Send virtual IOUs to each other!

An IOU (an abbreviation for “I owe you”) is a note that is given from one person to another that states that the holder of the IOU is owed something by the person who wrote it. Here at I Owe You you can write out virtual IOUs to each other. It could be for anything from a taco (for the bet the other day?), a date (not recommended) or a hug (recommended) or simply $5.03 (GAS money, baby). You can also write “You Owe Me”s, which is just like an IOU except that the IOU holder is the one who owes the item written on the IOU. When you send an IOU to someone on I Owe You, that person can either accept or deny the IOU. When the IOU is paid, you can mark it as completed. If you want to send an IOU to someone who does not have an account with us, that’s fine! You can still create IOUs for that person for your personal record keeping. If you can convince the person to create an account, all the IOUs under that person’s name will even be transferred to him or her.

Enjoy the site!

I though about buying a domain for it, but decided not to. I don’t feel that this one will give revenue. So why did I create it? We’ll, 1, to learn CakePHP, and 2, to reap in the bucks that my friends owe me :p.

Here’s a demo screen for ya:

And here are the rest of them: Smosh archive

Check them out -

Hey foos, the gang went to the city last week (at least part of it). We checked out momo’s as well as a load of other cool places. Check out the pix TJ took at http://zen.cubedwater.com/
BTW I was unable to find a picture with all of us in it but TJ was definitely there too

Apparently 90% of all those website hits were coming from that Japanese blog. When they first blogged my website it showed up on their front page, as all new post show up on front pages. Since it was on the front page more people saw the link and thus it got a lot of hits (actually 1,000 hits in three days). As time went on though the post got pushed to the second page, and than the third and so on. Now I only get a few hits from them every day. Now my main source has moved to google however.

In short I probably get about 60% of the hits I got on those first few days. The rate is steadily growing though, however slowly. Now on average I get about twelve cents a day. It pays for half of hosting haha. Update: now its more like 35 cents a day, not as bad actually. Getting a $100 check in the mail next month

• Today the del.icio.us bookmarks have doubled again. It went from 118 bookmarks to now 243 bookmarks (in a time period of 19 hours)
• I had 6 ad clicks yesterday, => $1.74 earned
• I now have the page hits for yesterday. 5592 pages for the 10nth to 8973 pages on the 11nth, 30% increase

Soo, $1.74…. If that keeps up (if anything it will get higher), that’ll be 1.74*365 => $635 per year. That’s enough to pay for hosting.

Soo, as I said, I’ve been working on this new site. I’ve done a bit of brainstorming for a new site to create that is new and unthought of, and actually useful. So I decided to build a searchable, open graphic resource database for web-designers. I would hold icons, backgrounds (tiles, textures…) and banners. It would be ‘open’, as in so anyone can contribute to the database.

I know your probably thinking, “This is not new, there are plenty on graphic resources on the web”. I say “yes, there are, but they’re not open, and they suck”. I’ve done a bit of researching and all the current ones have the crappiest, most unprofessional graphics that you could imagine. Also, my database is the first to be searchable.

So, first I set out to program this website. This took about a month (I don’t really remember actually…). I used php, as it’s cool, and for the layout I used one by Styleshout. I decided that it would be a good idea to have a database of graphics before I released the site, so I searched the web for icon packs with licences that allowed me to redistribute them. In total I found 1720 icons and a set of 11 backgrounds. I failed to find any logos, so I made a few of my own. While I was at it I also made a few backgrounds too. Then I released it on September 24.

What’s happened

During the first week of release the website got nearly zero traffic (wait, keep reading). Google had not spidered it until the end of that week, and it had nearly zero backlinks. I advertised it on a few forums, but that was pretty the only source of visitors. For the the entire first week, it got about 860 page views a day (and over a fourth of them were from me).

The next week, the first week of October, was slightly better. 650 page views per day for that week. This was less then last week in total, but after subracting the amount of page views that were actually from me fixing website bugs, it was actually a *bit* more.

Then, on the tenth (yesterday), things improved, allot. Apparently, this popular Japanese blog (Link, google translated version) actually blogged(!) about my new site. Yes, their blog is in Japanese, and my site is in English, but I guess their blog was meant for a multi-language people. Anyways, it must be a popular blog because they refered 532 people to my site in that one day! I then checked del.icio.us and found my site had been bookmarked 31 times that day. It went from 4 bookmarks to 31 bookmarks in one day. With such a high percent increase, it even got onto the del.icio.us “popular page”. That gave me another 131 visitors. By the end of the day I had 5592 page views. That’s a 860% increase from the week before! I also had two ad clicks (yay! 54 cents).

Although I do not have the statistics for today, by looking at the raw statistics stored on my dreamhost server I can see that I have already reached the amount of page hits for today that I had in total yesterday. And it’s only 1pm! It should increase still yet. I also checked del.icio.us and I’ve gotton still yet another 79 bookmarks. Also, I found yet another person blogged about my site, this time in Spanish (what’s up with that? Link, google translated).

That’s all the data I have now, but I’ll be sure to blog on this again, so stay tuned. This site should still grow much more as more people link to it.

L8ter.

Oh ya, also, if you want to check out this new site I’m talking about, it’s here

http://www.OpenWebGraphics.com

But that’s not why I’m blogging today. I’m blogging for no reason at all. Haven’t you read the topic? It’s ‘Yeah…’. I’m just to cheap to think up a theme for this blog post. Who needs a theme anyways when you have loud music?

Getting into more serious stuff, I’ve found my old site through the Wayback Machine. Now that was the first site I had ever made, so yes, it’s ugly… Its theme is kiwis… Yeah, kiwis… Check it out here. Note, all the archives before 2006 are not mine. Someone else apparently had the domain before me. I think there must have been a book named The Kiwi Effect

Speaking of old websites, I’m actually working on a new one. This one is going to be more for money, and not just for fun. The money will be made in the form of ads. Google ads, actually. Not the annoying kind. I’d rather not give the url out now though, as I don’t want google (or other people, like you, no offense) to get a hold of it until it’s done. In fact I’m not even going to tell you what the site is all about as of yet (nyaa :p) .