PHP Gallery really, truly, horribly sucks. It's kludgy, slow, and susceptible to spam. All of the available spam block tools don't work well, and I ended up turning off commenting on my photo album.
It's odd that no one has created a decent gallery application in Catalyst yet. I'm torn now between just moving to Flickr and paying the money, or writing something that I can use. I have the server space, what's stopping me?
Oh, right, time.
My little shell company, Dytara, finally has a web site after six or so years. The last time a site was up and operational was when I was laid off from a Seattle-based colocation company in 2001 or so. Back in the 1990's, I ran Take-A-Byte Systems, providing custom development and web hosting, with some help of a friend of mine. We then created whatthefuck.com in 1999, as a holding of Take-A-Byte, but TAB eventually faded away as he and I got real jobs. Dytara was later created as a holding company for future work, but nothing became legal, at least until now or a little while from now. ;)
The new site still doesn't have much for content, and much of it is recycled from a failed attempt at caring in 2003, but there are some changes in the works that required me to at least make a site framework. I'm still downloading IE6 to test it, but it naturally works fine in Safari/Firefox/Chrome.
I gave in and used tables, since IE6 CSS is so odd when doing absolute positioning. If anyone checked out Things I Hate About You recently, you'll notice that it works fine in IE6, but that's only because of some major changes in CSS. I wish there was more of an effort to rid the world of IE6. IE7 is still bad, but it's at least manageable.
Things I Hate About You [http://www.thingsihateaboutyou.com] was launched this morning, to very little fanfare.
I registered the domain name back in March, thinking of something completely different, but decided to make it a little more community driven and fun. That, and I wanted to see how long it would take. Part of my continuing experimentation with cute elements and jQuery, this adds a few effects, some stateless connections, and was also written completely with Catalyst. It took four days of an hour or two a night, with posts, votes, authentication, and RSS feeds.
Not bad.
I'll probably be adding things to this site slowly, to see how well it extends. It was kinda fun to create this without having to worry about eight years of legacy, like the rewrite of whatthefuck.com into Catalyst. This was just doing-it-as-I-want. I may use this as a test bed for a Facebook application as well.
It's still pretty broken in IE6, but it's low on my priority list. I may just redirect people to a browser download page. :P
Movable Type is now a 'platform' with forums and other stuff. I just updated to the latest version which gives you this 'platform'.
Let's see what breaks. :)
If you're reading from the main site, don't be too alarmed by the Google AdSense ad. It's mostly there for testing, but it's a little bit of an experiment as well.
I've been involved with the development, support, and administration of running various web sites for the last ten years or so, and yet, I've never been a part of a site that has run any kind of advertising campaign. Doing things for yourself changes some of your views on internet advertising, as it's one of the few ways you can reliably generate any income. People, for the most part, do not want to pay for anything they do online.
Most of you know that I run www.whatthefuck.com, a free content and networking site that was content and networking before it was cool. I had two major issues during the life of this site: first, a lack of time to properly maintain it, and second, a lack of ability to monetize the domain properly. I created the site with a friend when we were both just out of high school, and it was created in the same line of thinking as the old school BBSes that we used to run and sign into daily. Because of that, it never really occurred to use to try to make money off of it, and when it finally did, the economy was running down the drain.
Over the last year, I've been rebuilding the site piece by piece on top of the fantastic platform of Perl, PostgreSQL, Catalyst, and DBIx::Class. It "relaunched" last November, very quietly, to see who would notice. Those who were still sticking around noticed immediately, as the site worked, worked well, and was still speedy. The first mission was accomplished, and the last year has been me working on it in my spare time to restore the feature set that was original envisioned back in 1999.
The difference between 1999 and 2008 in terms of the web is like comparing video games from around 1994 to now. In 1990, a sole shareware developer could crank out fun, easy to play games as shareware for $20 and make a killing. Now, you need a few million in the bank, and a team of artists, designers, modelers, and marketers to publish a video game.. and there's no guarantee that it'll be a hit. You can't throw together some basic HTML, add a few tables and server side form processing, and call it a success anymore. You need transitions, glass effects, AJAX, Web 2.0, blah, blah, blah.
(Sometimes, this goes overboard, like in the case of Ruby on Rails developers. This is why a simple service like Twitter is still having issues -- overdoing something simple, creating a platform you just can't extend.)
To bring this long story back to the ground, the next big push out from wtf is the free e-mail support that users enjoyed back when whatthefuck.com launched. Back then, it was essentially three things: a mailbox viewer, a simple mail viewer (no MIME! wtf?!), and a message composer. Yeah, there were mail folders. Sure, later on, we added an address book, but that's as fancy as it got. Eventually, the whole system collapsed under failed hardware and too little space. Now, no one is going to care about a mail service unless it -- at the very least -- does real time folder management, tagging, dynamic resizing, MIME decoding, spam filtering, and live updates. That, and 20mb per user doesn't cut it anymore, but there's no way we're going to give out 5gb at this point. Even with a minor increase in allowed space, I have to buy a lot of hardware to support this endeavor, so I have to come up with a revenue source.
Enter advertising networks, and this morning's research.
I've hit a bit of a breaking point, though. I tried to put Google SiteSearch on wtf a few months ago, but Google blocks wtf from making any requests. Apparently, we're on their blocked/forbidden list for a violation of their policy. The only thing I see in there that could potentially be a policy violation is 'excessive swearing' due to the domain name, but that kinda sucks. I've seen sites with Google ads that were doing far more subversive things than our forum.
I just wanted to see if I could get an ad up anywhere else. Turns out, I can. Now, I go look for another advertising network that doesn't have adult ads, while still allowing a domain like whatthefuck.com.
