Shanti’s Dispatches

Update: There was a bug with Yahoo Results (the pear class ‘Services_Yahoo’ seemed to have not been loaded). Please let me know if you find any more bugs!

I’d like to thank Tom from Admin-ahead.com for helping out with some php5 migration fun on WHM/cPanel for the new WhoLinksToMe.com server.

I thought we would have to also use Apache2, but it turns out this is one thing cPanel servers do not get along well with at the moment.

However, Apache 1.x is a much better choice for us now anyway I do believe, as it mitigates any other problems that would have sprung up due to PHP5 and Apache 2.

Server History

For the past year and a half, WhoLinksToMe.com has been hosted on a server running over a DSL connection at my dad’s house in St. Louis.

I was able to remotely administer it via SSH, etc. Even VNC’ing into the local network there if ever a problem should arise.

Popdex was also scaled this way, growing to eventually 8,000+ daily pageviews / visitors before being migrated to a professional dedicated server.

Eventually I’d like to write a short guide on how you can start a small web-based business easily these days for $100 per month. Even less, if you’re so inclined.

Traffic Trajectory

Yearly traffic report for WhoLinksToMe.com (2005):

Traffic for the site averages about 1,400 daily unique visitors with over 3,000 daily pageviews.

It’s also been linked to:
- More than 81,000 times according to Google
- 267,853 times according to Yahoo
- 793, 676 times according to MSN Search

Many sites put the link in their template so the link is counted multiple times per site, but still… not bad for a couple of long weekends worth of work back in October ‘04.

So, my little baby wholinkstome (well, now that Gabe has helped out with the design its ‘our’ little baby), has reached the point where she needs a new server.

We’ve got some decent ad sales going on there, enough to afford a dedicated server at least.

But, lo and behold… she requires good ol’ PHP 5 due to some libraries / etc. we’re using.

That wouldn’t be such a problem, except that we went ahead and loaded WHM/cPanel on the server to make it easier to manage multiple domains/hosts on the server.

Of course, WHM/cPanel uses Apache 1.x and PHP 4 by default.

If you know of a good ’server guy’ who might be able to help us upgrade our cPanel to use PHP5, plz give a holler.

We can pay by the job, as the box is a totally unmanaged server, hosted by the fine folks at Layered Tech.

My main man Gabriel has knocked out an incredible design for WhoLinksToMe.com.

Gabriel and I have been working together on Niner Niner this past year.

Now we’ve teamed up to bring you lots of web 2.0 goodness, from WhoLinksToMe.com to a few other fun little sites we’ve got in the oven.

Hint: the project involves tags - you know, everyone’s favorite web 2.0 buzzword.

Well, I finally got around to getting the WhoLinksToMe.com codebase into Subversion.

Now deployment is a snap:

> ssh wholinkstome.com
> cd /path/to/wholinkstome/root
> svn update

Ta-da!

Of course, the deployment fascists would come after me for this kind of reckless behavior… but quite frankly, Susan, I don’t give a d*mn!

In other news, MSN Results are back (at least for the time being) on WLTM.com.

For example, Who Links To Me found the following number of links to sablog.com:

WhoLinksToMe.com has found 11 links to this site.
Blogrolling.com has found 49 blogrolls that contain this link.
Google has found 23 links to this site.
Yahoo! has found 426 links to this site.
MSN Search has found 6,485 links to this site.

WLTM.com Tip of The Day:

Upset because Who Links To Me tries to change your url to “www.yourblog.com” instead of just “yourblog.com” ?

Just pass in the exact URL you’d like details about through the querystring, like so:

Examples:
http://wholinkstome.com/?url=http://yourblog.com/
http://wholinkstome.com/?url=http://www.whatever.com/
etc…

Drop me a line if you have any questions!