GoTryTHIS News and Techniques

I’m very happy to announce we have a new WordPress fix, which should make GoTryTHIS and WordPress work perfectly together.

Here are the steps, including testing and troubleshooting:

1. Create a new text document on your computer called 404.php with the following content:

<?PHP
chdir('gotrythis');
require_once "gotrythis.php";
exit;
?>

2. With FTP, put the file into the folder of the WordPress theme you are using. It will be one of the folders in /wp-content/themes/. If you are not sure which one, copy it into all of them.

3. Test a GoTryTHIS link on that domain. If it does not work, it is probably because you installed GoTryTHIS into a different folder than normal. If that is the case, edit the 404.php file and change the first “gotrythis” to the folder name you installed to for that domain.

4. Test internal blog links. If they do not work, try going into your WordPress admin, click on “Settings”, then “Permalinks”, and then “Save Changes”. That should reapply your WordPress changes to your .htaccess file.

1) We have temporarily stopped installs.
2) We have stopped sales and upgrades from version 1 until the 6th of July.
3) These are unrelated. Things are generally going very well all around, thank you!

Installs were stopped because we got some unexpected results with one client. He assures me that the problem was actually on his end and not due to our software, but we are not taking chances. We’ll confirm if he is right tomorrow (Friday, June 26) and confirm that our safeguards are indeed working as designed before turning it back on.

Update: We’ve checked, and our safeguards are working as designed.

Sales were stopped because we’re short-staffed for the next few work days and I want to get caught up with support. This also gives us some time to do some polishing based on feedback before we open sales again after the Canadian and U.S holidays.

We’ve been working long hours. A lull in new tickets coming in will be most appreciated.

Thank you,
John Reel.

We have been busy launching www.GoTryTHIS.com in beta and Robyn and I have been personally responding to support day and night. Some of those tickets are clients telling us how much we’ve helped their marketing. The appreciation I feel from reading their ultra positive e-mails got me thinking of a service that made our hosted option possible.

Let me introduce you to BillingCircle.com. They provide one-time and adjustable recurring billing through Authorize.net. They have a straightforward API, which we used to integrate their service seamlessly with our own order page and client admin systems.

Dear BillingCircle support,

You and your service made our GoTryTHIS.com hosted service possible. I’m having a great experience with you and have really appreciated the time you’ve spent on the phone explaining things to me when I needed it.

GoTryTHIS has some billing requirements beyond simple recurring billing. Before I found BillingCircle, I spent weeks interviewing the providers of every solution I could find out there. Your competition had already collectively stunned me into accepting that I would have to pay thousands for integration training and many hundreds to thousands ongoing.

I spent over an hour on the phone with each of your competitors and then also with you. I cannot understand how they justify their pricing to get this same functionality. To be fair, they have some cool sounding high-end features. We don’t need them though, and I don’t think most startups need them either. Maybe I’m missing something, but I was left with the impression that they are focused on venture capital funded startups with money to burn. To win our business, one of them kindly offered to cut the introductory special they were having in half, bringing it down to only $500/month to start. That is a disturbing amount of leeway.

Then I found your service, BillingCircle, and I could not take you seriously at first, what with fees starting at just $29 per month. You claimed I could do everything I needed for a very startup-friendly fee! It turns out you were right. BillingCircle, I hope you corner the market your competitors are ignoring!

With your API, integration with our all-in-house systems has been seamless, and was completed within the 30 day free trial you offer, with no setup fees. Nice. Now if clients choose our hosted option, they are automatically charged monthly, each adjusted for their unique overage usage. Cancellations? I click one button in our application’s admin and our client will not get billed again in your system. Clients? We now have hundreds of clients paying monthly with the first of them already starting their third billing period. More come in daily! Recurring income means sustainable business!

Thanks to you, BillingCircle, we started offering the hosted version of GoTryTHIS on day one, which would have come much later otherwise. So, thank you for helping us to already start predictably growing our company and service, with recurring billing reliably taking place in the background, simply and without worry.

