chartbeat is in beta

I haven’t talked much about my newest website, chartbeat.com

We’ve had around 50 sites helping us with an alpha test the last few months and we’re finally ready to open up the site for anyone to try.

chartbeat is the heartbeat of your website. It shows you real-time analytics of how many people are on your site right now, how they got there, how long they’ve been there, and some interesting metrics like if they’re reading, writing or idle.

On top of that, there’s a beefed up alert system that alerts you on traffic spikes, site downtime, and page load time (both user and server seen).

Go check it out and tell me what you think — chartbeat.com

Fichey customization

A lot of people have been telling me they’d love customization of fichey.

Today I enabled customization of up to 30 topics you can choose from. In the future, I hope to expand this list and add other features that make it much more customizable. The problem with that right now is hardware. Believe it or not, it actually costs a lot of render out all those pages. As demand for it grows, we’ll keep on adding rendering machines and that will allow for more customization. (I added 2 more machines to handle the current load)

View the new version at, fichey.com

dontcensorme.com online

“Your right to free speech online is at the mercy of website moderators. There are no checks in place for moderators online. This site aims to change that and put the balance of power back in your hands.”

I’ve set up a forum that acts as a counterbalance to unfair website moderation. Go to dontcensorme.com and also view the Digg comments section, which shows that buried comments aren’t always buried for the right reasons.

The new server(s)!

If you see this then you’re on spiffy new servers hosted by Amazon’s EC2. Hopefully they can handle the load a bit better. Right now I’m on a 2 webserver and 1 db server configuration. It’s a bit small, but I built it to grow pretty easily.

I actually had 2 dbs clustered, but funky stuff was happening with missed heartbeats on Amazon’s new NAT addressing. I started a thread about it on their forum here