David B. Calhoun’s Blog

You may have heard of the term “Web 2.0″ being thrown around here and there. You must have heard it by now especially if you are into web development on any level. There are some who think it’s just a word with no defined meaning, then there’s others who take its meaning very seriously. Look at the web development jobs offered on Craigslist, for instance, and you will see many listing referring to “Web 2.0″, along with all the other fun obscure terms associated with web development.

What is Web 2.0? As far as I can tell, it has several meanings:
1. (Website type) A type of website that offers the latest trends in social networking, multimedia, or viral content. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, etc.
2. (Website design) A website utilizing the latest in website layout and functionality. CSS, Ajax, JavaScript, Flash, Scriptaculous, gradients, etc.

These are pretty vague definitions, but I’m not sure they can be made more specific. And why did I separate the definition? Because a website can be 1 without being 2. For instance, up until recently, MySpace was a great example of 1, but they didn’t change their interface much in over five years, thus they weren’t an example of the latest and greatest in web layout and functionality. They FINALLY updated the site though, to bring it up to standards.

There’s a lot we can say about Web 2.0, but I don’t really hear a lot being said about what exactly made Web 1.0. In other words, what is now considered outdated? Here’s a few things I can think of:

1. HTML Frames (LONG outdated and out of favor, replaced by table-based layouts).
2. HTML Tables (replaced by CSS layouts).
3. Guestbooks (replaced by Blogs and built-in commenting).
3. Animated Gifs (replaced by still images, or images that change when moused-over).
4. Content-heavy pages (replaced by simple and effective pages like Google)
5. HTML Marquees (still used by teenage girls for their MySpace pages, but generally considered tacky and annoying).
6. Counters (replaced by more sophisticated web traffic monitors)
7. Webrings. You just don’t see these as often, if at all.

I’ve been using BBClone as a web counter for several years now, and it’s always been very useful and fun to watch. The biggest catch is that your pages must be in PHP format in order for the counter to function. However, with the latest releases, supposedly you can now monitor your webpages via your Apache htmlaccess logs.

Anyhow, I have finally gotten around to upgrading from version 0.4.3 to 0.4.9a. All I had to do to upgrade and transfer over all my old web stats was the following:

1. Save a copy of the old installation. Always keep backups, especially before you make big changes! All I did was rename my bbclone directory to bbclone_old.
2. Transfer the new files over.
3. Make the entire directory (and subdirectories) writable. If you don’t do this, BBClone won’t be able to save its data! Technically I suppose you could just make the bbclone/var directory writable, but I haven’t tried that and I’m not sure if it would work.
4. Transfer your old web stats files from your backup directory into the exact same location in your new directory. There are two files: 1) bbclone/var/access.php and 2) bbclone/var/last.php. Simply move/copy them into your new bbclone/var directory.
5. Test it out! This should be all you have to do to get it working!