Archive for the 'Site related' Category

The Next ‘Million Dollar Homepage’ Idea?

Published
by
Vanberge
on February 5, 2008
in Site related
. 6 Comments

***Edit***
I submitted this to Digg… Feel free to Digg it if you like the idea!
***Edit***

The Page: www.YourSiteForaDay.com

The Idea: The idea is fairly simple. I have a website where I lease out the front page space on a “per day” basis. Therefore, anyone who wants to advertise can purchase a day on my website and have their content displayed on the main entrance page for their day. In the meantime, their page and link information is stored in an index of all the purchasers. One thing I’m still not sure on is the price of a “day”. Tentatively it is 100 dollars flat fee.

It sounds a little weird to talk or write about - so I wasn’t even really sure if this was a ‘good’ idea or not. I ran it by a couple people to gauge a reaction, and generally got some pretty good feedback. I started to think about logistics ans plan for how this could even possibly work. I found it better to just start developing, and everything just kind of materialized from there.

Today marked my official launch of a real internet project: www.YourSiteForaDay.com. I have to admt, after seeing the site and getting it launched, I do feel pretty enthusiastic about it.

Before launching this, I googled around for hours and did all kinds of research - because I figured if this is a good idea then somebody must have tried it at some point in the past. I did find a couple “similar” sites that lay out a big calendar and show things like “Bobs birthday” - but that’s not really what I’m doing here.

To my knowledge, something like this has never been attempted before - And I feel like it might be a good enough idea to really make for an interesting project. I’m crossing my fingers here and we’ll see what happens.

Just for good measure: www.YourSiteForaDay.com

Site Overhaul

Published
by
Vanberge
on November 12, 2007
in Site related
. 5 Comments

About twice a year, I get an obsessive compulsive bug to completely overhaul my internet destination.
Sunday proved to be the 2nd time for 2007.

UL:

  • Upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1
  • Upgraded to Gallery 2.2.3
  • Installed and moderately tweaked new theme called “Sleepy Blue”

I guess i’m not really sure why I do this.  How much does it really matter what my website looks like.  At any rate, the change is made.  I still have a little tweaking to do to get work my content into this theme the way I want, but so far it’s coming along nicely.

I hate HTML, I hate CSS, I hate PHP, and I definitely hate MySQL.

P4P

Published
by
Vanberge
on September 20, 2007
in Site related
. 5 Comments

Ef you, website.
I don’t really like you right now.

NetFlix

Published
by
Vanberge
on July 8, 2007
in Site related and Tech
. 19 Comments

This week, I finally decided to sign up for Netflix. The movie place I previously rented from had closed, so I wanted to be sure and choose “the correct” means of obtaining visual media for the future. After reviewing three contenders: Blockbuster, Hollywood video, and Netflix - the final decision was made. In the end, I just hate blockbuster and it’s hard to argue with the ease of use for Netflix.

Since signing up, I have found myself just plunged in to an abyss of rating movies and managing my queue. I’ve been a member for 3 days and my fat maws have already queued up over 100 films - with a little help from Vanbergs of course. I’ve rated over 200 movies. I’ve added “Fleaux” and “teh teee” as friends. It has generally been fun just being a Netflix member. It just sounds cool to say: “I use NetFlix”. All this and I’ve only watched 1 movie. (Casino royale; i didnt like it. 2 stars)

I’ve also taken this chance to do some fun integration with my website. Note the Movies page referenced in the top menu, and also the Netflix queue sidebar snippet. Yeah - I am a tremendous nerd. And I hate PHP.

At any rate… good game Netflix. And also good game NBC (The Black Donnelly’s).

The New P4P

Published
by
Vanberge
on June 16, 2007
in Site related
. 5 Comments

After probably 6 hours or so of additional work, and maybe 9 total hours - the new theme for P4P has been completely integrated and tweaked to full vanberge customization.

I’m actually very happy with the current look and feel of my website. The Gallery and Google search integration turned out much better this time than it did with my last theme. These two things were my major hurdles, so i’m glad to have them out of the way. I’m still not completely sold on how the Google search results look, but Google doesn’t allow a great deal of customization with that so i think i can live with it. Plus I was able to ditch Google’s ugly html-only search form and mesh the functionality into the default wordpress search form.

I also implemented some other minor tweaks… i widened the site by 100 pixels overall, i increased the font size, added some slight color/border/image tweaks and cleaned up some alignments. All in all, i know way more about css/html than I ever wanted to.

Hopefully Google doesn’t mind that I totally hacked up their search scripts and removed the capability to do a web search from my site. The search form used to have a radio button to search the Web, or p4p.. user had to pick between the two. Now the user CAN’T pick - the search only searches p4p. :-P

If anyone notices any bad/ugly/wrong things with other browsers please let me know… but the site should be pretty uniform regardless of browser.

Look and Feel

Published
by
Vanberge
on June 12, 2007
in Site related
. 5 Comments

I have obviously updated the look and feel of p4p. I found this theme a few weeks ago and really liked it, but did not want to venture into all the ‘tweaking’ to take all my content and put it into this theme.

The theme I had been using was heavily customized in many different ways - so finally i got the motivation to start that process with this one.

As it stands, most of my content should show up and be fine. I still have a couple big things to take on… Gallery integration, and then using the Google powered search.

Alas - One step at a time.