By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - I'm back in the office this morning, after spending the last five days on a trip to St. Petersburg in Florida to attend a memorial ceremony for Cher Hughes. It was an honor to meet her closest friends and family members, and I came away with an even greater sense of what a wonderful person she was. The memorial ceremony was a remembrance and of course it was a very sad event, and the situation is horrendous. However many focused on the more joyful and spontaneous aspects of Cher's life and personality. Like, the fact that she was a certified electrician, and how she liked to climb up in the bucket truck in a bikini to work on the billboards (she owned a sign company.) Her love for children, how she liked to have a great time with family and friends, her skills as a business woman - she was loved and respected by many, and she will be missed. I'm going to post some of the photos I took while I was there later (I'll add them to this article) but right now I just wanted to put out a quick note to say "I'm back" and I've got a lot to get caught up on. And, my focus remains - Jaco, Costa Rica...

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - The family members of Cher Hughes have graciously invited me to attend the memorial ceremony that will be held in her honor in St. Petersburg, Florida on Saturday afternoon. I'll be out of the office until next Monday morning. Anyone who wants to contact me can call the US Magic Jack number (845) 514-9893 and leave a voice message, which will be forwarded to me via email. I don't think my Movistar cell phone will work in Florida, but it might. In any case, the best way to communicate for the next few days will be via email - don@panama-guide.com - which I will be checking while on the road.

I'm still looking hard at Jaco, Costa Rica, during the period of time of 30 April - 11 June 2007. I received an email today from a German tourist who was there at that time, who was renting a house in the "Ricos y Famosos" neighborhood of Jaco, Costa Rica. He reported that one night, at about 3:00 am, both he and his wife heard a blood curdling, nearby scream from a woman, and they both immediately thought someone had been killed. Remember - the "perfect" Holbert victim is on the run and hiding from the authorities. If you know of someone who ran to Costa Rica in the spring of 2007 and who has not been heard of since (like Jeffery A. Kline) then they might have run into William Dathan Holbert. Right now I think there are probably three additional victims in Jaco somewhere, one woman and two men, yet to be discovered and identified. Unfortunately, it appears this nightmare is far from over...

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - In my job I have a tendency to piss people off sometimes. I speak frankly, call a "spade a spade," strive to find and tell the truth, and I don't like to hold punches. Over the years there have been several incidents and series of news stories and reports focusing on certain individuals who have surfaced, and I've published articles to expose these people for the crooks and scumbags they really are. Naturally, the subjects of these reports don't like it, and quite frankly I don't care a bit. For the most part these people have brought this negative attention upon themselves through their own actions and only they should be held responsible for the things they have done. So anyway, occasionally pissing people off is nothing more than a hazard of the job. I've gathered together some of the most notorious of these losers into what I'm calling the Panama Guide Rogue's Gallery - those who deserve special recognition forever more. And please note, there are a whole bunch of others running around the Republic of Panama who might be deserving of such recognition, however I am reserving this space only for those with whom I have dealt specifically. In other words, if the Panamanian authorities arrest some US citizen and deport him back to the United States (and I had absolutely nothing to do with it) then it's just a newsworthy story, but that guy doesn't make the list. These are only the people with whom I've had the displeasure of having to deal with directly, in one way or the other. I'll be pulling this article back up and adding more in the future - I'm sure there will be no shortage of losers and whack-jobs to add to the list. I'm going to try to keep the list in something close to chronological order - so that the guy on the top of the list is the most recent addition. And, I'll be working to update, add to, improve, and enhance the information available over time. With no further adieu, I present the Panama-Guide Rogue's Gallery, with our most recent addition, the pair of serial killers, William Dathan Holbert and Laura Michelle Reese. (more)    Click Here To Read The Full Article (2,473 words)

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - Apparently a lot of people all wanted to read about the ongoing strikes and protests in Bocas del Toro last night, and a surge in traffic to the website crashed the server. This is frustrating, because it's not the first time this has happened. Back in 2007 when Toni Grossi Abrams was killed in Panama, CNN and FOX picked up the story in New York and included a reference to Panama Guide in their reporting. The response from the public and the sheer volume of Internet traffic to the website instantly overwhelmed the server - at that point in time I was still on a "shared" server. Learning from that event, I had my service provider shift the website to a "dedicated" server, meaning my website sits all alone on it's own box. That was supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

It Happened Again: Well, guess what. About 18 months ago the same thing happened - server crashed due to a traffic surge. The answer from the service provider this time was to upgrade the RAM on the dedicated server. So, for the past 18 months I've been paying an additional $30 bucks a month for more RAM - which was supposed to be there specifically to keep the server running in the event of another traffic surge. And it's been working fine, until last night.

Watched It Happen: At about 5:20 pm last night I issued an email containing links to the articles I published over the weekend about the strikes in Bocas del Toro. Shortly thereafter I watched as the simultaneous connections grew from 50, to 70, to 90, to more than 110, and then more than 140. As the number of simultaneous connections went over 140, which is unusual, I even took a screen snap at the time. Then, about five minutes later the website crashed. I knew immediately what had happened - traffic to the website had overwhelmed the server (again.) I immediately notified the service provider and they rebooted the server and the website came back up. However, one of the MySQL data tables had crashed so there were no articles available. It took a second level technician another couple of hours to repair the table, and when I went to bed last night the site was fine. Apparently the table crashed again sometime during the night, and right now they have fixed it (again) and are working to keep it from happening again.

My Apologies: It's hard to complain about too much traffic to the website. However, the technology behind the site should be able to handle any kind of a surge - even if it's 10,000 simultaneous connections or more. In any case, I apologize for the problem and any inconvenience it might have caused, and hopefully I'll be able to learn something about why this happened and take even more steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. And as always, thanks for making Panama-Guide.com the #1 source of English language news in the Republic of Panama. My readers (you guys) are the best...

