- posted by Steve on Friday, April 30, 2010 at 5:53 PM
Last week I released a complete rewrite of
WittyProfiles.com. The goal of the rewrite was to reduce the database load and cache as many queries as possible. After about a week of monitoring, database load is way down and an average of 92% of MySQL queries are in memcached. The best part is that the users are happy with the increased performance. I guess it was worth taking the 6 months to transform 7 years of clunky PHP functions into modern object oriented code.
- posted by Steve on Friday, December 04, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Back in August 2009 I created
Giftputer.com. Giftputer uses crowdsourcing to find the perfect gifts given age, sex and personality. This project uses Amazon.com RSS Feeds, the python Universal Feed Parser, PHP and MySQL. Giftputer was designed to be a useful tool during the holiday shopping season and to bring in a few bucks in Amazon referrals.
DeGraeve.com is 10 Years Old Today
- posted by Steve on Tuesday, July 07, 2009 at 11:47 AM
Here's hoping for another 10 years of stuff from DeGraeve.com.
- posted by Steve on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 11:09 PM
A Geek Chart is a web badge that shows where you share stuff online. Each slice of the Geek Chart is a link to your profile on sites like Flickr, Twitter, Youtube and more.
What does your Geek Chart look like?This is a project I did to learn Python, brush up on ActionScript 3, experiment with ATOM and RSS feeds and play with memcached. The user and chart data is stored in MySQL tables. PHP is used for the front end. Surprisingly, there is no JavaScript in this project (yet). The idea was to use as many skills as possible to build something semi-useful that would impress future employers.
- posted by Steve on Wednesday, April 01, 2009 at 5:30 PM
YumGifts.com is a site that I built while experimenting with the Python
Universal Feed Parser and Amazon.com feeds. It displays the top selling gourmet food items. The site updates hourly.
- posted by Steve on Sunday, February 01, 2009 at 3:18 AM
Lose your job and need business cards? Let the
Business Card Robot make business cards for you.
- posted by Steve on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 8:31 PM
Easily create business cards with
FreePDFCards.com. Enter your contact information and get a PDF of your business cards you can print on your home printer or at an office print supply store like Kinko's.
- posted by Steve on Friday, January 16, 2009 at 1:28 AM
CubeStatus.com is meaningless project that spits out recent Twitter Tweets (cringe) mentioning cubicles. What is special about CubeStatus.com is that the entire idea and development process lasted only 4 hours. I thought of the domain name, discovered (to my surprise) that it was available, purchased it, updated the name servers, set up hosting, learned the Twitter API and threw together a little page with jQuery. I'm bored.
- posted by Steve on Sunday, November 02, 2008 at 10:28 PM
Earlier this year, I rewrote the inner workings of
WittyProfiles.com, a website I created way back in 2003. I optimized a lot of the backend code and added a number of new social network features. The new features led to more usage, and more confusion. After listening to a lot of user feedback and questions, I redesigned the site to make it easier to use. In the end, Witty Profile's bounce rate went from 45.0% to 24.9%, pages per visit went from 6.7 to 10.6, average time on site went from 7m:42s to 12m:25s and daily page views went from 30,000 to 100,000.
- posted by Steve on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 10:03 PM
AtomicBusinessCards.com lets you create and print your own business cards for free. Simply enter your contact information, upload a logo, and get a printable PDF of your custom business cards.