

Ask HN: Feedback on my site - benologist
http://www.swfstats.com/?

======
mdolon
The most important information I found on your site was the comparison chart
between your service, MochiMedia and HeyZap! - is there any way you can put
more focus on that, or mention the comparisons on the homepage?

Otherwise, looks good and I wish you the best of luck. It seems like it will
be hard getting traction against the giants but even a small slice of the pie
could/should be worthwhile.

~~~
benologist
I'll see if I can work that table into somewhere more obvious.

I've got incredible traction! I expect April will see me becoming the leading
analytics platform by whatever number you want to judge by. While I was in San
Francisco I had the opportunity to meet with most of the largest portals and
everyone's very excited with what I'm doing... some of the biggest portals are
using or testing SWFStats right now and others I met with should start their
testing in April.

I've also got a great selection of the biggest/most popular developers as
well!

All up I've been just insanely fortunate on that front. To really put it into
perspective ... when I posted here 5 or 6 weeks ago asking how to launch a
beta I'd done about 200 million events over several months of private beta
testing.... this week I will pass 2 billion. During peak hours now I'm
receiving close to 900 events per second!

~~~
rubyrescue
how are you handling the load? web server/db/etc?

~~~
benologist
I want to have a really cool answer for this like Cassandra and nosql and
clusters and nodes and server side javascript and all that cool stuff, but the
truth is not that exciting.

I have two servers, events go to log files and log files get processed and put
into the db.

Servers are win2003 and win2008, db is Sql Server Express (lol), and
webservers are IIS6 and IIS7. Long term I want to get nginx or mochiweb in
place for the tracker servers but for now it's beyond my skills and time/money
budget to do that.

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callmeed
Why the focus on games? Our company designs, sells, and hosts Flash sites
(several thousand) but they aren't games. This is something we need and I
imagine it would be very marketable to design agencies and companies that are
building non-game microsites for products, movies, bands, etc.

A tool like this would actually be really great for us ... it's hard to track
events like when a user brings up a form (but doesn't complete it) or how deep
a user goes into an image gallery.

I'm excited to look at the beta ... looks promising.

~~~
benologist
Honestly I'd love to move in a lot of directions but for now it's just me so I
have to stay focused on what I think is the best path heh.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
For the cost you'd charge for tracking "several thousand" flash sites could
you employ or partner with someone so that you could take on this extra load?

~~~
benologist
It's the workload that makes it complicated right now. I'm exploring funding
options so maybe something interesting'll happen soon.

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raptrex
The counter is annoying. Maybe choose a better gradient for the button, it
looks weird to me. The bright blue title like "Analytics for flash games" is
too bright to me. Make the text on the white background bigger. Make the
thumbnails clickable to full size images would make this a lot better.

~~~
benologist
I've made the counter a lot darker so it's visible but not dominant, the text
at the top isn't blue / so bright now, also I made those thumbs open up some
screenshots.

The counter I think is important, some people have very popular games and it's
a very common question... "can you handle my traffic?". The counter helps them
see I'm tracking lots of popular games, at once.

Thanks for all your feedback.

------
dannyr
It's weird. I have seen so many posts here that says "Review my startup" even
though it's only an app/site.

Here you are calling it "my site". I would actually call it a startup.

~~~
benologist
Well it is a startup, but I think startup and site are pretty much synonymous
in these parts.

------
benologist
Since I first posted here about 5 or 6 weeks ago I've been mostly focused on
other sides of my startup, but I added a blog a few weeks ago, and then this
week I finally got back to the homepage and added the new counter, the feature
list on the homepage and the shoutouts to hivelocity and fgd.

What do you think?

~~~
bemmu
The reports look really great, that cannon plunder example report link should
be front and center.

------
ErrantX
Nice idea. I can't comment on the product as I wouldn't personally use it -
but in terms of the site.

\- the rate counter is distracting. Also the cynic in me checked the source
code (and refreshed a couple of times) and I see it's static. That puts me off
slightly. EDIT: I would make it static and just say "Tracking XXXXX events -
and counting!"

\- the slideshow layout at the top is, I think, broken on Chrome (Linux). For
example games, levels, reports seem to appear randomly on the left behind the
buttons and some of the slide pages drop over the counter.

Otherwise nice design :)

~~~
benologist
The counter's a mix of dynamic and static hehe. The system doesn't actually
update in real time so it looks at what its done at the last update, compares
it to the update before, and applies the previous events/second.

It updates 2 or 3 times an hour so although it's never quite right it's never
very wrong either - for instance right now it says:

\- 1,818,889,440 approximation

\- 1,818,804,151 real, as of 13 minutes ago.

\- 140 events per second, real but based on the last update not right now

It's processing another log file right now and there's one 1/4 complete file
on one server and one 1/2 complete file on the other, so right now the
approximation is probably close to 2m events _less_ than the truth.

I'll have to do some more testing to see what the issue is with the stuff at
the top. Thanks for letting me know.

~~~
dho
I would replace the counter with something like "We track about 140 events per
second". That's easier to understand than some counter, where you don't know
when it was started.

------
TedBlosser
i think the design overall looks pretty solid. agree somewhat on the counter,
cool at first, but annoying if you are reading the text on the page. small
note, home page link (logo) is broken if you navigate to the register tab and
want to go back home (unless you were doing that on purpose). Like the
underlying concept as well. good job

~~~
benologist
The logos I've been linking to their specific section, for instance the
registration page links to my.swfstats where it is located, the logo on the
blog links to the blog home page etc.

I'm not sure if either approach is 'more' right, but I have those WWW / MY /
etc links up the top (except on public reports, seems I forgot to put them
there heh) so people can still get back and forth between the various
sections.

