ananasblau.com

So it’s been like six weeks now since Alex and I got into talking about “plasticpilots”http://www.plasticpilots.com and I bought it from him. I can say, I’m very happy about the whole thing. The development of the new software (it’s open source btw) went smoothly and I’m still improving small bit to have a better look and quicker workflow. I’ve increased the activity a lot, sadly there are almost no new comments yet but I think as soon as I’m putting up the forum again that will improve a lot. Traffic increased only like 10% so far, but pageviews did by 40%. I don’t have any stats on item use from feedburner yet but I’m very curious about those.

Financially it was a big expense for me and it didn’t generate any revenue yet but my strategy was to increase traffic first, so I’m in my 12-month schedule for the return of investment. A nice side-effect is the ongoing cooperation with Alex. We launched rollr.com last week and it’s basically the same software like plasticpilots. And that’s only the beginning, the next project will bring in some money for us :-)

My conclusion, if you have some spare money and time, plus the necessary skills to program a modern website, then invest your money and time. It will take a year to return your investment and you might have to spent some work (unless you know how to improve the workflow), but it will pay out. Oh, and don’t forget, stick to your niche. There’s a lot possible with synergy-effects.

Last month I bought plasticpilots.com from Alex (from plasticshore.com), trashed the expression engine it was running on and wrote a completely new software called plasticairships. The new software is running on plasticpilots for a week now, a few of bugs have been fixed since and improvements in the design been made.

I’m not sure if anyone else will ever find good use for it. Alex and I did a redux version this week, for a workshop he does next month. The redux looks totally different of course, very minimalistic, and it has a few features from feedme (which will get some loving soon).

Btw, plasticairships is running on rails 2.1, so it’s totally covered with named_scopes, the new eager loading and other stuff.

I’ve been doing a lot of open source in the last two months and you might want to check out the results so far. And besides all that there’s the githorde of course.

FeedMe!

FeedMe! is a RSS planet that was started by Daniel Lindsley and I improved it to match my needs for salzburg-weblogs.net. It’s still incomplete and I will put a few more days of work into.

exabuch

exabuch is a german billing web-app and took over this one as well. I have quite big plans with it, also on a commercial level

plastipilots

My newest investment is this very old design website plasticpilots that I’m about to buy from a guy living nearby (yeah, very big internet). It’s getting a completely new software as replacement for expression engine and the new software will be open source as well: plasticairships. I think it will be very easy to customize for any kind of showcases or portfolio.

I didn’t mention githorde yet, it’s something we came up two weeks ago. The idea is pretty simple, a loosely group of developers picking up open source projects and developing new features. We want to jump from one project to the next every few weeks, just like every good barbarian horde would.

Today was the first session, only one and a half hour where Andrew and I met in IRC and did some work on feeddit which was released to open source just a few weeks ago. We achieved our targets (caching, new digg library and filtering by topics) and despite trouble with git (well, at least Andrew, me totally gits it!) we are very happy with our first session.

If you want to join the horde, register at the website and participate. You’ll get a message when the next session takes place.

Nur ein kleiner Hinweis darauf dass ich gerade version 0.2 von exabuch veröffentlicht habe. Exabuch ist eine open source software die ich von Ingo Terpelle übernommen hab und weiterentwickle. Im Grunde kann man es mit blinksale, fastbill, easybill oder billomat vergleichen. Aber es ist open source, großer Unterschied.

Linklift is like text-link-ads a marketplace to sell links on your website/blog. Put aside that Google doesn’t like it, just like China doesn’t like monks, it’s a nice extra-income from my small blogs and much better than AdSense.

A plugin for text-link-ads has been around for some time, but is not for multi-site installations of mephisto. There are a few posts on nano rails about getting tla into rails but found them a bit too late.

My linklift-plugin works perfect with mephisto and there are also helpers to use it in any erb-file thus any rails-application. It caches the xml-file from link-lift locally but to speed up processes when a link was sold you might want to delete the cached xml file and clear all caches of you blog.

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<ul>
{% linklift website_key: your-key, plugin_secret: your-secret as link %}
  <li><a href="{{ link.url }}"{% if link.nofollow %} rel="nofollow"{% endif %}>{{link.text}}</a></li>
{% endlinklift %}
</ul>

Project website at rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/linklift-plugin/

Many thanks to Rayo at linklift who answered my questions quickly and was also so kind to fill my empty pockets :-)