John Reel
GoTryTHIS.com

If this sounds like something you need, give them a shout. Again, the direct link is BillingCircle.com.

I get Google Alerts for “gotrythis” and today, that was all it said, with a link to Alexa.

http://gotrythis.com/alexa

I immediately contacted our server support to check and they said everything looks fine in the logs, and they are running a more extensive check. I mean, that can’t possibly be correct, can it?

The demographics it shows are fascinating. Apparently you are between the ages of 45-54, or older, male, with no kids, browsing from home.

So, quick, someone break out the champaign before Alexa realizes it made a mistake, lol. Wait, I don’t drink. Never mind.

John.

GoTryTHIS lets you edit where links go, after they are already published around the Internet. Especially useful for affiliate marketers, you can also edit links to split-test different affiliate programs to see which one converts the best. This is also great for testing your own web sites against competitors as shown in this tutorial.

Please read the notes under the video for a correction.

Notes:
It’s been pointed out in the comments that you cannot split-test adword links, which I had forgotten when I created this video. However, the same principle does work if you send them to a landing page (such as a squeeze page to add them to your list) and then split where you send them from there.

As well, it has been privately pointed out to me before, that you can split-test your PPC links after they have been approved, as the published PPC destination link doesn’t change. (It’s still going to the GoTryTHIS link, and that link then redirects them to the final split-tested destination.) That isn’t playing by the rules though and could have negative consequences. Remember, if you update your PPC campaign, it will likely get checked for approval again.

With campaigns, you can discover what content is best at driving traffic to your sites or whatever you are promoting. This demo shows how to use them and why. It’s so easy.

This demo shows installing a domain from the dashboard. In this case, we’re updating a domain already installed on version 2. This is the same setup process as installing a new GoTryTHIS 2 domain and upgrading a GoTryTHIS 1 domain from your dashboard.

Please see the “Setting Up” tutorial for information on how to launch the installer for upgrading version 1 domains and installing new domains.

This video gives you an overview of how GoTryTHIS is setup and works from an under-the-hood point of view. For more detailed information, please check out the first section of the Setup Guide.

Good news!

We’re going to open up the rest of the first 500 discounted spots tomorrow, Wednesday June 16, probably around 1 or 2 PM EST. While those are available, you can upgrade to the free or discounted options. I was going to do it today, but with one more change tomorrow, we should eliminate our biggest support issue. Should have thought of that a month ago!

What do you think of the new web site and video we put up today?

Thank you,
John.

As much as I want to release new spots this week, we’re behind in tech support.

Since we first released, we’ve been updating things to deal various “bugs” that only show up on some configurations, as well as a few real bugs. While everything may work just fine for most people, on certain servers graphs may not show up, while on others our installer might not connect. It was expected with such a big project designed to work on so many servers, we just hoped it would go faster.

There are still a handful of issues like these that we know about and want to get fixed before the opportunity for new things comes up by opening up sales. We’ll continue getting caught up Friday and next week. When we’re caught up with support, we’ll release new spots.

We are trying to balance getting GoTryTHIS 2 into your hands as quickly as we can, with providing a rock solid product. We’re getting closer and closer.

John.

The most significant change in this version is that we rewrote the ability to change all the links at once in the “domain” tab, so that it can handle bigger link lists. You can now change all your existing links at once to and from 301/302 redirect type, being case-sensitive or not, and to add or remove the branding bar. A few people were waiting on this.

This update is already on the hosted version. If you are using the installed dashboard, you will see an upgrade notice when you refresh your page or login.

Thank you,
John.

Here’s some happy thoughts.

I had earlier made the decision to not continue offering free support to people taking the free upgrade. I was worried about the costs of offering ongoing support without ongoing revenue and was going to charge on a per-incident basis.

