More website launches
I have learned plenty by working for my current employer, Ad Pepper: both as a programmer, but also in regards to how many ways you can earn money on the internet. Delivering online ads really is a big business.
So in my quest to be better at programming in rails, I thought I might just create one of those websites that has its revenue source purely from serving ads. My criteria for the website were, that (1) it I should not use much time on developing it, that (2) I should not need to maintain it, and (3) I did not need to be proud of it!
So I set off two weekends for the project. As I did not want to maintain the site, the content should be there from the start. A theme for the site that matched this criterion was baby names! Yes! Baby names. No! I didn’t make anybody pregnant! It’s just an easy way to get data; I did not need to create the content myself.
So I used the first weekend to gather data. I first went to the Familie ministeriet to get a list of all approved names in Denmark. Then I went to U.S. Social Security Administration to collect lists of popular baby names in the U.S. All in all I ended up with more than 21.000 names. In this week, I registrered two domains: namethebaby.net and ababy.name.
The next weekend was used for programming the main site: nameTheBaby.net. It was kept in a really basic layout. As I had time to spare, I decided to make an English version of the Danish site hvadskalbarnethedde.dk also. You can find this site at: aBaby.name.
So thank you rails! I wouldn’t ever have been able to do this in PHP, C# or Java in the same time period.
As I said before, I am not particularly proud of these projects. They do what they do – and serve ads while doing it. That’s really the main purpose of the two sites. They were made more as a reaction to how my current employer makes money: an interest in seeing if I could do the same thing. The two websites might horribly fail their purpose or end up providing my with a little side-income now and then. No matter what happens, at least I can say I gave it a shot.