Goodbye SA Top Sites...
Ah. It's been a tumultous relationship - marred by highs, lows, and low lows (how the heart beats when it sees 1 visitor). I'm speaking of course, about SA Top Sites and their widget stats tracker - faithfully installed by over 4000 South African sites. (Alas they seem to be down at the time of skryfing this post).Some said their stats were high, some low. At the end of the day, it was a simple solution that served its purpose. But they were just down for too long. About a week, or more, if I'm not mistaken. And a week, in the fast paced world of the Internet - is just too much.
So I'm leaving them. And what do they care. A change of ownership, a change of servers. This stuff happens all the time.
But if anyone, anyone feels the way I do - just in search of something more - it suggests a nice fat market gap for one of our homely aggregators, Amatomu or Afrigator to take up the charge.
Do it properly though. People want meaningful stats - and Amatomu is getting pretty close with its page of ajaxy wonderment.
One widget is all it takes:
[Total Visits]
[Total Pages]
[Ave. Visits/Month]
[Ave Pages/Month]
[Direct Visits]
[Referrals]
[Ranking]
[Most popular article]
Something like that. Ah. Twould be wonderful. For now - I've discovered a rather useful oversees tracker - HiStats.Com. Check it out - until the local boys give us something.
As the founder and previous owner of SA Top Sites I have to say I'm disappointed with the current status of the site. I put a lot of hard work into the site and the company I sold them to seem to have little interest in continuing the service which is sad and really makes me very upset.
ReplyDeleteIt is sad - and you guys managed to build up a large community to boot. I had the same experience with www.gAL.co.za - which has crumbled since I left a couple of years ago.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Justin, rescue the situation lad and use Afrigator to take up the slack... It's a perfect oppportunity surely?
I feel your frustrations which is why I started up a site that uses the same software. We should be a lot more stable than SA Top Sites. The only downtime we've had in 2 years is when it's time to upgrade something and even then it's never for more than a couple of minutes. If you're interested check us out. www.zatopsites.co.za
ReplyDeleteI'll see if I can't find something capable of stat'ing more than the topsites software can currently do.