Blogflare.com
Blogflare.com
| Language: | PHP |
| Database: | MySQL |
| Javascript: | jQuery |
Blogflare.com, started in 2007, was made to allow blogs of all varieties to be ranked according to traffic and several other factors. In addition, they receive free traffic and better search engine rankings as a result.
The biggest challenge for a site like this is the ongoing calculation of traffic statistics. Version 1.0 of the website calculated statistics every hour on the hour, which seemed efficient at the time but drained resources, especially on a shared hosting environment.
Version 2.0 of the website changed things up a bit. After testing, I found it was best to calculate ranks every 5-10 minutes to keep the data load small and the impact on performance minimal during the update. The reason for this is that data isn't allowed to grow too large before being reset in that five minute window.
Of course, I've toyed with the idea of spacing the updates 30 seconds to one minute apart but at that point, the updates become noticeable.