One of my favorite projects recently has been the ONEsite Analytics & Activity Dashboard which has added many new features and is under active development.  Because we come from a web hosting background we have always been very interested in capturing as much information as possible about both the traffic on our sites and the actual health of our servers and their public and private services.  As a very client-focused company we have strived to provide as much information as possible to our clients through our Control Panel.

Statistics have been an important part of the ONEsite platform from the very beginning.  We offered robust statistics on blog traffic when we first launched the ONEsite blogging capabilities many years ago.  As our traffic and number of incredible customers has grown over the years we have continued to gather large amounts of data about the sites running on the ONEsite and present this information to our customers in the Control Panel for their network.

We began a project in Q4 last year headed by Evan Stenmark to modernize the way we collect and log data as well as collate, analyze and package as much as possible in the Control Panel for our customers to use.  We see this as a key initiative because the platform generates much data which is key to understanding the activity of the community and its members and how it grows both organically and virally.  Many of our customers use 3rd party Analytics such as Omniture or Google Analytics to track pageviews or referrals; however, the ONEsite servers actually collect much more information than is available by these 3rd party companies.  In order to describe how I need to describe a bit about our backend architecture.

At ONEsite we use PHP extensively and developed a PHP Event System as part of our core architecture several years ago.  This event system is a key element in everything from our user content generation flows to our moderation capabilities and also allows for a lot of our unparalleled customization and integration capabilities.  Our event system was inspired by many of the excellent capabilities within ActionScript 3.0.

Essentially, all user interactions on the platform trigger events in our backend code which may in turn trigger other events.  Thus, if a user writes a blog post in our system it may trigger an event such as POST-PUBLISHED.  The platform has the capability of attaching multiple event listeners to an event which may in turn run core features within the platform or custom features enabled for single networks.  Thus, everything from blog post premoderation to blog post pinging to custom data warehousing about blogs may be achieved by attaching event listeners to the POST-PUBLISHED event.

The ONEsite platform utilizes hundreds of distinct events to power all of our bountiful features.  Networks on the ONEsite platform generate hundreds of millions events on any given day.  Knowledge about these events is very useful for analytics purposes and thus we decided to tightly integrate our events system with our analytics capabilities.  In order to do so we began to log events which occur on the platform and all relevant event metadata about that specific event or metadata shared by all events.

Because this generated a significant amount of information we decided to heavily invest in a new backend architecture to store all of this data.  We chose to use an open source technology, Scribe, to log all of the events on the platform.  Scribe was originally developed by Facebook and has been key to their scaling to hundreds of millions of users.

Scribe allows us to store and organize massive amounts of information collected by the servers in our datacenters and to access that information historically.  However, in order to actually generate value from that information store we needed to use other tools.  Principally among these tools is Hive which as their wiki says:  "a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop."  Hive allows us to run queries ranging from "How many forum posts were made this week compared to the same week last year?" to "Do users who choose Blue as their favorite color upload more photos than other users?"

Hive, along with other Hadoop tools and custom code, generates the data which is presented to networks in our Dashboard.  The ONEsite Dashboard allows network operators to quickly see the overall health of their network as well as run reports for marketing campaigns or other initiatives.  We are continually working on more advanced capabilities in the Dashbaord to give network operators access to more network vital information, more demographic analysis of its users, and more trends occuring within the community.

Understanding both who the end users of the ONEsite platform are and how they use the tools we provide is key to the success of our company and the sites we run for our clients.  We believe our Event system and our Analytics Dashboard provide ONEsite customers with valuable and necessary information to achieve their community goals and as such ongoing development into Analytics is a key item on our roadmap.

I recently had the great pleasure of traveling to Australia for business with Thad and fortunately had the chance to take in a lot of the excellent culture and natural beauty of the country.  The trip really couldn't have been more of a success overall thanks to the great meetings, the friendly people and the places they recommended visiting.  Matt and Thad also did an outstanding job of organizing the trip!

