Music.RSStalker.com

This site allows you to enter a list of musicians/bands and generate a custom feed of their album releases. This way you'll never miss a new release. It's very similar to music-alerts.com. The differences are 1) better feed management, 2) feeds for genres, styles and record labels and 3) feeds actually work (I hope). With the music-alerts feed I get a list of 50+ new releases every week, which includes every release for the last 6 of so months. This is annoying because I have to scan through the same list every week to find which are actually new.

I started this site on Nov 6th. I had the 6th and the 7th off from the paying gig, so I got a good chunk of the site done then. I was pretty much ready to launch a week later, but it was about then I realized the Discogs API I was using wasn't all that great. I switched over to Amazon, which took a little while, mostly because I only had nights available to work on it at that point.

Later.RSStalker.com

I had the idea for this site as I was laying in bed on Friday night and coded it up yesterday and today. It might be a little rough, but it doesn't do all that much so it should work pretty well. This app is very similar to Instapaper and Read It Later. It allows you to save a web page for later viewing.

My version doesn't require a sign up or anything to be installed. This means it will work in all browsers. The best part is that is sticks all the saved pages into a personal RSS feed. Since I generally have a huge backlog of items to read in Google Reader it makes sense to add any single pages there as well. Now when I'm looking for something to read I don't have to go to two places.

Both site are built on CakePHP. Not much JavaScript involved in either. I used the same design from the original RSStalker.com, which sped development up considerably. If you have any technical questions about how the sites work I'd be happy to provide details - just leave a comment.

I'll get back to posting some more CakePHP tips soon. I promise I have a bunch of ideas queued up.

In the meantime I wanted to announce my latest CakePHP site, InStalker.com. InStalker is a site to help people get hard to find products like the Nintendo Wii and DS Lite. I know there are tons of other sites that already do this. Two things I didn't see very often on the other guys is Twitter support and Ajax. There is no need to sign up for anything. You just leave the site open in your browser and it will automatically alert you when $latest_trendy_product is in stock.

It's using the latest beta 1.2 release (which rocks). A lot of the code and design came from RSStalker.com, so it really didn't take me that long to put together.

So if you're looking for a Wii (still not in stock very often and when it is you usually need to buy as part of bundle) or DS Lite (comes in stock often, but you have to be fast) check it out.

RSStalker, a site I built almost two years ago, was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about price tracking. It's only one line and not overly flattering, but still kind of cool. I actually talked to the reporter who wrote the piece earlier in the week about the site and price tracking in general. Thanks Shelly Banjo and WSJ!

RSStalker.com has been doing pretty will with affiliate sales lately, so I've been looking to re-invest some of that money into the site. I've tried a few ads with limited success. I was randomly watching SeeMeWin the other night after a friend e-mailed me an article about the site. SeeMeWin is a videocast where they scratch lottery tickets. Nick, one of the guys doing the video cast, mentioned they were selling ads on the "scratch pad" (where they scratch the tickets). I figured it couldn't perform any worse then the ads I'm buying now, so for $20 I got RSStalker on the scratch pad. Yea, users can't click on anything so they're is no real way to track conversions. I'll post an update Wednesday with how well this worked.

Here's what it looked like:

I decided it was a good time to make the new RSStalker.com live. I've been testing it for the past few days without any real issues. The only thing I'm worried about is how it will handle the load from the full user base. I've got some caching going so it shouldn't be too bad. I figured now would be a good time to launch, since if something went wrong I'd have the weekend to fix it.

I'm a bit disappointed that CakePHP 1.2 still has issues with caching the home page of your site. I solved this before by doing an Apache redirect, but I don't want to do that here. If I get some time I'm going to try to find a better solution.

Anyway, enjoy the new site. Leave a comment if you have an issue.