Mon 4 Jun 2007
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: 8% [?]
Mon 8 Jan 2007
Not too much to say on this one, since PseudoCoder is pretty much a stock WordPress install. I’ve done one profile so far and have 3 more lined up. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to continue at one a week after that, since I’m having a harder time finding sites then I thought I would. I’m trying to actually contact the site owners rather than just gathering info from the website, which can limit the number of sites I profile. I will continue to make posts as I find web apps, even if it isn’t at the once a week rate.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Thu 30 Nov 2006
I spent the last couple of days knocking out a couple of annoying bugs including the CakePHP bug mention in the previous post and figuring out the right wget options so that my home directory didn’t get filled with files from the crons that were running. Anyway I didn’t do anything really too interesting with DealCrew, so there isn’t too much to write about. December’s site will be announced tomorrow. I’m pretty stoked about it even though in the end it’s really just a blog.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Sun 12 Nov 2006
Since the month ended…12 days ago I’m calling it quits on the Netflix Prize. It just wasn’t in my wheelhouse. I was playing around with a few things, but tying to come up with a decent algo using command line PHP on my AMD XP 2200…it just wasn’t happening. I may still play around with it if I stumble upon some brilliant idea, but for now I’m moving on to a new project. Official announcement to come.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Tue 4 Jul 2006
I went live with the new theme for this blog a few days ago. I didn’t have nearly as much time to work on it as I would have like. When all is said and done I don’t hate it. Yeah, it’s not super stylish, but it’s functionally clean and has a neat element or two. I think the angled corners turned out nice. They’re kind of like the rounded edges that are all the trend, but different enough to stand out. I also when with an extra large banner, which would usually go against my design beliefs. I usually don’t like large banners because they push the important part of the site, the content, down. But in this case the giant header will hold information about my current project, which is the focus of this blog anyway.
Languages:
php, xhtml, css
Database:
MySQL
Open Source Software Used:
Wordpress, ProgressFly
Technologies:
Photoshop 6 and CS
My first time working with:
Wordpress Plugins
Popularity: 6% [?]
Thu 1 Jun 2006
I launched the site last list night, probably around midnight or so. I’ll admit it’s pretty bland, but once we get some posts in there it should look better. Design is probably my biggest weakness at this point. I would describe my design style as functional. For my “real” job I take mockups of well designed sites and make them work all the time. Being able to come up with the design myself is something I’m going to have to work on.
I’m pretty impressed with CakePHP as a whole. I’d worked with a lot of CMS systems lately and I prefer the freedom a framework like Cake allows. There were a few quirks that I encounter, such as with the HTMLHelper method yearOptionTag. The method is supposed to simplify the creation of a year select for a form. But I found it unuseable because it forced “_year” onto the field name. It also didn’t allow you to set the year as descending.
Languages:
PHP5, Javascript
Database:
MySQL
Open Source Software Used:
CakePHP Framework
Technologies:
Ajax
My first time working with:
CakePHP
Popularity: 6% [?]
Sun 30 Apr 2006
Month two of this project ends today. The widget is done and posted on Konfaulator’s and Yahoo’s widget galleries (same gallery with different fronts). The only real part that I didn’t complete is when removing a product. Rather than giving the product title, the ISBN/ASIN is shown, which makes it difficult to figure out which one to delete. It’ll have to stay like that for now. To fix I would have to re-do the feed being used by the widget. Only a slight change is needed, but the month is up and I don’t want to risk messing something up.
Languages:
Javascript
Database:
MySQL
Open Source Software Used:
None(?)
Technologies:
Yahoo’s Widget Engine
My first time working with:
Yahoo’s Widget Engine
Popularity: 5% [?]
Thu 30 Mar 2006
So the first official SiteAMonth site is done and launched. Although April will be spent promoting it, I’ll take this post to summerize the site development process.
Languages:
PHP, Javascript
Database:
MySQL
Open Source Software Used:
moo.fx, modified FeedCreator class
Technologies:
AJAX, RSS, Amazon’s Web Services
My first time working with:
Ajax, RSS, Amazon’s Web Services, Javascript effects, Apache’s Mod Rewrite
Popularity: 7% [?]
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