By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - I ordered a major server upgrade from my host, which was implemented early this morning (Sunday) at 1:00 am. Apparently there were a couple of glitches which are still being worked out, but now apparently the website is back up and running again. Now I'm on a faster server, with upgrades at every option. Better CPUs, more RAM, larger and faster hard drives, etc. Users should see improvements in response time and page loads, as long as the delays are not being caused on your end due to a poor Internet connection or bandwidth issues. Anyway, continuing to expand, grow, upgrade, improve, and get better over time.

Copyright 2012 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 - I didn't really notice yesterday but this article was number 17,000 for the Panama-Guide.com database. I've been cranking them out at a pretty good clip so far this year, after hitting 16,000 articles on 30 January 2012. So let's see, yesterday was 10 May so that was --- 1,000 articles in 101 days, or an average of 9.9 per day (including Sundays, when I don't normally work.) I know you guys don't care all that much, but I like round numbers the way barracudas like shiny baubles. So just humor me, OK? So to help celebrate this momentous event, I plug the number 17,000 into Google, do a search, hit "Images" and - WTF? Ah, I get it. That's an ad for the Medion X 17000 - MD 36046 46"Flat-panel LCD. Sure. What the hell ... why not? Is that a surfboard on your head or are you just happy to see me? She's in the tropics. That could be Panama behind her. Let's run with it...

Copyright 2012 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 - I like round numbers and this kind of stuff tends to catche my attention, the way a monkey will play with something shiny. Oooo, look at that... This article right here is the 16,000th article that has been published on this website since 27 August 2004. On 8 October 2011 I published this article - "Now 15,000+ News Articles About Panama Published On This Website" - which was just 114 days ago. Ipso facto Jacko, that means between 15,000 and 16,000 I've been cranking out articles at an average of 8.7 per day. And here's why. There's normally only about 8.7 good or newsworthy stories happening in Panama on any given day. I try to cover all of the really important stuff, and tend to ignore the BS and fillers. Anyway, thanks for making Panama Guide the #1 source of English language news in the Republic of Panama. My readers are the best ... you guys rock.

Copyright 2012 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 - If you're not using Twitter yet, you might want to give it another look. Twitter is best for short, real time updates, received from the people you want to monitor. For example I use Twitter to constantly monitor all of the local and international news feeds in real time. If you follow me on Twitter, all of the articles I publish on www.panama-guide.com are uploaded and Tweeted instantly. There’s the headline and a shortened link (Tweets are limited to 140 characters) so if the headline interests you, click on the link provided automatically in the Tweet, and you’re taken directly to the article on the website.

There are all kinds of little tricks you can use on or in conjunction with Twitter, programs and interfaces via the Internet, websites, and apps you can use to improve the efficiency of Twitter and to make it a more valuable tool. It can be can be tuned and tweaked to make Twitter better for you, personally. Also, it’s a quickly evolving environment as developers get great ideas and then build new apps that take advantage of what the Twitter-sphere offers, so it’s a constantly changing and moving target. These days you should know how to use the basic tools of the Internet (email, websites, and search engines) as well as the “social media” such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+. If you want to follow Panama Guide on Twitter, just click this link and then select "Follow." Then every article published will come straight to your door.

Copyright 2012 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 might have noticed I've reactivated the forum on this website. I'll slowly be adding new topics and hopefully the users will create and suggest areas for discussion. You'll see the last five forum posts in two places on the front page - after the Featured Article, and in the left hand column after "Our Sponsors." You can also click on the Forum link, located at the upper right hand corner of the website, on the top toolbar. Anyone can read the posts, but in order to actively participate and post you will need to sign up, get a user name, and log in. This is required to keep the level of spammers down to zero. Anyway, "it is what it is" and hopefully reader participation will make it valuable.

Copyright 2011 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 - That was a nice little break. I took a couple of days off for New Years - went to a water park with my daughter, slept in, didn't shave, watched a lot of football, stuff like that. It's good to charge the batteries every now and then. Now I'm ready to kick off the new year with a bang. Last year, 2011, was a very good year for the Panama Guide website in terms of traffic and visitors. We saw a total of 878,349 unique visitors, had more than 1.9 million total visits to the website, delivered more than 21 million articles to the computer screens of our readers, generating more than 104 million hits to the server, while eating up 2,655 GB of bandwidth. And now 2012 promises to be even better. I would like to send out a special "thank you" to each and every one of our readers who keep coming back to this website for news and information about Panama. May you all have a very happy and prosperous 2012.

