Plutor.org » Projects

Lessons learned from Film Addict

Plutor — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:19:09 +0000

It’s been a week since I posted Film Addict. It got posted to kottke.org, Slashfilm, USAToday.com, and became a Twitter and Facebook meme on some level. At this point, it has received 100,000 pageviews, and it was filled out 37,000 times (peaking at a rate of over 1000 per hour, but at this point still about once a minute).

Lessons learned:

If I use strict and warnings, I should keep an eye on the Apache error log. I generated 10GB of errors in the first 24 hours, filling up /var on my webhost, which resulted in 8 hours of downtime during the Slashfilm surge.
Google Adsense now allows “personal” domains. I tried to sign up in 2004, when Weboggle was all the rage, and I was turned down because it lived under plutor.org. I’m not sure when the policy changed, but I applied this week and was approved on Thursday.
Google ads don’t really make you much money. At this point, the ads on the Film Addict page have made me $2.90, but even if I had had them from day one, I’d only have made about $15.
I sleep fine at night, even after creating something clearly intended to be meme-fodder.
With enough data, you can get awesome bell curves. Histogram of number of movies seen:

It didn’t end up going much of anywhere on Digg or Reddit or Delicious. I’m not sure why, but I think part of it might have been the individual nature of the form. You could compare your list against your friends’, but there was no community interest. Another factor (especially on Delicious) was the unique id in every posted URL; there could never be enough posts of a single URL to get any momentum.

Film Addict

Plutor — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 21:21:00 +0000

A couple friends of mine posted one of those lame Facebook chain note things today. It was a list of a couple hundred movies, mostly 18-25-year-old targeted franchises from the past decade or so (think Scream, Saw, American Pie, etc) with some others (mostly very popular) thrown in. “Copy this list to your profile and check off the ones you’ve seen”. The list’s arbitrary inclusion criteria angered me, so I decided to make my own, with a better inteface than “copy and paste it yourself”. The list is IMDB’s top 250.

I posted it to MetaFilter Projects. Pretty much immediately, Mathowie Twittered it. At this point, more than 200 people have taken it already. Give it a try, compare your list to mine.

Redirect referer test

Plutor — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:50:41 +0000

A web user is looking at page A. He clicks on a link for page B. That page has a META Refresh to page C. What is the value of HTTP_REFERER for that last request? What if the redirect was a Status 307? Or a location.replace() JavaScript call? What if he’s using Opera? I’ve been doing some redirect referer tests this week and I have results for some the most common browser/OS combinations. I hope to expand them further.

Live photocasting Halloween

Plutor — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:01:06 +0000

Sometime during the planning of our two parallel Halloween parties, Chris and I realized we needed some way to allow the two groups to communicate. Videocasting was our first thought, but we didn’t have the equipment or the knowledge. But when it came to taking photos and putting them on websites, we had all kinds of both. Using something Chris had written a while ago as a guide, I wrote a quick script to pull the photos off the camera, resize them to a reasonable resolution, and upload them to our web server. I then wrote a CGI that would pick a random photo from each location and place them side-by-side. Chris asked me to make the algorithm weight towards newer photos, which was far easier than it would have been if we had been uploading to a service like Flickr or something.

After a rough (and late) start in Boston, things went well. Philly took some naughty shots early, which got people riled up here and for a period of time, things were pretty lewd. Eventually it became family-safe fun time party photos and some gentle photo-jabs were traded between the sister parties. Sometime around midnight, Chris texted me “this is the best thing we’ve ever done.” I agree. That said, we learned things. The script had all kinds of bugs (mostly because I wrote it without having the camera we were going to use or the software). The CGI was too weighted towards new photos. And whereas Chris had done this before and had a neat photobooth setup (a side room, tripod, IR trigger), Boston had a camera that had to be hand-shot and plugged back into the laptop every few minutes.

Will we ever be able to learn from the mistakes we made, and try out a new iteration of the script? I certainly hope so. Maybe we can hook in a third city. California friends, I’m gesturing in your direction.

FeedWordPress Collapse Filter

Plutor — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:40:45 +0000

There’s a serious dearth of FeedWordPress filter plugins out there. I aim to rectify the situation. FeedWordPress Collapse Filter will collapse multiple posts being imported from a single feed into a single post. I use it here on Plutor.org to keep Flickr photos (which I frequently upload by the handfuls) from overwhelming everything else. Each syndicated feed can be separately configured to collapse (or not) with a different time threshold.

Download FeedWordPress Collapse Filter 1.0