The company I work at uses it across all products - Javascript and PHP. It's super handy and has helped us find bugs before our users! Definitely recommend giving it a shot since you can have Sentry logging your Javascript errors in 2 lines of code.
It is /very/ useful. I managed to mooch a free account for an open-source project and it has been invaluable. For Python projects, it has the best integration (being written in python) of any of the many that I have tried (most of which seem to focus on RoR and everything else is an extra).
I'm attempting to get it adopted at my workplace as well. The major point that seems to get the bosses interested is being able to host it ourselves (for free, it's open source) easily in the case that we outgrow the hosted version.
Not sure it would be related, but python.com used to be a startling high-res extremely NSFW spread that you really didn't want to accidentally visit in a public setting when you really wanted python.org...
(They are now 'no longer accepting new affiliates' though, and the pictures are gone.)
The issue with it however is that the initial page is delivered over an insecure connection, which allows any part of it to be modified in the usual MITM style. Nothing prevents an attacker from changing the link that is served to the client with something else that looks like that payment system and functions the same, but logs the payment information. There's a reason Firefox now disallows mixed HTTP/HTTPS content by default[0]
My blog at http://erica.biz makes more than $1,000/mo in advertising and affiliate commissions.
I built the blog after I bootstrapped and sold my first tech company. I talk a lot about growing your business/startup, and especially about all the failures I had while building my businesses. It became popular (1.2 million unique visitors last year alone.)
I've now been blogging there for just over 6 years. Today I'm more focused on my startup, so my blog isn't bringing in as much income as it used to (though it's still over $1,000/mo.) My best month was over $24,000 in income.
Good question. I don't have a good ad stats program right now, and I charge a flat rate for banner ads on my site, so the honest answer is...I haven't checked!
My ad service provider is going out of business on 12/31, so over the next few weeks I'll pick a different ad software program and/or ad service provider, and I'll then be able to track stats better.
Interesting question. I read her post, checked out the blog, disabled Adblock but still didn't see any ads. So I disabled Ghostery as well and finally saw the source of her income. My initial thought was "who the hell clicks these ads?". I suppose the target group isn't people like me who use extensions Adblock and Ghostery. And people like me are (and probably most of you) - at least for now - a pretty small group among web users.
you don't have to click the ads to mean something. every time you see an ad you're most likely getting cookie retargeted as well, meaning the advertizers now can uniquely identify you across the internet. The next time you purchase something related to an ad you saw half way across the internet, she gets paid for showing you the ad.
Thanks, really appreciate it! It's been my side project for about 2 years now.
It really started to take off at the beginning of this year when I started to rank well for relevant keywords. This past summer, I switched domains to make it more memorable, and my ranking suffered pretty severely.
My rank in Google search never recovered, but my traffic from other sources / direct traffic has increased quite substantially such that this doesn't matter anymore.
Google analytics showed a decent amount of traffic from users searching for asliceofpizza, abitofpizza, etc, and I talked to some users that indicated they had trouble remembering the domain. Bought the new domain for ~$600 over the summer.
My direct traffic has increased a lot since then, so I'm inclined to say it helped.
Yeah, I did a 301 permanent redirect (the redirect is still there too), redirecting each page to the correct corresponding page on the new domain. I also told Google about the redirect through the webmaster's console.
I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it.
If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.
Have you considered working with local pizza shops or recruiting a "virtual" sales force to do that for you?
Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out.
So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places.
For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
You read my mind! That's my next plan for expansion, I'm just trying to decide how to approach it. A lot of the visitors to the site are budget conscious, so I'd really like to have coupons, etc for them (even if they aren't as good, etc), but people have mentioned that they'd love to have more local stores.
My current ideas are:
1. Use the yelp api to add local pizza stores to the current site - this is probably the easiest way to keep the database up to date. I could then reach out to local pizza stores, and try to get some promotions added. The biggest challenge with this is keeping the promotions for local pizza places up to date as a single person working on this.
One idea is to somehow encourage users to 'adopt' a local store, and keep the promotions up to date for that local store. Still trying to decide if there's a good way to do that.
