Month in Review: May

Well, May has come and gone. That means it’s time to review it.

I managed to completely finish Militarism this month. It’s been picked up by a few people, and resulted in a pleasant spike of hits.

I also redesigned the home page; it now looks something like a web-based resum�© of sorts.

dnScoop tells me that girasquid.com is now worth $350, which is a good increase for this month($41) - my goal was to keep it snowballing and it looks like I’ve achieved that so far.

I haven’t made a cent off of AdSense or AdBrite this month. Oh well.

I did, at least, manage to attract a lot more unique hits this month. The total is 507 uniques, which is more than double last month’s value of 251. I’m pretty sure most of that is because you only get rewarded in Militarism if you’re recruiting unique users.

I’m slowly starting to work on Parakeet 2.0; there are lots of ideas for other projects coming so fast that it’s hard to keep them all organized.

Well, that was my may. How’d everyone else’s go?

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Introducing Militarism

Well, after a month and a half(or so) of work, Militarism is finally finished and ready to go.

You can check it out at http://girasquid.com/militarism.

I’ve stayed true to the linking game gameplay style, but added a few elements(like actually using those clicks for something). Overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, although I’m planning on adding a few more features in the future.

I learned a lot while I was working on it, along with doing a little bit of crazy insaneo math to figure out the casualty calculations. There are probably a few tweaks left to be made, but I’m happy to put it out there right now for everyone to play while I tweak it.

For the moment, I think that I’m going to be starting work on Parakeet 2.0.

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Month in Review: April

The month of April has been a good one.

I tweaked Path a little bit, to make it easier for me as the administrator to keep everything running smoothly. I’ve also been steadily progressing on Militarism; you can see the screenshots I’ve been taking by visiting my Flickr page.

A quick check at dnScoop shows me that girasquid.com is now valued at $309(an increase of $188)! I’m pretty happy about that; my Google PageRank has also increased from 0 to 2.

I didn’t bring in a much larger number of hits than march, but I did manage to at least bring in more. My average was 18, up 2 from 16 for march. My total unique hits was 251, up 24 from 227 for march.

I’ve now made $0.61 with AdSense, and I also signed up for AdBrite on the main page. That’s made me $0.20 so far.

The sketching for Parakeet 2.0 is finished; once Militarism is done(hopefully this or next week), I’ll start working on that.

My April was a good month. How was yours?

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Month in Review: March

Well, the month of March has been interesting.

I finished Path. There are a few tweaks I’m considering making to it, but I’m mostly happy with it.

I’ve started another project, named “Militarism” for the moment. Probably forever. It’s a slightly modified take on the traditional linkgame. I’ll write about it soon.

I managed to find dnScoop, which will let me evaluate how much my domain is worth. Right now girasquid.com is worth $121. I’m going to try to make it a goal to increase that amount each month.

I also brought in a substantially larger number of unique hits this month than January or February. In January I got 56 hits, and in February I got 50. These are…small numbers. So far, for the month of March, I’ve received 201 hits. That’s not quite hitting my target of 212(february + january doubled), but it’s very very close. I want to try and get my number of hits snowballing too; I have little doubt that if I can just work on updating more often and finishing more projects that I can put up and have people using, I will. Once Militarism is finished that number of hits should spike, at least for a little while.

March 31st Update: I have managed to achieve a grand total of 227 hits over the month of March, with an average of 16 hits/day. Let’s see if I can beat that during April.

I signed up for Google Adsense. So far I’ve made all of $0.23. But it’s something. Maybe one day girasquid.com will pay for itself. That would be sweet.

I also discovered a really neat community for startups called StartUpping.com. I’ve just been lurking around their forums, and I’ve picked up on a lot of neat tips and ideas from them.

StartUpping also led me to another service, called MyMindShare. It’s a really neat take on paid advertising and how we as consumers/customers interact with it. Right now I’ve got an ad up on there, as I’m frantically trying to hit those 212 hits in my last day and a half or so before the month is over.

I’m considering setting up Project Wonderful ads on one of my projects too. I’m just not quite sure where yet, or which project it would be viable on.

I’ve gotten a lot of sketching done on Parakeet 2.0. I know almost exactly what I want to do with it and how I want to change it, and hopefully once Militarism is finished and I figure out if I’m going to finish Bear or not, I’ll start on it. It will be a lot easier than building 1.0 was, because I’ll A) know what I’m doing, and B) actually be following standards. Also, there will be a few sweet new features that will hopefully help me get my foot in the door on it. Bear’s on hold indefinitely now.

That’s been my month of March. How was yours?

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Path 1.0 is Released!

Well, after a few weeks of work, Path is finished. You can check it out at http://girasquid.com/path.

Path turned out okay, and I did what I wanted to do with it. I also learned some stuff, which was what I was going for. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Google Adsense’s Setup is Neat

I just turned 18, and one of the first things I did after turning 18 was to sign up for Google Adsense. It has a really cool box set-up process, that let me customize my styles all I wanted. That’s how I got boxes that matched the color scheme of this blog , and that matched the color scheme of Path. Very neat process.

• MySQL is a lot more powerful than you think

MySQL can do a lot more than I thought it could before I started working on Path. Here’s an example of some queries I learned about:

• SELECT (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM user_answered WHERE user = ?) = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM questions)

• That snippet returns either a 1 or a 0. This lets me figure out if a user has answered all of the questions or not.

• SELECT id FROM questions WHERE id NOT IN (SELECT question FROM user_answered) ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1;

This snippet lets me select a random question that a user hasn’t answered, without having to perform multiple queries or loop through all of my data to do it.

• DELETE FROM unique_hits WHERE ipaddress LIKE '66.249.72%'

Did you know MySQL could do basic pattern-matching? I didn’t. The DELETE statement above lets me remove all of the Google Crawler’s IP addresses from our table of unique hits.(66.249.72.*)

• I don’t have regex-fu

While working on Path’s profile storage, I was looking for a way to allow users to embed stylesheets and HTML code, without jeopardizing my security by allowing them to embed <script> tags. I ended up settling on using a CPAN module called HTML::EscapeEvil, but not before I tried to build a custom regex to strip out <script> tags and failed miserably. I really need to work on learning and understanding regular expressions better.

• I’m not comfortable with complex data structures

The way I designed Path, it’s 100% possible to have a question with 8 million answers, and 5 correct ones. The system can expand to that point. In order to make it easier for me to build the question-adding and answering systems, most of the data I retrieve from the database is stored in a complex data structure(namely, an Array of Hashes). This worked, and I managed to hack out code that would let me use it, but…I don’t feel quite comfortable using structures like that yet.

In the end though, I’m happy with Path. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any features I’ve missed, and I’ve learned a lot. Bring on the projects!

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