That “fear-based” view doesn’t really make sense. After upgrading, you’re going to need some support here and there… and we benefit from that feedback. We’re going to continue to provide support as before. We don’t have a system in place to figure out who gets free support or not anyway. I’ll get the web site updated to change that policy next week.

I should also mention that if you take the free upgrade, you’ll get upgrades until the release version and any bug fixes. There are new features that are not yet in there, which I want you all to have. That will be it though. We need recurring income to bring recurring additions to the software. We have a lot planned. Hope you join us.

Either way, I want to keep you a happy customer for life.

Speaking of support, this has been a tough few weeks, as some of the problems found thus far in beta have been time-takers. We still have a few issues to fix next week, but we’ve accomplished a heck of a lot. Thanks to everyone for putting up with the issues that have come up and giving us the opportunity to fix them.

Also, every once in a while someone writes just to tell us how much they appreciate what we’re doing. Personally, that really makes my day, so thank you also.

It’s just getting better and better.

Thank you,
John.

We’ve released a new upgrade today, fixing various things that we’ve found on different servers and a few issues we created with the updates. Been quite a week. We’ll be letting in more people next week.

Have a great weekend!
John.

Update: We took down the 2.02 domain upgrade due to a bug we found. Since we’ll be releasing 2.03 tomorrow to fix it, we didn’t want you to all have to upgrade twice. Sorry if you already upgraded your domains.

We’ve just released version 2.02, which has so many fixes and updates that I’m not going to bother listing them all out. We’re still in beta and this still isn’t the official release. (The official release will have at least one more cool extra feature in it.) After the official release, we’ll keep more detailed release notes for you on each update.

This update is to both the dashboard and each of the domains. It only takes about a minute or so per domain and the dashboard. We try to keep updates to each domain to a minimum, so we grouped a number of fixes together. Most updates are just to the dashboard.

We’ve done a lot of work to make the upgrade procedure simple and fast. When you login next, a popup will appear and give you the option to upgrade. If you have any trouble, contact us at support and let us know.

Thank you!
John.

Hi.

I’ve been trying not to innundate you with messages, so I’ve been keeping most updates to the blog and the GoTryTHIS twitter account.

We invited 100 people so far and these customers have helped us find various issues to fix. They were mostly with the sales and setup process, including some due to cloud hosting oddities. There was nothing overly troubling with GoTryTHIS itself, due to its extensive stress-testing. Yay!

Programmers are working on updates. I’m currently covering support along with the talented Robyn. We’re also working on improving the documentation based on the feedback and questions that have been coming in so far. That will be an ongoing process of course, so please keep sending your feedback.

The response has been really positive, which is so good to hear after working on it all this time. I want to share this e-mail from David because he really “gets it” and I asked him if he would create a video to expand on how he uses GoTryTHIS. He said “Yes!”, and I’ll follow up with him on that once the release version comes out.

Here’s how David uses GoTryTHIS:

> I’m one of those lucky people who found GoTryThis in the early
> days. But I’m also one of the smarter ones who actually installed
> it and embedded my entire business in GTT.
>
> With more than 2,000 organized referral links, I can look back
> through my stats and find marketing campaigns that actually worked.
>
> Blog posts are ranked by popularity in my GTT installations.
>
> ClickBank affiliate promotions are listed in order of click
> through now.
>
> I got a bunch of links with very little traffic going through them
> too. And guess, what I’ll never run that promotion again. I can
> now see definitively which promotions are losers and focus on the
> winners.
>
> Thanks so much for the great product. I’ve been waiting patiently
> for the massive upgrade and all I can say is the wait was worth it.
> I’m a GTT user for life.
>
> Great product!
>
> David Perdew, AL USA -
> www.NicheAffiliateMarketingSystem.com
> April 27, 2009

Okay, what next? Here’s my estimated timeline:

1) This week we’re the remaining issues that we know of.

2) Next week we’ll (probably) release another 50 copies

3) Next week we’ll also be finishing the next release, which includes fixes and a very enhanced co-branding “viral’ bar, which I think you’re going to like. We might wait until this is done before releasing the next 50 copies.

