The Daily WTF

Not Always Right

Clients From Hell

/dev/sigh

This late night snack purchase is my tribute to Stephen Colbert, one of my favorite entertainers, who’s suspended his TV show to be with his sick mother.

Source: ‘Colbert Report’ Suspends Production

Unfortunately this choice also creates market distortion — if I could get my hands on servers with more RAM at the same price, my applications would be written to favor memory over CPU (for example, more caching layers, less database access), which would actually save the hosting company money since the CPU is the main driver of power and cooling costs.

DialShield is a product I took from idea to conception:

• Integrated with VOIP services to provide voice and SMS integration from the web
• Designed and coded the public-facing website and web application
• Integrated with live websites for testing and documented usage and APIs

w3roi, the service I created to measure and optimize the performance of online advertising, has always been priced by the number of ad clicks each user needs to track each month. This ties pricing to the hardware costs involved in running the site, as tracking and analyzing more clicks requires more CPU, RAM and bandwidth.

Since costs have dropped, all of w3roi’s plans have been upgraded to offer more resources at the same price. Depending on the plan, the increase includes up to 4 times as many tracked clicks as before. Existing customers’ plans have been upgraded with these new limits effective immediately.

One benefit of all the extra space is room for a permanent dashboard display. I combined an old 22″ widescreen monitor with a Logitech Revue (Google TV) box Google sent out free to developers last year to display a GeckoBoard custom dashboard. The widgets are driven by XML feeds from my own servers showing the current day’s sales and registration stats.

With my new favorite gadget, a Belkin Conserve Insight, I measured power usage of the whole setup as no higher than 50 watts max. That means I can leave the display on all day while using less power than a single 60W light bulb, and always know how the day’s sales are going at a glance.

One of the most interesting new features for PRO users is the Real-Time Pulse Dashboard. This is a new, live-updating report that shows current visitor activity across a website. Not only does it reveal the usual stats like where each visitor came from, what browser and operating system they’re using, and where they are located, but it also shows what they’re doing. The dashboard is powered by a node.js server which each visitor pings every 20 seconds with their current activity — reading, writing, or if they just left the webpage open in a hidden tab.