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - This is the last article that will be going out on what was the RSS feed from this website. Unfortunately, there are a handful of lazy website owners who use the RSS feed to republish every article I write, in full. Basically, they are exploiting the RSS feed to duplicate all of my content on their websites. Therefore, I'm killing the RSS feed, right now. If you want to read the articles on this website, you will now have to use your browser to visit www.panama-guide.com. Have a great day.

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - You are reading the 12,000th article published on this website - so if you've just started researching the Republic of Panama as a potential retirement destination you've got some reading to do. We follow the news in Panama every day and select those topics we think will be of the most interest to our primary readership base - the community of English speaking expatriates who have made Panama their second home. About half of our traffic comes from the United States - some 50,000 people every month. Approximately one third of our traffic comes from computers in the Republic of Panama - some 33,000 different people every month. Canada accounts for another 10% or 10,000 readers. And the remaining 7,000+ come from all over the globe. If you do a Google search on just about anything related to the Republic of Panama sooner or later you'll run smack-dab into one of the now more than 12,000 articles we've published on this website. We continue to work hard every day to be the #1 English language resource for those who want to know what's happening here. Thanks again to all of our readers - you're the best. Someday when I'm rich and famous I would like to buy you all a beer. Let's see - 100,000 people times 60 cents for ice cold "Balboas" that's ... (pause) ... gonna happen sometime in the future when I win the lottery. For now, please accept my heartfelt gratitude. (grin)

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - Here is this month's edition of the story that never really changes all that much. We continued to see slow but steady growth in traffic to the website during the month of June 2010. We have now seen six straight months with more than 100,000 unique visitors per month. Our ratios remain steady as well, in that our 100,000 unique visitors each make on average 2 visits per month - so we saw about 200,000 visits to the website. And, on average each visitor to the website reads about eight articles and in the month of June 2010 we delivered more than 1.7 million individual articles to our readers. It wasn't a spectacular or record breaking month, but I'm not complaining. We are now far and away the #1 source of English language news in the Republic of Panama. No one else even comes close. There are a couple of morons out there who like to whine "he's lying about his traffic stats." Bullshit - they're simply jealous. Instead of worrying about their own house, they spend all of their time looking out of the window and fretting about what I'm doing (which is nuts). To our faithful base of dedicated readers - thank you all. See? quick and easy. I spend less and less time worrying about traffic and stats, which is a good thing. Now, back to work.

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - We set a new record for unique visitors in May 2010. Not by much, but a record is a record. Last year in May 2009 we had another record breaking month traffic wise, mostly because of the election coverage and a healthy spike early in the month. May is normally a good month anyway, because it has 31 days and a lot of people are planning their summer vacations. And, the longer I do this, the less time I spend obsessing over numbers, traffic, and stats. As long as there is a steady increase over time (months) then I'm happy. I only point out things like big numbers and new records, and I do these little end of month updates just because I've kinda gotten into the habit. Anyway...

Still Climbing in Alexa: Our position in Alexa.com continues to steadily improve, where we now have a traffic rank of 124,717 and climbing (lower number is better.) Alexa "reset" their algorithm about two years ago, and we've been slowly marching back ever since. Whatever, we're getting more traffic, still growing, still getting bigger and better. That's all that really matters. And, we have now had five consecutive months of traffic in which we saw more traffic than during the record breaking election month of May 2009. Slow, steady, continuous growth over the long haul - the best kind.

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.    

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - Recently several people have logged onto the website and submitted links for inclusion in our links section. However, when I check their websites there's no link back to us. In short, we only exchange links with other websites that have placed a link to us somewhere on their website. Normally these sites have something to do with Panama and contain some kind of English language content. Please take a look at this article which fully explains our long standing link exchange program. It's relatively simple - just toss up a link to Panama Guide and let us know where it is, then we will link back to you, and the world will become a better place.

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.   

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - Here's the monthly story that never really changes too much. Traffic to the Panama-Guide.com website continued to improve during the month of March 2010. According to the Sitemeter "Gold Chart" we saw 105,220 unique visitors during the month, a new record by that standard. We saw more than 100,000 unique visitors for the third month in a row. Last year in March 2009 we saw about 84,000 unique visitors, so therefore we saw an increase of about 25%, year on year. We had a good month for traffic but didn't break any records according to the AWStats program running on the server. For example we delivered more than 1.9 million articles to our readers but the record of 2.6 million set last month remains intact.

Are These Numbers Real? In short, I have no reason to lie about the level of traffic to my website. Anyone can access the "What Is Panama Guide" Category on this website, and there you can go back and see how traffic to the website has slowly grown over the past six years. For example you can see this article from 1 May 2005. Back then I was really happy (ecstatic) to have seen only 4,232 unique visitors, 8,424 visits, and delivered 35,788 pages to our readers. In comparing this month's traffic (pages delivered) to April 2005, we have seen a 5,353% increase in the past five years - not too shabby.

Outside, Third Party Verification: If you really want to, feel free to make use of independent, third party resources such as trafficestimate.com to compare websites. Those guys always tend to track my traffic about 10% to 15% low, but it's not a problem because they track everyone equally low, so when you're comparing two websites, one against the other, it balances out. Alexa.com is also useful for comparing websites. There are several people out there who are either mad for some reason or jealous, and they have a tendency to disparage and throw stones. I don't care about them or what they say. Rather I choose to focus my attention and only concern myself with my own business and the things I can influence. In short, I ignore the noise.

We're Still #1 - Far and Away: Nobody else even comes close. Panama-Guide.com is far and away the first choice for English language news in the Republic of Panama. Bar none. Thank you all for making us #1. After almost six full years we are still here, plugging along.

Copyright 2010 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.