Not that we do not hear enough of Ma.tt and his history with WordPress, but USA Today had a nice article on Matt, WordPress and his fans. Mom says her son is so focused on WordPress, “Sometimes he forgets to eat and sleep. He’s a young man in a hurry. He never stops. I keep telling him to slow down.”
Also of interest, via a review on Mashable, is of a service called Errorlytics. It is a 404 redirect service that lets a website owner track 404 page hits, transparently redirect 404 pages to other content within a blog and/or website and possibly increases pageviews and SEO. They have a custom WordPress plugin for the purpose and the service is free for one domain and 5 rules. Now is it worth it? I will never use it because I do not want to depend on another remotely hosted service for my uptime. There are many WordPress plugins that acheive the same purpose and do it for free. There are many ways to handle 404 pages efficiently and with good results. This service might be useful to those who either do not have the experience to put other solutions in place or are looking to make use of the other features associated with the service. If you have Errorlytics installed, what did you think of the service?
You are right, Mark. I will never use Errorlytics also. Not sure how long can the company survive. If they die, how is my data stored in their server?
Hi all. Just wanted to chime in that the reason we went with the hosted approach instead of the plugin approach was so that we could have platform independance and appeal to a wider audience… Also so that we could roll out new features and squash bugs without constantly having to get everyone to update all the time.
You could certinally build Errorltycis in a WP plugin, but then it’d only be for WP. Also, the uniform interface gives SEM people an “instant view” of all of their sites etc… so they dont have to go login to each of their clients accounts all the time to keep track of and handle new errors.
As far as “the company” – Errorlytics is a tool that was internal to my company AccessionMedia.com (a web dev shop in CT). We aren’t a venture funded deal – but if we look that way I think that’s flattering. 🙂
As far as I can tell Accession Media and it’s product Errorlytics aren’t going anywhere. However I get your point about your data. Lets use the somewhat happier scenario that my company stays in business, but you want to cancel your Errorlytics account and use another solution.
Thanks,
Josh Katinger
President
Accession Media – makers of Errorlytics.com
Lets use the somewhat happier scenario that my company stays in business, but you want to cancel your Errorlytics account and use another solution. Perhaps the best thing we could do for departing customers would be the ability to export all your rules into a CSV or text file. We could probably even allow the departing user to choose the format of the export. Meaning, if you are running LAMP and want to export the rules and use them in your .htaccess file, we could have that be a radio button to export rules in .htaccess format. Would a feature like that take away this concern for you?
Again, I have to emphasize that the tool wasn’t built JUST for WordPress. When we originally started riffing on the idea with our client sites, they were mostly static PHP sites (no CMS). We just wanted to get plugins for the major php CMS systems (WP, Drupal, soon MT) to make it easy for people running those tools to get the benefits.
I really appreciate you looking at the tool (I hope you tested a free account? if not let me know and we can get you rolling). The “tough love” feedback is often the best as it forces us to consider things we hadn’t. All feedback is appreciated!
Thanks,
Josh Katinger
President
Accession Media – makers of Errorlytics.com
I should check it out first