4) Once we’ve got good feedback on the upgrade process and the new version, everyone can upgrade from version 1! There is a very good chance of all that happening in the next couple of weeks.

5) When the initial upgrade rush dies down we’ll announce a formal launch date for all new customers.

6) Once that initial rush clams down, new features, new features, new features!

This launch is just the start of something really big. Other exciting upgrades are being worked on. With the R&D done, the infrastructure in place, and clients coming in, we can focus on rapid development and growing our company to benefit you even more.

Thank you,
John.

Today’s Topics:

Link cloaking is the most basic feature and benefit of GoTryTHIS.
- What Is Link Cloaking And Semi-Cloaking?
- What Are The Benefits Of Publishing GoTryTHIS Cloaked Links?

1) What Is Link Cloaking And Semi-Cloaking?

When most people publish a link to a web site or other media such as a PDF, they simply cut-and-paste the link and publish it. Sometimes, if the link is big, you might use a link shrinking service like TinyURL.com to create a smaller link, which instantly redirects to the real link when clicked on.

Go ahead and click the following TinyURL example link and see how you are instantly redirected to a Google search for GoTryTHIS in a new window/tab. To cloak something is “to hide or disguise” it. I’m calling this example a semi-cloaked link, because you cannot tell where it leads to until you click on it.

Semi-Cloaked Example: http://tinyurl.com/dgqqna

A fully cloaked link is one where the destination web page is enclosed in a full-page frame at your URL. When you do this, you can specify your own window title, replacing the one created by the site, or let the site’s title be displayed. It also remains at the URL you specify, not the one from the site.

When you click on this next example, notice how it retains the URL in the link and has the custom title, “Google Results For GoTryTHIS” instead of the regular “Google” title.

Fully Cloaked Example: http://gotrythis.com/SearchGoogle

(A “frame” is like a window in your web page, which contains another web page, which can be any web page on the Internet. In the fully cloaked example, you’re on gotrythis.com/SearchGoogle, with a full page frame containing another web page, in this case Google’s.)

With GoTryTHIS you can quickly create fully custom semi-cloaked links, cloaked links, and other types of links, all of which are tracked in near real-time.

2. What Are The Benefits Of Publishing GoTryTHIS Cloaked Links?

Note: This is just one sub-section of GoTryTHIS Benefits!

a) Self Branding:
With services like tinyurl you advertise the tinyurl service right in the links you publish, every time you use it. It is terrific viral marketing and cudos to them, but as marketers, you might prefer to advertise your own site! GoTryTHIS instantly creates semi or fully cloaked links that all go through your sites instead of a third-party service.

b) Natural Looking
Cloaked links like the above one look like Real links look like yourdomain.com/something.html, and people are used to that. Some cloaking solutions put codes in like TinyURL above, or longer tracking codes with variables. Anything that looks like tracking code can reduce clicks, simply as that. GoTryTHIS uses natural looking links on your sites.

c) SEO freindly:
Search engines read the pages your links are published on, including the links. The more links that point to your web sites, the higher their search engine ranking becomes. As well, the keywords in the link help push up that link in the search results for those keywords. Depending on your settings, GoTryTHIS links can promote your web site and can be customized with whatever text you link in the link, with no codes or variables. (This means you can add SEO keywords into the redirect link, like mysite.com/keyword1/keyword2.html.)

d) Tracking:
Of course, when you redirect your links through GoTryTHIS, each click is tracked and graphed, with various details, which will be looked at in future articles.

e) Organization:
Finally, you can easily find your links through text searches, tags, various filters, and various sorting.

If you would like to gain exposure by writing an article for U of GTT, please contact us through the feedback button to the left of our site (www.GoTryTHIS.com) and let us know what you are considering writing about. Thank you!

What is U of GTT?

Welcome to the Online University of GoTryTHIS, a free educational resource for learning the basics through to advance marketing tactics and techniques capable with GoTryTHIS.

