Thanks to Apple shipping everyone’s iPhone to be delivered last Friday, my package tracking website Boxoh.com saw double the number of absolute hits and six times the number of Adsense impressions. That’s a lot of iPhone recipients mashing F5 all day long.
Let’s hope more of them turn into return visitors. I do have several features in the works to help make the site more compelling for regular users and one-timers alike.
I’m looking for one or more advertisers who would be willing to sponsor the package tracking RSS feeds generated over at Boxoh.com. As it stands, only about 5% of the traffic to the site is via web browsers. Last month alone, I got just under 1.5 million hits to the dynamically generated RSS feeds for package tracking. The Google ads on the web page are hardly reaching my audience.
Unfortunately, commercial RSS advertising systems such as Feedburner will not work as they are geared towards blogs with a small number of feeds to monetize. Since Boxoh delivers individualized feeds based on package tracking numbers, the number of unique RSS feeds is vast.
If this sounds appealing to you, please get in touch with this contact form.
My Google maps making, RSS feed slinging, universal package tracker has moved to greener pastures. Boxoh.com is your new go-to place for tracking UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Airborne packages.
Backstory: In 2006, I posted a handy new utility I’d cobbled together which was a mashup between package tracking for for multiple services. It quickly became by far the most popular page on this site, with more than 1.4 million tracking requests last month. It gets more than three times the traffic of my movie theater RSS generator and four times the traffic of another spinoff site, FeedSifter, a simple RSS/Atom feed filter.
If you are familiar with MediaTemple’s GridServer service, you’ll know that using up all 1000 GPUs (server work units) for the past several months is not a good thing. Those cycles weren’t just going to waste on poorly written scripts, either. Each hit to the tracker consumed an average of 0.0002 GPU (WordPress uses 8 to 16 times that with each hit). It wasn’t always this way, though. Check back soon for an upcoming post on how I managed to cut down the CPU usage of the package tracker by 90% with some intelligent code analysis and a creative caching solution.
Boxoh.com is now hosted on a screaming VPS server with plenty of spare power. I’m taking full advantage of APC caching and several other behind-the-scenes tweaks one can only get a grip on when they are running a dedicated server.
Thanks to all of the people who have made the service so popular!
Also, thanks to Juplex for a fast and friendly site design!
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