheap. That’s right, if you want cheap web space with all the configuration tools you can stand, this is the place to get it. $5 per 100MB (1GB bandwidth) per year. This includes apache, php, mysql, perl, cpanel, 100 email addresses, and more running an a linux server.

If you are interested, email me at zeptoblog at zeptoworld dot com.

So I was talking to my brother about web tracking software. There are a couple of things that are always bothersome when dealing with tracking traffic to your web site. First, none of the trackers that are out there seem to provide all of the information that you want. All too often, you have to put more than one tracker on your page just to get the reports you need. Secondly, if the tracker is free then the terms of use ensure that you put their stupid image on your page or they will shut you down.

Well, I got tired of this and wrote my own tracker. I am calling it silentracker (not to be confused with Silent Tracker of course.) As of the writing of this post it is in beta and only being used by a couple of sites. If you would like to be a beta tester for it then send me an email at zeptoblog at zeptoworld dot com and I will see what we can work out. The goal of this tracker is to only give my users what they need.

One of these days I am going to post on the lessons learned from writing my tracker. I would have preferred to write it in Java, but I ended up doing it in php because of the limitations of the server that I currently have available. I will have to get a new server one of these days that supports Java Servlets.