I recently renewed this domain, meaning I’ve had it for a year now. Seems like a good time to summarize what’s been accomplished.

March 2006 - RSStalker.com
April 2006 - RSStalker.com Widget
RSStalker is the most successful site in terms of financial return. Although it certainly isn’t allowing me to quit my job. Looking at it now it’s obvious the design sucks. The UI is confusing at best. I’m currently in the process of completely re-doing the site using CakePHP as the backend and giving it a whole new look.

May 2006 - StadiumTraveler
A complete disaster is term of traffic. Apparently if you don’t actively promote a site no one will visit it - who knew? I renewed the domain for another year anyway. It’s a decent enough show piece for my portfolio.

June 2006 - SiteAMonth
I redid the look for this blog. I still think it looks pretty decent. I don’t even want to think about how much time I spent of those damn corners though.

July 2006 - Vacation
I took a month off from my side projects and enjoyed the summer.

August, September 2006 - FantasyLife.net
This one took two months, but I thing it came out awesomely. I recently redid the header/logo and it looks way better. Still struggling to build a user base. I still like the idea and have some unique ideas for the direction of the project. I’ll circle back to this one eventually.

October 2006 - NetFlix Prize

November 2006 - DealCrew.com
One of the first sites I ever did in PHP was DealCrew. It was a coupon/forum shopping site. At some point I ported the whole thing to Xoops, but it was pretty much the same premise. This is the third iteration - a significantly slimmed down site.

December 2006 - PseudoCoder.com
I was super excited about starting a second blog. I really wanted it to become a haven for self starters, like myself. I’ve reviewed a bunch of cool sites and interacted with some great developers. I just haven’t had the time to keep it up. I was throwing a solid 6-8 hours into each of the site reviews.

January 2007 - camXip
I actually took on partners on this one, but their interest fizzled out about the time I launched the site. I’m going to circle back to this one - there is a lot to like about it.

February 2007 - Frantic Job Hunt
I quit my job sometime around here. Worst job I ever had. I just walked in and quit one morning. I wish I could quit that place a million times.

Obviously the furious pace of projects has died down as I haven’t really worked on much since January. It’s times like this when I realize I shouldn’t have picked a domain like SiteAMonth. It promises more than I can deliver at the moment.

With that I announce the end of this blog. In the end there can be only one. Stay tuned for the rise of PseudoCoder.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I wrote my first guest post the other day. It was an intro to Xdebug for PHPDeveloper.org. I didn’t like the end result as much as my post on how to use Xdebug to speed up your code.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The Plugin

BlogFollow automatically puts a snippet from the commentor’s blog into the comment. Kind of like a signature to the comment. Full details and download link are now available.

The Reasoning

I read a post on the blog FuzzyFuture the other day that intrigued me. The post was about the “iFollow” movement, which calls for the removal of the nofollow tag from comment links. The thought being to encourage user participation, by providing a reward. I love the concept, but I think the implementation misses the mark.

Maybe I’m being idealistic, but removing the nofollow link is a tangible reward in the sense it helps SEO and PR, not by driving readers to the commenter’s blog. An actual human reader has no concept of what attributes are assigned to the link. Therefor the only way this helps drive actual readers is indirectly through improved search ranking. But much of the value in SEO/PR is in increased ad sales.

It’s pretty clear the iFollow movement doesn’t really increase traffic to the blog directly from the comment. That’s why I created the BlogFollow plugin.

A lot of what my bloglines subscriptions are sites I found from comments left in other sites. I’ll read a comment, if I feel it’s intelligent, informative or entertaining I’ll often click on their name to see what their site is like. I’ll generally subscribe to the site if it looks halfway decent and give it a few weeks trial.

I hope the BlogFollow plugin will help with clickthrus on comments. It gives a bit more content from the commentor to help encourage users to click. I like this approach over iFollow because it drives users directly to the commentor’s blog.

Both parties win. The blog running the plugin would conceivable get more content and user interaction. The commentor’s get their blog presented to a wider audience.

The Spam Issue

The obvious concern is an increase in spam. I think this will be minimal because the comment itself still has to get through whatever akisment, spamblocker, spam mutilator your already running. Conceivably someone could put up a blog of \/iagra links and hot stock tips, then go leave meaningful comments to get their content on your site. However blogfollow strips out all html/javasript, so there won’t be any actual links (other than the one set by the plugin in the post title) or XSS attacks.

Yes, someone could use the permalink in their feed to point to something spammy and then go around and write great comments to trick people into clicking the link. In the end it’s still up to the site owner to police their own site.

The plugin is running on this blog right now, so go ahead and leave a comment on this post to see it in action.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I was going to spend the next month (or more) promoting my four core web apps and my two blogs. I’ve put that on hold for the moment and I’m going to put together a quick WordPress plugin. Full details in a few days.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’m really enjoying working on camXip and since I haven’t completed nearly as many features as I’ve wanted to, I’m going to keep working on it through February and maybe longer. I’ve contracted a professional designer to do the logo and a couple friends are going to be working on the site as well. I’ll probably be splitting the blog off at some point as well.

In the meantime I’ve been working on some other CakePHP plugins that I’ll be releasing. The next one is an automatic RSS feed generator and I may release the user/login system I use for pretty much every project at some point.

Popularity: 15% [?]

I’ve setup a stock CakePHP instance that I’ll be using to test various code snippets. If they’re any good I’ll release them for everyone to use. Check it out: sandbox.siteamonth.com.

Popularity: 4% [?]

A few weeks ago I decided to drop the multiplayer Ajax Rock, Scissor, Paper site I was working on.   My biggest problem was that when I work on these pet projects I don’t have hours to just sit and code.  By nature a site like Shoot4It.com it was impossible to just sit down and work on it for 20 minutes then walk away.  There was no real way to break it down into bite size chunks that I could whenever I had a few minutes.

So in the end I put that on hold and started on FantasyLifeGame.com.  I’ve owned the domain for over a year now and have been kicking around the idea long before that.  I’ve made two previous attempts to code the site, but scrapped them both times because I didn’t like the way they were playing out.

I can’t say enough good thinks about cakephp.  It’s made my coding life so much easier and enjoyable.  Now I dread even thinking about a site that isn’t using cake (of some other structered MVC framework).

It would probably be best to read the description of what FantasyLifeGame.com is before continuing reading this post.

I’ve been lax in writing about my adventures in creaking FantasyLife, athough I didn’t really do anything too revolutionary here.  I hit some of the usual Ajax snags.  I spent a solid day getting the inline editing to work only to realize I didn’t like the user experience.  In the end I went with a modified type of inline editing where I swapped out the entire div with a form.  A much more pleasant (and pretty sleek) experience.  I sprinkled Ajax in places I thought it would work best, but didn’t go overboard.

I finally got to use Lightbox in a project, which I was dying to do, since I think it’s the coolest thing ever.  Although I only allow 4 pictures per post.  I’m not trying to be the next Flickr here.

Anyway, 99% of the main functionality is done.  There are hundreds of smaller things I want to add and lots of tidying up to do, but the site is quite usable right now.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I didnt really get much done for July.  I just had too much paying work to do, on top of playing with my little girl and getting out and enjoying the 100+ degree weather.  I still intend to keep cranking out these smaller, personal projects and I have some great ideas.  Hopefully August will bring more time and output.

Popularity: 4% [?]