This is a purely educational ongoing series with random posts aimed at beginners through to experts. There is no expected end in sight, as we will continually be taking feedback, interviewing clients, adding new features, and inviting guest authors. We’re all sure to learn new things!

How To Participate:

Anyone can participate for free. Look for blog posts at GoTryTHIS.com/blog and e-mails sent from GoTryTHIS with subjects that start with “U of GTT #x”. Comments, discussion, and suggestions are always welcome on the blog. Just keep the vibe positive as the blog is monitored for negative karma.

Be A Guest Author:

If you would like to be a guest author, get hold of us through the feedback button on the left and tell us what you would like to write about. You may promote your products and services only if you are teaching techniques with them that are directly applicable to GoTryTHIS.

Thank you,
John Reel.

There are now two PDF documents available by clicking the support link or feedback button on the web site or within GoTryTHIS and clicking the “Docs” menu in the support popup.

The first one is about Setting up GoTryTHIS and the second one is about using GoTryTHIS. I’ll still be updating these… well continually, as we release new versions. I’ll also be writing lots of other tutorials and getting guest authors to write them as well. (Let me know if you want to be a guest author and get some publicity in the process.)

Your feedback on the documentation is appreciated.

Thank you,
John.

Since we released 50 copies a couple of weeks ago we have been fixing a number of issues that have come up. One SetupBOT issue, previously blogged about, annoyingly took most of that time.

There are still things to be done, which effect a smaller portion of people, but we are now wrapping up enough issues to release another batch, which we’ll do early next week. (We’re never releasing right before a weekend again… learned that the hard way long ago!)

This will continue to be an ongoing process and we’re still in “beta” for now. Everyone will continue to get updates for the next little while. I want one feature improved for the final release, and was hoping it would be done this week, but we just haven’t had time to start it. So, it will come in a future update in the next few weeks.

For those who already have version 2, there will be a new release coming next week with the release of new spots. This will require updating all of all the domains you are using GoTryTHIS with, which usually takes less than a minute per domain. We try to keep those updates to a minimum, usually only updating the dashboard. This upgrade fixes a couple of bugs, so please upgrade when we release it next week.

I will also publish some documentation tomorrow. A lot of the main documentation is done, and more will come. We’re also going to create inline help, which will be in an upcoming release.

Thank you everyone for your patience,
John.

UPDATE 2: Everything I said in the “Update 1″ below turned out to be a weird configuration in one server. Still looking into it, but this appears fixed.

UPDATE 1: There are some servers where we have to upload all the files individually instead of in one zip. That takes more time, and is currently resulting in a blank page when it completes. We’re looking into this, and will be fixing it next week.
—————————–

Hi.

For anyone who was waiting for this, it is now fixed. Please note that the “Waiting…” may stop its animation, but it is still working in the background. We will fix that later, once other more pressing issues are addressed.

Thank you,
John.

Hi.

I’m trying not to inundate everyone with updates, and I’m staying off twitter until that nasty virus is all fixed up.

I suspect it will be next week sometime that we let more people in. We had a complex issue with our installer to solve due to our cloud hosting environment, which we found a solution to and are finishing fixing today. Next there a number of little things to correct with ordering, a few code corrections from bugs reported, and a feature enhancement that I think many people will be excited about.

Early next week we will release an upgrade to existing users, which will give us a good chance to test the upgrade procedure for installed user accounts. If all goes well, then we’ll invite another 50 to 100 people in shortly after.

Thank you,
John.

Here is how we’re making GoTryTHIS available to ensure a smooth
launch:

1) On the 7th, we sent out an e-mail asking people to write us back to create a list for pre-launch sales and hundreds of people responded within hours. Responses are still coming in. We won’t be replying to those until we are ready to give you the link.

2) On the 8th, we sent out e-mails to the first 25 upgrading clients and 25 new clients who responded. Most of them have got started already. This gives us the opportunity to test our processes with a small number of people and find the problems that need to be fixed before a larger launch.

