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.

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.

DeGraeve.com is 10 Years Old Today

Here's hoping for another 10 years of stuff from DeGraeve.com.

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.

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.

Business Card Robot

Lose your job and need business cards? Let the Business Card Robot make business cards for you.

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.

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.

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.

Print Your Own Business Cards

print your own business cardsAtomicBusinessCards.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.

Aside

YouTube - Street Slide: Browsing Street Level Imagery

Yahoo! Style Guide
If only there was a filter to automatically apply these writing guidelines…

Boston, Massachusetts (02101) Conditions & Forecast
nifty new weather interface at wundergrounder.com

The Idiots Guide to Making your Iphone Backup fast - Mac Forums
This came in handy while upgrading to iOS4

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.
Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency - Short Imagined Monologues

Kayak Explore
Where can I fly for how much?

TextRunner Search
Perform searches like "What contains antioxidants?" TextRunner searches hundreds of millions of assertions extracted from 500 million high-quality Web pages.

Daylight Entrance by Daniel Rybakken
LED panels replicating daylight on a dark staircase in Stockholm.

Google Font API - Google Code

Tag Galaxy
interesting way to visualize a parametric search

Dark Sky Finder

Manual for Civilization
How do you create a record of humanity and technology that would help restart civilization? "Civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile."