Exxxcavate was one of those projects you look and say ‘i can do this!’ . Its an adventure while i created it, and before i knew it i was doing what i told the employers what i wouldent do and that was complete the site as a whole. We had originally agreed on there budget only paying for me to create the engine and input ( the part that would crawl sites and place the info into the database ). But once that part was finished, i wanted to see it do its thang. “Its Alive” as Henry Frankenstein said.

The jist of exxxcavate was to crawl tube sites like redtube.com and youporn.com ( there was 41 in its engine altogether ) once a minute and grab new videos or update ones already in the database. I used wordpress as the cms and basicly created a plugin for the crawler. The crawler kept a ton of data, some almost useless, but would give a lot of info on the sites it was crawling. If the video sites offered embeding of video, we would take and display the embed on our site – otherwise i would iframe it in ( exxxcavate was to be a clone of metakitty.com ) .

There had always been reason and will to try something in adult porn for advertising, mainly cause there was no true market definition of how good the porn industry was ( as far as marketing and publishing online ) , and this idea was a simple way of testing the waters.

Right away, the peeps who employed me for the project seemed, well, lazy. They never disclosed what they did for a living with me, but they did act like they knew everything to know about internet marketing, but right away – after the project was a week in, one of them asked me “I have been looking at other sites doing the same thing, and they are all making about the same amount of traffic – what if ours only does as good as those ones? ” . And it was true, there were a ton of sites like metakitty, but all of them only did about 5k daily visitors. The competition seemed tough for sure, but i couldent understand why that part of the research wasn’t already performed? I didn’t know what to say, but i told him what he wanted to hear ” we will do better! “.

The entire production of the site to a couple months, and by that time i couldent take any more. For the entire project i got paid about 3.5 an hour, and there was hope for any bump or increase in my pay. Of course they were not obligated, but in America, usually fellow americans pay out more for work done well, especially when you go out of your way just because you have a passion for what you do. This showed there true colors and i was no longer impressed by there attitude.

About a month went by and the site saw little happiness, if any. Soon one of the employers was trying to get a hold of me – they wanted to do more work on the site, and more importantly SEO. At the time, i didn’t know any tricks, and when i told him that, he flipped out on me. He then continued to tell me he was consulted by a good friend who happens to be a SEO expert and he said the site was doomed. I simply expressed that i failed to see eye-to-eye with that opinion and he continued to get on my case about how i was backing down from a huge opportunity. We discussed how the site coulden’t be doomed, but in fact just needed more and lots more attention. By this time, the employer was pissed – and i could tell from the beginning he was having a bad day, but obviously needed to vent it on someone.

I began to be fed up with the phone call and told him he needed to find someone else for the SEO work. For some wierd reason he decided that attacking my character would better put me in my place. Eventually he cooled down and simply got off the conversation. Later was contacted by his partner and told that it was a mis understanding. Well – i didn’t care, because they were cheap, and now a#$)(*les in my book.

Later the same one who called me out, later asked me to do some touch up work. I obliged and performed the work. it was nothing huge, about four hours. When i was letting him know the work was done, i told him i had placed my Donations paypal button on my site if he had a little love to share ( 4 hours of friendly work is worth something, right? ) . He replied “Fuck Donations, we want this site to make millions and you can be the Lead Developer ” . I said “That would be great, but faith dosent feed my kids” .

I never talked to them again.

The site never really got any attention that it needed, and at one point they had boughten a chunk of traffic for the site, which actually crashed the site. I had warned them a sudden burst of traffic might knock it off line and we would need to be ready for a traffic increase. I installed google analyitics for them, but they couldn’t seem to get to the data ( odd, right? ) . There main Faults ?

1) You don’t talk down to your developer. If you ask him if he can do SEO work and he admits he dosent know much, that is a noble person and should be respected as such. It takes a real man to admit faults or weaknesses and i pride myself on that. Be happy that a person will admit they can’t do a job before accepting it. Don’t just be a whiny-ass baby who can’t afford a 50/hour seo person and would rather pay your cheap ass developer another 4/hour .