This brings us to April 9, as I write this. Support issues are minimal. We have had a few ordering problems to correct and an intermittent (but fixable) problem with our installer.

3) In about a week, we’ll directly contact the next 50 to 100 people on the pre-launch list and see how things go. We might repeat this a few times, with the time between determined by the amount of support required.

4) Then we will open up sales to all upgrading clients.

5) When support dies down from everyone upgrading, we will open sales up to everyone on the waiting list and announce a full launch date for anyone who is planning to promote.

GoTryTHIS is a massive project, with many different custom developed components and many permutations of new and upgrading client options. We have to go slow to eliminate problems before they can effect more people than we can support. So far things are going pretty smoothly, which is a good sign!

I really appreciate your patience. I know you have been waiting a long time.

Thank you very much,
John Reel.

Well, this is exciting! GoTryTHIS 2 is finished, the new site is almost finished, and starting on April 7, we’ll be letting the first 20 to 50 new or upgrading clients in as a test run. If you are on any of the GoTryTHIS lists, you will get a notice with details on what to do on the morning of the 7th, a Tuesday.

Where to start? There is so much I’ve been keeping quiet about until now!

WHAT’S NEW?

GoTryTHIS 2 has a totally redesigned, streamlined interface, where you will control, search, and track all of your online marketing for all your web sites, side-by-side, in one place. It is a “web 2.0″ hosted service that is also available as an application you install on your own servers. In either case, all your marketing links that you control and track through GoTryTHIS work off of your web sites, and keep working if you unsubscribe.

If you choose the hosted service, you can use it on all your web sites and we do all the data crunching, storage, backups, and update the main program automatically before we make the updates available for people who choose the installed version.

If you choose the installed version, you install it onto your own server and take care of backups and updates. Please note that version 2 is more CPU and storage intensive than version 1 in order to optimize it for speed. For intensive use, you may need a dedicated server.

What’s more exciting than version 2 being ready, is that we’re just getting started. With the technical infrastructure complete and predictable recurring income coming in from a base of users, we’ll be adding in new features and improving GoTryTHIS continually! This is the entire focus of our new company, Site Marketer Inc., and we have a huge list of new features planned, many already being coded.

PRICING:

GoTryTHIS is now $29.95/month including upgrades and support. There are discounts for the first 1,500 subscribers, with the first 500 priced at only $14.95/month.

The installed version has an additional one-time license fee:
- 1 domain: $97
- 5 domains: $197
- 20 domains: $297
- Unlimited domains: $497

The installed version comes with unlimited clicks. The hosted version comes with 200,000 clicks per month, which is well over what we understand most of our clients use. Extra clicks are $0.00004 per click, rounded down to the nearest dollar, so 100,000 extra clicks is just $4.

UPGRADING:

You do have a free upgrade option, as well as other options.

Please watch this video for more information.

QUESTIONS:

I bet you have loads of questions. Please check the FAQ to see if we’ve already anticipated and answered them. Also notice the feedback button at the left of every page. You can ask questions there if you can’t find the answer there.

Please note, we’ll probably be flooded with questions, so we may collect all the questions and then do a bulk reply on the blog in order to respond quicker than responding individually right now.

Thank you everyone!
John Reel.

Would you like to know how other users make the most of GoTryTHIS?

Well, I do. So:

I’m planning to publish a 100% free e-book, as in no opt-in required. It will share all the creative ways you, and others like you, use GoTryTHIS, telling us all exactly how you do it. The more of you who participate, the more we will all learn and the better you will be able to profit because of it. Think case-studies, rather than testimonials.

Additionally, all content and ideas that you send, which are used, will be attributed to you in the book, along side the content. This will include an active, direct link to your site if you wish. In many cases, I’ll be quoting your e-mails directly so people can get a taste of your expertise. Please write with that in mind.