Copyright 2012 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 here at Panama Guide would like to wish you all a very special Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I've pretty much done all of the work that I'm going to do this week, and now I'm going to head home to spend some time with the family. We're doing a big turkey roast for dinner tomorrow, having some friends over and all of that, and my daughter Sarah who just turned five is all excited about opening the stack of presents we have under the tree. I hope Santa brings you the special gift you were hoping for, and that there's nice things stuffed into your stockings. And since the greatest gift you can give is laughter, I hope you'll enjoy this video of a Christmas Frog who's catching bugs on an iPhone. OK, it really doesn't have anything to do with Christmas, it's just funny. Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone...

Copyright 2011 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 - On 8 December 2009 I threw a new traffic counting tool on the website. I saw this "flag counter" thing on some other website, thought it was cool, so I decided to use it. Flag Counter uses the IP addresses of those who visit the website to keep track of where they are coming from, and it can generate a report based on that traffic and data collected. It's a pretty cool tool. I know that about half of my traffic comes from the United States, about one third from Panama, and everyone else from the "rest of the world." Well, I've noticed that the number of visitors from the United States has been creeping towards the 1 million mark and I didn't know when it was going to go over. That happened sometime either last night or this morning, exactly two years to the day after I put the counter on the website. I like round numbers and I thought this one was cool, for what it's worth. Whatever, I'm a geek, and geeks like numbers, and big numbers of visitors is a good thing. Another cool thing about the Flag Counter app - someone visited the website from Antarctica. How "cool" is that?

Copyright 2011 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.

#Panama - By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - Another milestone to take note of. This article, the one you are reading right now, is the 15,000th article published on this website since it's inception on 27 August 2004. Less than a year ago, on 6 December 2010, I published this article - Now More Than 13,000 Articles Published on Panama-Guide - so in the past 307 days there have been 2,000 new articles for an average of 6.5 per day, including weekends, holidays, and times when I'm off screwing around chasing bad guys or whatever. If you start counting from 27 August 2004 this website has been on the internet for 2,599 days - and doing the math - that's an average of 5.7 articles per day. So, over the past year we've been producing content slightly more prolifically than in the past - another simple fact for the the bean counters of the world to ponder.

Quality Over Quantity: One of the most important things I do is filter the wheat from the chaff. I try to pick out a handful of articles every day that I think will be of importance to our community of English speaking expatriates. It might be something about the weather, taxes, politics, or something really important like hot chicks in bikinis. And then part two of that equation is I provide a quick analysis of what I think that particular news article means. How it will impact us in the future. Why is it important. What are the emerging trends. What should you be looking out for down the road. What lessons can be learned from the mistakes of others, etc. I would like to think those are 15,000 individual reports, any one of which could stand alone on it's own merit. There's a lot of work and man hours represented there. If you've been reading this website for years, then you might want to Donate, Subscribe, or Send Me Stuff... (sheepish grin).

Traffic Is Still Good: Now consider this - as of right now we've had 5,237,412 visitors to the website - more than five million people who have come to read the 15,000 articles we've published - and we still see more than 125,000 unique visitors per month, and about 6,000 or so visitors per day. Every year during the height of the rainy season (the slow season for visitors and tourists in Panama) there's a slight dip to traffic levels. And then once the rains stop and the vacations start, the traffic surges again. No matter - the more I do this job, the less I look (stare) at charts, graphs, traffic levels, and numbers. We've seen slow and steady growth over the years, a trend that continues at a fundamental, strategic level. The Javier Martin story will be featured on CBS early next year so there will be another big jump from that. Anyway, for what it's worth. It's just that 15,000 seems like a nice, round number, something worth taking the time to make note of. Here's to the next 15,000...

Copyright 2011 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 - Once again, if you put a hyper link in a comment to an article, I will delete it instantly and read no further. I simply won't take the chance that someone will put in a malicious link, I don't have the time to check them, and I won't go surfing on random links, just because they appear in a comment. So, if you put in a link it will never see the light of day. C'ya.

Copyright 2011 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.