2) You never ever stop working on web sites. These guys were under the impression that you could make a site, and the next month without doing anything, your site would be raking in the dough. This mentality is from the late ninetys, and was 60% true. Now, it is not possible…. well, i would say %5 often make something and it eventually makes a little bit of passive income, but often that attracts the developer to work on it more and that makes it soar. So yeah, you can get away with doing little work, but it can’t cease.

3) Don’t be a dick – people will like you more and share there compassion for the work instead of just the need for money.

I am more then happy this project failed – because of what was said between the employers and myself. Had they had listened to me ( and obviously, had more capitol ) , we could have made it worked.

I just want to take this moment and snicker on behalf of there humiliation

i know i should be working, but inbetween work and the family i find a little time to get some recording done.

These are vocal-lacking demo tracks for the upcoming debut of my very own rock group American Standard . Hopefully you will enjoy them for what they are now – if anyone wants to get in on the project ( guitar, drums, bass are needed ) just get a hold of me nrgdesigns@gmail.com

The songs in demo form will be presented as ’song #’ until lyrics and vocals are set in.

song-one

song-two

Enjoy!

I am looking to create a site for the purpose of earning ad revenue and selling themes. Wordpress Themes are a bit less complicated compared to wordpress plugins, but unfortunately , i am not that great of a designer nor graphically inclined. But i can turn a design into a theme very easily. The idea of IonThemes is that artist and designers submit designs to be transformed into a wordpress theme. The theme itself will contain links back to IonThemes and the artists website. The theme will be listed as the artists ( though copy right will be shared ). The artists will take 90% of ad revenue generated from pages displaying there themes, and if the designer so chooses to sell the theme for a price ( the artist set the price ) , artist take 75% of the profits for one year, and after that take 100% of the profits ( ad revenue splits will be skipped for themes that are sold at a price versus a free download ).

There is some more info at the site – go check it out and submit a design so we can both make some money

A simple side project based on twitter . While reading the api, and setting up my own personal librarys, i started running this project on the side. Its princable was taken from another site i had seen that mentioned a lot about the limitations of its service based on the limitations of the twitter api. For the same service TweetFly offers for .05 cents a day, they were asking for 100$ a month! Another site, Socialoomph.com seems to have there system on lock down, and very impressive . They offer the same service for 30$ a month.

Currently, TweetFly.us is still in beta, but at a price of .05 cents a day, i can’t really lower it, and it will never go up. Also, you get a two month FREE trial period starting from registering date.

As of now, TweetFly has limited functionality , but with the generous support of users we will be able to add more functionality and keep the price the same while upping the quality of the service.

TweetFly’s Core Function:

You set search terms to search tweeters based on,  and then you follow them ( tweet fly does the work ), if they resond by following back, you keep them – otherwise they are automaticly unfollowed.

TweetFly’s Future Functions:

• Eliminate Following tweeters who are not following you back BEFORE you set it up with TweetFly
• Auto set multiple messages to trigger when someone follows you, or DM’s you ( for example an out-of-town message ) , or at certain times of the day or week.

For high donaters ( $100 or more ) , they will be followed by everyone joinging tweet fly.

Check it out

I wanted to just quickly announce my new musical group, American Standard. It is, at the moment, only a project. theres a couple of tracks in the works, and the site is already up here and at myspace.

The groups main focus will be rock/metal/alternative and speak mainly on and about the zombie nation that we live in. Nothing to special, just my own

At the site, i will be publishing drafts of songs, and finally the final versions, and of course it will be free to download it and share

I hope to get a few guys together for live performances before the new year, all of that info will be published on the site as well.

Rock on!

Its been a interesting road, and still in beta, we have added videos to thatcrack.com .  I created a custom vid player in flash and used the youtube api to list videos from the YT database. There are still a ton of features we are trying to add in. For now, we are just picking up vids using a curl-crawler (that i made).

Along with my work on emocreep.com , we ( the invisible company of whom i am part of mwha ha ha ha ) are planing on creating a plugin with the video player and youtube crawler, not for free, but rather make it a intergrated part of a wordpress MU installation. so it would be like a ning.com where the users had a blog they could customize and they would be there for the video player/crawler .