2. Make the local pizza places a separate site / app and push users to use it for just finding local pizza places, less about finding coupons, and run it next to the current site.
Over the last few Google search algorithm updates, exact match domains (EMD's) were devalued. This could be one of the reasons why you are not ranking as highly for the term "pizza codes" while the previous domain was.
The deranking (and domain change coincidentally) were right around that time. Interestingly, I rank higher for 'pizza codes' now, and a lot lower for terms like 'papa johns coupons'.
I started it out about 2 years ago to help out people on slickdeals, and posted it in relevant threads. After the first few months, people started to find it useful enough to post it on their own on slickdeals.
Now it's almost entirely promoted by other people sharing links on twitter, reddit, slickdeals, etc. About a month back it got posted to '/r/YouShouldKnow', and got ~3k 'upvotes'. Didn't notice it was posted until I saw the big spike in traffic when looking at the stats for the day.
More recently I've been testing out reddit ads, but I need to work on my targeting (my ctr has been ~0.7%). Paid advertising is a bit challenging for a site like this since revenue per user is on the low side.
Users can submit codes, or I add them when I see them on sites like slickdeals. I built a python backend that checks where a code works for new codes. After that, I have some methods so I don't have to check as frequently.
That's great. I usually wade through Retail Me Not on my own, but it's time consuming to go back and forth to see what's available from different stores (and they try and hide the actual code). I'll give it a try next time.
They hide the actual code until you click on their link so they can get the affiliate traffic (otherwise people would just copy the code, and leave, resulting in no revenue for them).
Retailmenot was part of the inspiration for the site - I always found pizza coupons on their site to not be very accurate.
Users can submit codes, or I add them when I see them on sites like slickdeals. I built a python backend that checks where a code works for new codes. After that, I have some methods so I don't have to check as frequently.
Great idea! Quick heads up, the SERP doesn't seem to load in IE9 (I know, I know...it's all they offer at work). All I see under the ad is "ding...)", so possibly some CSS rendering oddity going on. Email is in my profile if you want, shoot me a note and I can send over a screengrab.
Thanks for reaching out to me! I just replied to your email with more details, but this is fixed now - I was incorrectly placing the 'doctype' after some javascript, causing IE9 to fall back to 'quirks mode', which seems to disable css and js. Since js is used to load the results, the results never loaded.
A good old fashioned web site which ranks high for a resort town which has a lot of tourists who don't know where to eat so they search in the Google. My next venture is a run on sentence shortening service.
Direct only. Our competition is tripadvisor, it a david and goliath situation, even though we specialize in just one area for one thing. My friend owns a similar site in a much larger demographic and makes a lot more, but be advised.. this works mainly because of salesmanship and ranking well, the per month hours are now very minimal (5-10).
I would love to see your website and how the information you provide for this particular resort compares to what Trip Advisor offers. Any chance to share the url?
I wrote a short book on Ruby (http://dmtri.com/posts/65/just_enough_ruby_to_get_by) for beginners. I wanted to publish it via LearnPub originally and earn some money, but I decided to release it for free instead.
I started a bag company, https://www.missionarybag.com/, for a niche market (young adults who leave home for 18 months to 2 years). A contract sewer here in the US makes the bags and my stay-at home wife does the shipping/handling. This is our first month to hit $1,000 profit in a month in under 6 months. After spending 12 years in software development, I wanted to create something tangible. And all the ecommerce/SEO/marketing I have helped others with over the years has come in handy - learning a lot in the process. We are looking to fill some larger orders with an overseas manufacturer.
I can't speak for the church or any particular mission, but from my experience as a Mormon missionary over a decade ago, backpacks 1) Make missionaries look like students, when they are not. 2) Are awkward on public transportation (and using them on transport is considered quite rude in some cultures). 3) Are more prone to being pickpocketed or losing things than a bag at your side/front that you can see more readily.
The other aspect is that they actually want to discourage them from carrying so much stuff. They have many problems with back pain and the such. And like the other guy said, they want Missionaries "to look professional, and backpacks are not professional".
I wish I'd known about this a few months ago when I was in the market for a new bag. It meets all my picky bag criteria including not being made in China.
