UK Waterways Site Ranking takes off fast

Good grief, I don't think anything about waterways on the web has taken off as fast as the UK Waterways Site Ranking chart. 

Just a few days in, and already 34 sites have signed up.  (Two more in the chart are control sites by creator Tony Blews, so they don't really count.)

I was first to enlist, so I had a headstart, and I felt a bit embarrassed about it.

But now Jim Shead has jumped in too, with his Waterways Information encyclopaedia.  This is consistently busier than me, so in a day or two I'll be swapping blushing red for envious green.

I'm not sure if Tony expected it to succeed so fast.  This is an 'alpha release', the very first edition, and I'm sure there'll be lots of tweaking to come.

It would be nice to have the option of a counter that didn't say how high (or low) one was, and I suspect the current system counts all hits, not just unique ones.  And it would be good to have an easy way to match the colours of the badge to the one's own website, without programming knowledge. 

But now that Tony's got the subscribers, all he needs to do is give up his day job and hope his hits generate a little income in Google ads to pay for development.  He deserves it.

One notable site that's missing is Narrowboat World.   I hope that editor Tom Crossley signs up, so that his extraordinary 'circulation'  (which in the past he's claimed at over 4,000 a day and I don't doubt) could be confirmed independently. 

But he won't, of course.  Tom isn't a joiner, and Narrowboat World remains a linkless black-and-orange hole.  Which is a pity, because his following could be four times as much, if only he'd link out.

Comments

[Tony Blews]

It took me long enough to fix it so that people could choose their own colour, so a colour by rank system won't be happening.
You can change the colour on the "manage site" page.
If you really want to not show your rank, I can add the as an option, but I can't see why anyone would want it.

As of last night it no longer tracks your own hits on your pages, if you are still logged in.

If you look at 6 (for example) pages on a site it counts 6 hits, as each is a page view.

The all time page views count will be vanishing soon, as soon as I've made sure that it only counts the last seven days worth of hits (as otherwise the database will grow and grow and grow.

Any further developments will probably be listed here:
http://www.tonyblews.co.uk/2009/01/uk-waterways-site-ranking/

[James]

...unfortunatly, you need (I think) to embed a little HTML script into the website in question, so you can't sign up anyone else.

(I know, I've tried!)

[Martin Clark]

You seem not to have noticed someone else jumping in as well, who will probably remove your blushes before Jim Shead does!

[Sarah]

Yeah, it's the ranking bit that's fun. Much more exciting than the bald figures.

[Halfie]

Andrew, "one" will always be at the top!

Seriously, though, if one can be serious about what's only a bit of fun, the whole point of a ranking system is that it tells one how high or low one is. It ranks one, in other words. Or are you suggesting a hit counter which is the same for everyone?

[Sarah]

Nothing to stop anyone else signing it up is there? All you need is the url...