Don’t bother stealing my idea,… LOL . Its already in the works and just needs a design and layout

Of course i have little experience with WPMU, but i am sure ill hang

As thatcrack finally is working without a glitch every five minutes, and exxxcavate has neared the final call in phase 1, it is time to look ahead to the near future projects as i feel my skills as a programmer are becoming more jedi like every day.

Certanly with in the next few days i will be releasing a new theme – one of my own and fully authored by me. The first few i do will be nothing to special, but i want the theme habit to build into more ‘premium’ style themes. The major difference? They will be free! now that i have torn in and out of wordpress to create very unique type wordpress setups, i know i can create any kind of theme i want – easily and without to much complication ( mostly css and ‘getting it to sit right’ ).

I will also start doing hosting again, with wordpress as the main package.Sounds simple, but i can imagine some people might actually be interested in it. More details will be anounced on a page soon.

Major Projects:
1) A youtube api site grabbing vids of a certain genre. these will be listed out, sort of like exxxcavate, but obviously much MUCH more g rated LOL. ( beta release due July 1st )
2) Mixtape Cover art site – simply displaying a bunch of the greatest mixtape cover art ever known ( not like most of the CRAP that is on datpiff ) (beta release expected end of June )
3) major enhancments to hostphotofree.com, including member image managment, a basic and advanced image editor, a book mark button that will allow you to grab images off the web more easier, and a web based scrap book editor ( one thing at a time there speedy gonzalas ! )

Something that has been dinking around in my head is a easy to use music player plugin for wordpress, as well as a psudo radio station plugin which will play songs as a playlist or randomly from a mp3s uploaded via the plugin. the flash radio player would then play songs and start them as the play head sees fit ( so its not really streaming, just clever stop and go ). Anyways,… i am not sure when i will begin that one, but ill squeeze it in somewhere.

That Crack is my first application site, originally built in 2007  , it has now went through enough changes to finally be back online and without fault. Originially the site was built using a Esyndicat, a community link exhange program intended for peeps to share links and places of interest,i built on top of it to diplay mixtape cover art and play tracks using a home built flash player.

The first stages of the site built was simple, and the owners would originally upload via ftp. The players were then later built, which seemed to bring in the most traffic. The players were a pain, and a all night adventure. I think it took me four days to make the structure of the player, but it took me a couple weeks to make it skinnable, which still wasn’t that great of a feature. The way the players are made, i wished i would have done it differently after i was done – but as is life.

About three months ago, we felt our first effects of growth – disk space. Each mixtape is about 180 megs, plus a zip of the entire tape, basicly doubling the size. Before that, the company that was our dedicated host providor was going through some serious changes and possiple bankrupcy – so we tried to move to another host. After the new host failed us multiple times, we found out the employees of the last host company were going to be creating a  new company and allowing the old customers to continue with them. So we stayd put ( after we practicly moved ). Then we started to run out of room – and after many attempts to move or get a bigger hard drive, we finally hooked it up with a san drive. Now the room issue is gone. No more space limits

So since we were moving to a new space, we decided to get the site off of Esyndicat. Esyndicat, though seemingly a strong application, still posed a lot of speed issues. Our site started to experience 15k + visitors a day around August of last year, and it never seemed to go past that point. I can’t really say for sure, but at that point, and with the little experience i have, i had to assume the code or the sites system was slowing down visitors. So getting off of Esyndicat was always a thought.

Around the same time i was realizing Esyndicats limitations, i was getting into wordpress.

So now we have moved the site into wordpress – its much faster. Not only does it serves its mixtapes from the san, it also dosen’t have much crappy code in the way – you can see the site set up and turn on much quicker then before.

We are also able to keep track of the songs and players much better – and the possibility to allow video listings, as well as news and blogs ( who knows – this is unofficial stuff ). There is a top Downloaded, Listined section – as well as a Top Posted  , which is gauged on how many times a player is embeded else where on the net and if its been active in the time period stated ( the side bar shows last week, the other section right now is set to a month ). We wil be setting up a all-time list as well. Like Tina says ‘The more you grind, the more you shine’

The next thing on the list is new players with a online skin editor!

Peace