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:

golfshake is a niche social networking site, targeted at golfers. In addition to the standard social features, golfshake adds many tools specific to the golf community.

Darren Ramowski originally submitted his site a couple months ago when it was golfscoretracker.co.uk. Since then he has done a complete overhaul and recently re-launched as golfshake.com. The new name and site are both big upgrades. As Darren explains in his blog, the main drive behind the switch was to promote the site to international (non-uk in the case) users. In addition the site has grown beyond a simple score tracking system to a full fledged community. The new name fits both these goals.

The original site was built seven years ago as a side project to help Darren's golf game, as well as a way to refine his PHP/MySQL skills. The site has really taken off in the last 18 months as the user base has jumped from 1500 to over 16K. Darren attributes most of this growth to the additional community features which have encourages word of mouth advertising.

From Darren:

Within the last 2 years the site has seen some major updates to the code base and the introduction of lots of new features. Users can now get in touch with each other to arrange golf games, see how their golf compares with buddies, organize public events which other users can join and run golf societies online. It's a bit of a cliche but it's almost MySpace for golfers.

I'm a big fan of this sort of stat tracking/competition angle. It's something that will keep users coming back and active on the site. The way Darren has incorporated the usual social networking features with features targeted directly at golfers is impressive. It is this integration of stat tracking and community that really set golfshake apart.

If you're a golfer, golfshake is definitely worth checking out.

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.

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.