Over the past few years I've been cranking out random side projects whenever I get a decent idea and enough Red Bull in my system. At the moment I have 10 or so sites up and running. Two of the sites make a little money - don't worry I'll get to exact numbers in a bit.

We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop[ulation]. is about to explode---we can predict that just by looking at age histogram---and per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty. - Neal Stephenson, "Cryptonomicon"

The Losers

This is the part where I list all the wasted hours and failed projects. If I can still see through the tears, I'll get to the winners later on.

StadiumTraveler - I let this one die and moved it to a subdomain of my personal site. I keep it around to fill out my portfolio and to remind myself to never do a user generated content site again.

FantasyLife.net - I still love this idea and think it would be a huge winner as a Facebook App. I spent like 5 hours a night for 3 months working on it. Did you know you can fit 7 Zoloft pills in a shot glass? Excuse me while I down that and follow it up with three shots of Jameson.

camXip.com - A site aggregating IP cameras from around the world. Kind of like EarthCam, but with more Web 2.0 and less shitty design. The name is short for cam[era] X[across] ip, and is pronounced "camzip", like how the X in "Xerox" sounds like a "Z." I, of course, thought this was genius. I thought this less and less every time I'd have to explain it.

InStalker.com - The most successful of the losers. I think this site actually made like $20. I can use that money to get a sturdy rope and a noose tying book at Home Depot.

There you go. 4 sites, something like 200 hours of time spent, all for $20. I console myself by thinking how much my development skills improved. That makes me feel exactly 1% better. This box of wine, on the other hand, will make me feel 47% better.

Too Early To Tell

Now we get to the mildly uplifting part of the post. The part that makes me want to put my extensive emo MP3 collection on shuffle and spend the day in bed, rather then seeing how far I can launch myself by driving my car into a low wall.

music.rsstalker.com - Not much to say here, other than if you like music you should check it out. And if you don't like music...what's wrong with you? Go find another blog, weirdo.

later.rsstalker.com - I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who uses this. I could verify that, but sometimes you're just better off not knowing. Like in a horror movie anytime someone investigates a weird sound or movement. I'm 99.999999% sure I could just walk away from that situation and be perfectly happy never knowing the source. I call this my "get the fuck out" principle.

The Winners

First off, both of these sites pretty much run themselves, which is as awesome as it sounds. They are both version 2, where the original version was plain PHP and the new versions are CakePHP apps. They both make almost the exact same amount of money, but are completely different in terms of function and monetization.

PlanbookEdu.com - This is a site for school teachers, designed to make their lesson planning easier. It originally launched in January of 2003 and the new version was re-launched this past July. There are currently over 3000 registered users, with 171 paying $20/year for premium features. That works out to $3420 for 2008. In 2007 there were 84 paying users ($1680). The only marketing I did this past year was sending an email to the registered users announcing the new version.

RSStalker.com - This site gets approximately 50 hits a day from actual users...and over 50k hits a day from various RSS aggregators. Once a user has setup their feed there is no reason to go back to the site. If they buy a product using a link in the feed I get a commission from Amazon. In 2007 RSStalker sold 1049 items, generating $68,368.62 in revenue for Amazon and $3,358.20 in commission for me. The 2008 numbers are very similar: 1070 items, $76,875.06 revenue, $3,675.17 commission. Not much growth, but considering the economy that's not too bad. Plus in 2007, two orders of 30 iPods each accounted for almost $700 in commission.

In the last year I hit two major issues with this site that needed code fixes. The first was the result of a change in CakePHP RC2 that caused an issue with the legacy DB schema I was still using. I filed a ticket, but it was clear the fix wasn't going to be applied, at least not anytime soon. That left me with two choices. Make the change in my local CakePHP core (approximately 30 seconds) or fix the DB schema, adjust all the code and migrate the old data. Obviously I took the more difficult path. Making the 30 second core change, then repeatedly pounding my head into a wall for two days would have been less painful. I have no idea why I do these things.

The other issue I had was with my hosting. All the sites listed above are run off one shared hosting account (DreamHost). They would occasionally complain about my CPU usage. Even though I was using Cake's view caching, the number of requests was taxing their Pentium 2, 256MB ram web servers. I looked into switching providers and will probably have to do that this year, but in the meantime I solved the issue with my HTML Cache Helper.

The Future

It makes sense to use the earnings, less what I spend on those spinny rims for my SUV, and re-invest it trying to grow the sites. With PlanbookEdu I was holding off until the new version was release and stable. Most of the signups occur August to October, so I'll wait until then and target blogs/sites educators would visit.

RSStalker is so niche it's hard to find worthwhile advertising opportunities. What sites do people who shop at Amazon, know about RSS, and want to save money hang out at? The most money comes from LCD, GPS and camera sales, so maybe use that some how? We actually sell a lot of $1K+ camera lenses, which always makes me think someone was Googling "good camera lenses for stalking people" and hit my site because of the name. Does anyone know any good stalking forums I could advertise on?

Languages:
PHP5, Javascript

Database:
MySQL

Open Source Software Used:
CakePHP Framework

Technologies:
Ajax

My first time working with:
CakePHP

Most of the pages on the site are done and working. The big remaining peices are to apply the stylesheet to pretty it up and clean up some of the user interface. Uhhh...and we still need a name...

This site will be a user driven site, so I want to make the barrier for users to contribute very low. That means no accounts, no e-mail verification or any of that stuff. Like a blog comment they should just be able to post. This presents the obvious problem of spam posts. I figure if someone wants to go to the Yankees page and post "Yankees SUXXX!!!! GO SOXXXX!!!" I can't really do much to stop them. I could force all new posts to be approved before they go live, but that would require constant maintance. I really just want to stop automated bots that find forms and just submit lame V1@gr@ links.
The alternative is one of, or a combination of these:

1. CAPTCHA - I hate CAPTCHAs. Not only are they hard for the visually impaired to read, they're hard for me to read and I have decent vision. I did implent a CAPTCHA in the development site to see how it works, but I don't like it.

2. Hidden Field Trick - I read about this in a blog comment somewhere. Basically you make a form field and give it some enticing name like "email" or "comment". Then you hide the field in a div so a normal user won't see it. An automated bot will not know this and put spam data in the field before submitting it. Now this is easily worked around if someone was paying attention. Wordpress or ESPN's Sports Travel site couldn't get away with this, but my site will be small (to start) and therefor won't be specifically targeted.

3. Integrate a automated spam package, such as Bad Behavior. I like this solution. It automated, well supported and seems pretty easy to implement. Bad Behavior mostly uses header info to pick out the spam. There are other packages that compare the post to a database of spam and tags it that way, but I don't want to depend on checking an outside source for every post.

So the final solution will probably be a combination of #2 and #3. I'll probably just do #2 to start, since will probably go together pretty fast and I'll do #3 pending time.

With May just about half over I figured I should post an update on this months site. So far I'm impressed with CakePHP. Development is going much quicker then I expected. I'm (over) using AJAX, mostly because it is fairly new to me. This turorial was very helpful and I've implemented for the comment posting.

The parts that are slowing me down are the overall design issues. Again, my design skills are well below my development skills, so that part will be a challenge for now. I put together a logo image using Yahoo! Maps. I plotted out various spots on a fictional cross-country round trip and took a screen cap. I'll probably add a few inset photos of various stadiums, time allowing.