[ANN] FreeCounter2

Freeway
1

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away (actually in 2001, on the third
floor of my previous house, in a donated PowerMac 9500 running
Rhapsody, Apache and an early version of PHP3) FreeCounter was born.

It crashed the next day, having run out of disk space. In a great
panic, I transferred it to an ISP in Virginia, where it lived for a
while until they also ran out of room for its ever-growing database.

Next, it moved to Florida, where it ran on a succession of very nice
Xserves for many years. Until said Xserve mysteriously vanished from
the 'net about three weeks ago, taking all hits with it, and leaving
no trace. The owners have not returned my calls, either.

I scrambled to put things right for the existing service, moved it to
Joyent (carrier-grade hosting) and patched up the many bugs it still
had (it wouldn’t even run under PHP5 without major surgery). But I
also wanted to make good on promises I had made many years previously
– being able to give your clients their own logins to see, but not
touch, the traffic reports, being able to edit a site or user profile
after creating it, etc. Having my hosting provider die was the kick I
needed to rewrite the entire thing from scratch.

So today I am announcing FreeCounter2.

http://freewaypro.com/counter2/

Just like the old, only shiny and new:

  • Modern, buzzword-compliant core.
  • Stone-age simple reporting and statistics with 100% fewer graphs and
    charts than Google Analytics and Mint.
  • Automatic archiving (so your hits don’t just disappear after 30 days).
  • Secure RSS feeds for each site so you can watch your hits alongside
    your news.
  • Multiple-user features allow you to give your clients a “guest view”
    – basically they can see all the traffic, but they can’t delete
    anything – or give someone else on your team a “partner view” where
    they do have control.
  • New documentation for the end-user!
  • Lots of nice Ajax flourishes in the interface.

Still free*, still entirely for the Freeway community.

Enjoy!

Walter

*As before, donations are welcomed to help defray the costs.

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2

Forgot to add this very important bit: if you are an existing FreeCounter member, you will need to register again on FreeCounter2. The two sites do not share anything except most of a name.

Walter

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3

Excellent stuff, Walter! Much easier for clients to use than Google Analytics and the tools that come with some hosting packages. I love the way I can see all the sites I’ve set up through my one login. Previously, I had separate logins for each and so had to remember them all.

I’ve recently depleted my PayPal account, but I plan to contribute once I get some cash back in it. Thanks again for doing this.

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4

You are welcome, thanks for the pre-release testing, too.

After I got a couple of off-list queries from old users, I added a new feature. If you try to log in with an account from the old system, the system will migrate you over to the new server. This is working from a copy of the old database, so nothing is going to be deleted from the “legacy” FreeCounter.

Right now, it only duplicates your account information as best it can (countries are a problem – sorry, you might end up in the USA without warning). I am not sure if I can get it to migrate sites over, but I’ll see what I can do there.

You will still need to download a new copy of the Action and upload your sites using your new Site IDs. Everything about that part of the system has changed.

Walter

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5

Hey - you’re getting good at this programming thing! :wink:

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6

Anybody who has a lot of sites in the old FreeCounter – and you know who you are – please give the migration feature a try. I just tested it with some made up accounts and sites and it seems to work okay, but I do need a live test.

Thanks!

Walter

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