One of the things that took the most work to get right was the thickness of the graph lines.  Because of the nature of the graphs, it was an absolute necessity that the lines be drawn with antialiasing enabled.  PHP’s interface to GD (or perhaps it’s GD itself?) ignores the line thickness setting when antialiasing is enabled.  The solution I eventually settled on is to, more or less, draw several one-pixel-wide lines next to and on top of one another to get the appearance of a thicker line.

As an aside, I’m using the technique mentioned here for permanently redirecting the old URL to the new URL:

… if you actually moved something to a new location (forever) use:

<?php
 header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
 header("Location: http://example.org/foo");
?>

It looks like there’s some issue in using curl_multi_exec() in PHP with too many requests at once causing some requests to fail strangely, potentially accounting for the lack of data from several sites that are clearly not down and clearly provide stats.txt.  My current workaround is to do the requests in smaller blocks.

I’m also trying to provide more detail as to why there aren’t stats for the sites that don’t have stats.

But the biggest development is that there will probably be graphs of the data over time.  I say “probably” because while the code is pretty much written, I’ve only been storing historical data for about a day so far (in the past, only the most recent data was kept), so it’s hard to tell whether the graphs will look okay with a lot of data and whether producing the graphs will put a significant load on the server.  The data will probably update more regularly and more frequently–likely noon and midnight CT.

Also, if anyone knows for sure if Bloty, IziBlog, and/or LiveLogCity are still alive or definitively dead, I’d like to know.  Oh, and CommieJournal seems to be looking at the posibility of moving to a different codebase, though I can’t for the life of me see why anyone would want to try to move thousands of accounts from the LJ codebase to something incompatible and with a different working paradigm.

CommieJournal to close May 1 unless they raise the money to cover $169/month hosting bill.  (If they cover this month’s bill, will the date just become June 1?  I don’t know.)