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 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

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

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

The exxxcavate crawler is having less errors. It was originally creating a bad slug with listing titles that contained “-” ( hyphen ) in it, simply by creating the slug with a “–” in it. Easy enough, i just added another str_replace call to it and it cleared right up

Also, some of the titles were ending up with hex characters in them ( %20 , %33 etc,… ) so i added a rawurldecode to the call and i think its cleared up. Some of the titles now have special chars like ( ! ) or ( : ) in them and they seem to parse fine, and get left out in the slug ( which is good ). One concern, there was a listing grabed last night that had nothing but special chars like “色戒做爱” and the slug was totally empty. Some of the japanese films sometimes are just japanese characters, which are considered special, which would all get blanked in the slug. I am going to check if the slug is empty and if so, create a mock slug ( like the post id ) so at least something is in that field. Otherwise, i don’t think the listing would show.

I am creating a form to easily check crawl vars for new sites. Hopefully i can have those all added today

here it goes. I have decided no more f*&&$*in around. I am finishing this thing today !

The crawler has been proving itself better as a chron job then a manual file. Please don’t ask me why – i am not really sure. But the experience is as follows.

First i created a php file ( and other files included in there ) to browse websites cataloged in the database and find video clips of adult content – record the title, the listing location, views count, duration of the video, and tags and the category it was placed under. I then took that info and placed it into wordpress as a post, using the obvious info as normal post info ( title, category, tags ) and the rest as Custom fields.

The site is hosted on cirtex, a shared hosting company boasting itself as a ‘adult content leader’ , being that they are the only shared hosting that allows adult content . We all know shared hosting means problems. You can’t develop crap on a shared hosted account because its built for less then 1k daily visitors ( this isn’t always true – some shared hosting accounts actually have a robust balance server load and actually take care of there customers – they expect some sort of ability for the developers to actually make something, and ususally dont give the boot until 15k daily visitors are reached, as in the case of bluehost.com )

The site will be moved to a dedicated server, after the project is complete. The cron job has a multi crawler, multi site memory, and can be split in many ways simply by adding different vars. Once the mysql limitations of cirtex was realized, i droped the file down to grabbing a whole page of listings to only one at a time. This actually had a lot of benefits, as i was able to handle errors on a more detailed level.

Today, i am adding search-by-video-length feature, and will be adding a landing page. Also making the css in the site act a bit normal ( my screen resolution is 1280 width, and it looks like shit on screen of 1060 or less ). All of that is not a big deal and probably about six hours of work. I need to add 30 more sites to the crawlers database, and that might extend some work on my part. I am thinking… all nighter?!

the crawler worked up 3800 listings before showing signs of hatred towards man kind. It began to error out when it was flipping categorys, but as far as i could tell, it did it fine before on all the sites, so i was totally unsure of what could have been happening.

So, i figured it was mysql spitting poop out its eating hole ( sure enough ). The querys were collecting in its cache.

usually, on a dedicated server, or something with root access, i could clear the cache in an instant, but the site is hosted at cirtex, so its got some sort of cache renewal rate ( probably every two or four hours ). So i have to wait it out

Blah

so probably 5-6k a day. That ain’t bad. Were looking at having the machine stop for a few hours every day so it can allow the mysql to clear, but that shouldent be a problem.

Anyways, time for a break