Work Log
New Servers for WittyProfiles.com
It’s the time of year when school gets out in the U.S. and I’ve upgraded the servers for Witty Profiles just in time. According to Google Analytics, last month Witty Profiles attracted more than 700,000 unique visitors who generated over 17 million pageviews.
Jun 8 2011
FreePDFCards.com Supports ISO Latin-1 Character Set
FreePDFCards.com is a very easy way make your own business cards. Until recently, some extended characters were getting lost in one of the conversions when creating the PDF. I recently read about an under-documented feature in the Adobe postscript conversion utility and now FreePDFCards.com can produce business cards for our friends in Europe (and elsewhere) who have accents, tildes, umlauts and other diacritical marks in the ISO Latin-1 character set in their names and contact information. dásamlegt!
Aug 17 2010
Witty Profiles Optimization
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.
Apr 30 2010
Giftputer - Find the Perfect Gift
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.
Dec 4 2009
Geek Chart
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.
Apr 29 2009
Yum Gifts
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.
Apr 1 2009
Business Card Robot
Lose your job and need business cards? Let the Business Card Robot make business cards for you.
Feb 1 2009
Free PDF Cards
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.
Jan 27 2009
Cube Status
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.
Jan 16 2009
WittyProfiles.com Redesign
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.
Nov 2 2008
Print Your Own Business Cards
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.
Jul 30 2008
WittyProfiles.com Evolves
I spent the last couple of months rewriting WittyProfiles.com from scratch. Witty Profiles is a site I started in 2003 that now contains a library of nearly 250,000 short text messages for people to copy and paste into their profiles on social networks. Over the years I’ve collected a lot of user feedback and decided now was the time to implement the most requested features. Included in this release: rich text editing of quotes and profiles, elimination of quote moderation, quote voting, enhanced user profiles, and improved search.
Jun 30 2008
Flickr RSS Feed Generator
Mac OS X has a screen saver that takes an RSS feed of images as a data source. This Flickr RSS Feed Generator uses the Flickr API to retrieve images determined by parameters you specify and returns an RSS feed, whose URL you can paste into the screensaver options screen in OS X.
Feb 19 2008
New Buddy Icon Maker at FranksIcons.com
Frank’s Icons released an updated buddy icon and avatar maker. New features include: icons with up to 6 frames of animation using up to 6 different images with better fonts, font sizes and font colors. Make a new buddy icon now!
Jan 5 2008
ColorHunter.com Now Accepts Image Uploads
Are you a designer struggling to find just the right color scheme? Struggle no more. ColorHunter.com now lets you get color palettes from uploaded images. Simply upload your design in progress (in jpg, gif or png format) and get two color schemes generated from the image. Try it out!
Oct 6 2007
Favicon Editor is Better Than Ever
The DeGraeve.com Favicon Editor has been redesigned for better usability. You can now drag your cursor around to paint your favicon instead of designing it by clicking one pixel at a time. You can now create favicons from uploaded images of any size and type. The favicon editor has more colors to choose from and now keeps track of what colors you’ve used. Try it out!
Aug 18 2007
Color Hunter
ColorHunter.com is for people who want to find color palettes created from images. The color palettes are created on the fly from flickr images that match your search terms. Check out the latest nature color palettes.
Jun 4 2007
Facts
Looking for something to talk about during an awkward moment? Read up on the latest interesting information and trivia in DeGraeve.com’s new Facts section.
Mar 31 2007
DeGraeve.com Powers Facebook
Well, sort of. I noticed a huge surge in requests recently for my color palette generator web service and did some investigating which eventually led to Justin Ormont’s Facebook Auto-Colorizer which automatically colorizes Facebook profiles based on the user’s photo. Pretty cool usage.
Feb 28 2007
256pixels.com Improvements
256pixels.com is web site that holds a daily favicon design challenge. Instead of creating a favicon from scratch every time, you can now upload an image to get you started on your favicon design.
Jan 5 2007
About
Web apps that solve problems.
Spin-Off Sites
Sometimes my web apps grow up and move into their own URLs.
- Witty Profiles
- Color Hunter
- Free PDF Cards
- Witty Comics
- Frank's Icons
- Giftputer
- Geek Chart
- Yum Gifts
- 256 Pixels
- Bimtones
- Tiny Advice
- Yankee Swap Gifts
- Trip OCD
- Visual Packing Lists
- I Matter Not
- Legal T-Shirts
- OmniWishList
- Cube Status
Interesting Links
Schlep Blindness
"There was a point in 1995 when I was still trying to convince myself I could start a company by just writing code. But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but pretty much what business consists of."
"Brace Yourself! The American Empire Is Over & The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying!"
C-SPAN2 Book TV interview with Chris Hedges
Shapecatcher.com: Unicode Character Recognition
This is a tool to help you find Unicode characters. Finding a specific character whose name you don't know is cumbersome. On shapecatcher.com, all you need to know is the shape of the character! Sketch it and find it.
Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review
Google Advisor
Google Advisor makes it easy to find financial offers from multiple providers, compare them side by side, and apply online.
API | Tumblr
Embed your tumblr blog in a webpage using the tumblr API. Response formats include JSON and XML.
instantwatcher.com
Instantwatcher helps you find good streaming titles from Netflix
Design Principles
for people, organizations, formats, software, hardware
The Globe's 100 Year Old Homepage
Long before the Web, The Boston Globe had a “homepage” of sorts – its old storefront downtown. But boston.com isn’t the first time the paper has tried a free, real-time, ad-supported product. From at least the turn of the century until the 1950s, Globe staff shuttled back and forth throughout the day from the newsroom to the street. There they wrote breaking news headlines and sports scores on four blackboards and two enormous sheets of newsprint. Behind the Globe’s windows? Ads.