The goal of the trip was to kickoff a project with a new client and meet new potential clients as well as other partners we have in Australia.  We travelled to both Melbourne and Sydney in the week we were there.  Overall, the lengthy plane trip across the Pacific was much better than I expected and I discovered that the route between Melbourne and Sydney is actually the most-trafficked in the world (some flights leaving every 15 minutes during commuter hours!)

In both cities we were fortunate enough to be meeting with fantastic people who took the time to show us the sights of the city--both tourist hotspots as well as hidden gems.  Everything from Bondi beach in Sydney, to the waterfront and Diagon Alley-esque teashops in Melbourne to the Blue Mountains.

Thad and I had the chance to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Sydney Opera House.  The Opera version of it was much raunchier than other versions I've seen but overall the experience was quite enjoyable.

Unfortunately, most of the wildlife that I saw was in the admittedly excellent miniature zoos and aquariams in Sydney harbor.  However, I did get the chance to take the train from Sydney to the Blue Mountains and spend an entire day hiking on the trails which take you from excellent mountain views to hundreds of cascades and large waterfalls.

Everyone's hospitality was in Australia was greatly appreciated and I look forward to returning soon.

Nothing has made me really feel like I am living in the 21st century more than the iPhone.  It is not perfect, but using it makes me feel like I am holding an artifact from the future--perhaps the Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age novel.

We recently submitted our first iPhone application to the iTunes application store and I am quite proud of the polish of version 1 and of the accomplishments of the team behind the app.  It is the first of many ONEsite-powered applications which through the power of the mobile web will allow our community members to more easily contribute their own content in addition to providing their own perspectives on others' contributions.

2009 is the year in which data portability and social network interoperability are emerging as truly useful features to the average website viewer.  It has never been easier to register for your favorite community or to broadcast your photos or thoughts to your friends and the world, no matter their social network.

Look for exciting new things coming from ONEsite.  We are truly building momentum.

The ONEsite team and I just returned from the first ever Web 2.0 NYC conference.  The show was at a large convention center in Manhattan and was right next door to the Interop expo.

ONEsite was a sponsor of the show and we had a great booth.  Several members from the team helped work the booth including Thad, Andy, Robby, Elichia, Bob and I.

This was my first expo and I very much enjoyed it.  We met a lot of great people and had the opportunity to demonstrate in person all of the terrific communities running on the ONEsite platform.  It is quite thrilling to be able to demo a live site on demand very much similar to what a potential client is describing they desire to build.  The ONEsite platform powers thousands of communities ranging from small startups, to trade-specific communities, to massive social networks for large media brands.

I'm very proud of what we've built at ONEsite and know that the best is yet to come!

Recently we've been doing a significant amount of performance work preparing to take the ONEsite platform to the next level.  We've crossed a number of incredible milestones recently (total number of users on the platform, amount of new user generated content per day, amount of data imported from other platforms, etc.) and have been proactively tackling existing performance issues whilst planning for the next waves of growth.

While there are a number of great blogs discussing how to increase performance, nothing beats a well-written book (except for personal experience, of course).  That being said, I've been particularly impressed with two books recently.

First off is Steve Souders "High Performance Websites for Front-End Engineers."  This book details how to improve the client-side performane of a website.  This involves everything from gzipping stylesheets, to minifying javascript, to parallelizing browser connections to increase performance for modern Internet connections.  Steve works at Yahoo! as "Chief Performance Yahoo!" and definitely knows his stuff.  The book is well written and filled with things you may not have realized if you mostly pay attention to the backend side of things.

Next up is the 2nd Edition of "High Performance MySQL."  I simply cannot say enough wonderful things about this book.  The 2nd Edition is twice as thick as the original and every single chapter seems to be both relevant and insightful.  The book covers everything from replication setups to advanced MySQL storage engines to Sphinx and full-text search indexing.  Here at ONEsite we are very fond of MySQL, Sphinx and all the other great LAMP technologies that make up the foundation of the ONEsite platform.

Great things are ahead!