Notes: 1) I will exclude anything involving embedded links. 2) By submitting your content, you grant us the right to use it as we feel fit. 3) Submitting content does not guarantee it will be published.

Please e-mail your GoTryTHIS wizardry, techniques, success stories, case-studies, and detailed testimonials to ebook@gotrythis.com. Also, please leave a comment below to let us know you have and to encourage others to do so too!

Thank you,
John

Through stress-testing, we had the following questions to be answered about the new version of GoTryTHIS:

1. How much cpu usage, storage, and bandwidth is used on the dashboard under very high load?
2. How many historical clicks can the dashboard handle and still be snappy?
3. What is the greatest sustainable rate of clicks per minute that any single site can push to the dashboard before there is a backlog, and where does that backlog happen?
4. Do the clicks that we send match the clicks that get reported? How accurate is GoTryTHIS?

To test this, we setup multiple cloud-based ’servers’, one for the dashboard where all the data ends up, and five test sites. On each test site there were multiple scripts to continually “click” on random test links. These were the links I was giving out at the end when we did two really big tests, with 120 people running these scripts running for 24 hours, simulating months of activity.

Here are the results. Please keep in mind that everyone will have different results based on the servers that their site is on.

CPU Usage:
If you’re doing millions of clicks a day, talk to us first. You’ll need a dedicated server or you can use our new hosted version and we’ll handle things for you.

Bandwidth:
For every 10,000 clicks there will be an extra 4MB of outgoing bandwidth from your site to the dashboard and 1MB of incoming bandwidth to your site from the dashboard.

Storage:
Every 10,000 clicks represent 0.016GB of storage, or 16MB, on the dashboard. Clicks are only stored temporarily on individual sites.

Snappy:
We simulated sending one dashboard 1,500,000 clicks per month for three months from three sites. This totaled in the dashboard having 4,500,000 clicks. I’m very happy to report that it ran as fast as a new installation.

Backlog:
Currently the dashboard can handle a sustained rate of about 2 million clicks per day from all the sites combined before a backlog starts to be created on the sites. As soon as there is a dip in traffic, the backlog reduces until it catches up. We will work to improve these numbers even further after the launch.

Accuracy:
We compared what was supposed to be sent to what actually arrived and found that 20-30 clicks out of 4,500,000 clicks didn’t get recorded. That is only 0.0000067% missed clicks, under very high load. Considering all the ways a click can missed being recorded, this is extremely accurate.

Conclusion:
The new version is exceeding our expectations for performance!

Thanks to everyone who helped with our stress testing!

Update: Monday December 8th, 3:49PM EST

Please now ignore my previous e-mail looking for people to help test. Enough people have already responded. Thank you everyone!

Soon, we’ll let you know all the results of the tests. Until then I can tell you this: In version 1, we had some users who had problems due to having more clicks than the database can handle. Due to a lot of optimizing and testing, the new version appears to be able to handle a sustained rate of over a million clicks per day, and still load and run very fast!

I suspect we’ll eventually improve on even that.

Thank you,
John.

Hi.

As we’re testing GoTryTHIS 2 and working out how much resources it consumes, I thought it might be a really good idea to find out what typical and extreme usage is, and what percentage of users fit into each.

Please respond to this blog post and tell me on average how many clicks per month you get on all your GoTryTHIS links combined. Also, what was your largest spike ever? Guestimates are quite alright!

Thank you,
John.

UPDATE:

Please hold off on any more additional testers, and shut down existing tests while we analyze the data collected so far. While it is loading fast, we’re hitting a bottleneck somewhere with the data getting to the new dashboard as fast as we would like. There are stupid number of clicks coming in right now, and I’d like to give it a chance to catch up.

(I’m not sure yet at what point the bottleneck started until we’ve done some serious analysis, but we currently have over 65,000 clicks coming in per minute, so I suspect that under more normal use things will be fine. We’ll try to calculate what that limit is from the data we have now.)

Thank you!

Well, it’s been a long haul.

GoTryTHIS 2 appears to be an upgrade to GoTryTHIS, and of course it is. It is also a testing platform for hundreds of thousands of dollars in other new technology we’ve developed, which means it is really big, complex, and hard to test.

These technologies include a lot of code to make installing and upgrading GoTryTHIS relatively easy, despite all the hard stuff going on in the background. There is also technology around moving data around so you can have GoTryTHIS 2 installed on several sites at once, and manage them from one central location of your choosing.

Imagine all the different types of servers out there, and you may have an idea of the challenges we have had making it all work. But, it’s fun to push the limits of the web!

Here’s the schedule for what is going to happen next:

Crowd-sourced Testing:
Next week, we’re taking the “final” version of GoTryTHIS 2 and putting it out for a mass test through a service called uTest.com. It uses crowd-sourcing to test web applications using many professional software testers.

We’ve got a testing plan put together that involves installing version 1, adding thousands of fake links and millions of fake clicks, upgrading to version 2 and importing those clicks, testing version 2, and then upgrading to a fake version 2.1 to test the new upgrading procedure.

The beauty of the utest service, is that we’ll have the results of that testing in a few days, with feedback from dozens of testers. If we were doing it internally, it would take a month or more and only contain feedback from a few people.

Fixing any problems found
Once that is done, I suspect we’ll have a number of small bugs to fix due to different platform issues. I doubt that we’ll have any major show-stopper bugs at this point that require rethinking anything. (That has happened a few times before, and we’ve designed ways around the problems, so what are the chances of something new coming up this late in the game, right?)

Crowd-sourced testing again
Then we’ll take the updated release and run it through another set of tests at utest to make sure that the final release version is stable. We may have to repeat this process a few times, each time with fewer issues cropping up as they are found and fixed.

User Beta testing
Once this is done, we’ll let in a limited number of real users for beta testing. To give us some cash flow, we’ll also sell some copies of GoTryTHIS 2 at a fixed price.

Recurring Billing Setup
In the background we’ll be finishing off adding recurring billing and new licenses to our billing system to allow for sales of version 2, and upgrading. All sales will be billed at a low monthly fee once we release.

Release
And then at some point, we’ll actually release version 2 for free to all existing users and it will be available for purchase to new customers. I won’t even pretend to estimate when that will happen, but we are making progress!

Version 2.1
As soon as coding is frozen on version 2, and the billing system is ready, we’re starting to add new features to GoTryTHIS 2.1. All the hard stuff will be done for the infrastructure of the program, and new features can be added frequently. Everyone who is paying monthly fees will automatically get new releases with new features, as requested by users. Existing users will get a discount on the monthly membership, if they choose to continue to receive updates.

Thank you,
John.

For those of you who have Wordpress, Joomla or other systems that use mod_redirect in your home folder, it has been said that GoTryTHIS doesn’t work.

There are various work-around’s listed here.

As well, there is a simple fix for Wordpress. Similar fixes might work for other systems as well.

WORDPRESS FIX:

In your templates folder for Wordpress, there is a file called 404.php that displays when a page isn’t found.

We’re going to replace that file with one that redirects to GoTryTHIS.

Copy the code below, and then load up the admin side of your Wordpress blog and go to “Presentation” and then the “Theme Editor” sub-menu. Then select 404 Template on the right hand side.

First, copy all the text there from 404.php into a text file on your desktop and save that as a backup in case something goes wrong.

Then replace all the content of 404.php in Wordpress with the following code, and edit the variable $gtt_path with the correct domain name and path to where you installed GoTryTHIS on that web site.

Then save the file, and test your blog and test a GoTryTHIS link.


<?php
// Set the following line ($gtt_path) to the location you installed GoTryTHIS into
$gtt_path = 'http://www.yourdomain.com/gotrythis';

// Do not edit past this point
header( 'Location: ' . $gtt_path . '/gotrythis.php?id=' . urlencode( substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],1) ) );
exit();
?>