I ended up getting a SealLine shoulder bag which are pretty pricey but excellent.
FYI, I just tried to send you a message via the "Contact Us" link on your site, and clicking "Send" results in a classic Ruby on Rails "We're sorry, something went wrong" error page. You could be losing sales if those messages aren't going through.
Cool album. How did you get a big enough audience to make real money from this? Was it just word of mouth from making good tracks? Or was it also from doing shows or reaching out to music blogs or something?
I made a nest egg of $150,000 through advanced use of the "spend less than you make" framework. I invest passively with index funds. I average about 6% annually, but this year was significantly more than that. Easily $1k/month.
Is that from dividends or growth of capital? 2013 is definitely a historical anomaly when it comes to returns, not hard to do well when the S&P 500 is up 27% YTD
https://coderpad.io is a SaaS product I built that provides the highest fidelity experience out there currently for interviewing other programmers over the phone.
I got to my current rev with a mix of self service plans and enterprise deals.
I built and sell a collection of plugins for the Delphi IDE at http://www.twodesk.com. (Yes, people still use Delphi), for a consistent single-digit multiple of $1K each month.
That is AWESOME... back in 2000, I was writing a vertical app for an oil company using Object Pascal/Borland Delphi (it was still Borland... and Kylix... at that point) It got me using Interbase/Firebird/FirebirdSQL for a couple of years. Glad to hear it's still around.
I was developing primarily in Delphi for 5 years, took a year off, and now doing it on a the side again a little bit. It's not SO bad mumble mumble mumble
I now blog at http://ta.gd/mypost no ads no nothing, it really just a feed for all things tech, also original post. About 3 years ago I had a news blog called alternative news daily which I sold for about 7 times revenue. My best day ever I took down 800 and change in a day.
It was during the bp oil spill ordeal, I heard Lindsey Williams on a talk radio show talking about all the toxic chemicals and gas the spill would produce, and how the worker were getting sick from it.
up until then I had never heard of anything like this in main stream news, so I wrote a lengthy article on it. A few days later guess what... The story was a hot item in main stream news! Not only did alternativenewsdaily.com have the top position in search, the distribution channels I submitted the story too made up the rest of the serps. Traffic poured in by the thousands and my ads were catching clicks like crazy. Later on the momentum wore off and I was drowned out by NYTimes, huffpost, and others, but that short time I was on top was freaking awesome.
I still have decent ranking blogs that I will try to post breaking news on as soon as I hear about it to try to get a jump on mainstream outlets, I monitor drudgereport for that, but I doubt I'll ever get anywhere close to that day traffic surge.
for a good laugh you may be interested in my post http://ta.gd/boyband how to start the ultimate boy band in 5 easy steps (no ads)
170 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread2. Network of content sites monetized with ads
I'm attempting to get it adopted at my workplace as well. The major point that seems to get the bosses interested is being able to host it ourselves (for free, it's open source) easily in the case that we outgrow the hosted version.
Plus we are pretty lazy when it comes to that
Edit: Never mind, I think your censorware might just have a more inventive sexual imagination than I do when it comes to domain names...
(They are now 'no longer accepting new affiliates' though, and the pictures are gone.)
>http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2013/12/amazonfresh_has_lau...
But the main site (http://www.sfweekly.com/) and the blog site (http://blogs.sfweekly.com/) aren't blocked. I'm going to guess my work filter is just screwy.
[0] - https://blog.mozilla.org/tanvi/2013/04/10/mixed-content-bloc...
Wish I could say that I have had enough time to go through them both...
I built the blog after I bootstrapped and sold my first tech company. I talk a lot about growing your business/startup, and especially about all the failures I had while building my businesses. It became popular (1.2 million unique visitors last year alone.)
I've now been blogging there for just over 6 years. Today I'm more focused on my startup, so my blog isn't bringing in as much income as it used to (though it's still over $1,000/mo.) My best month was over $24,000 in income.
My ad service provider is going out of business on 12/31, so over the next few weeks I'll pick a different ad software program and/or ad service provider, and I'll then be able to track stats better.
My goal was to break $1k / mo by the end of this year. Last month I not only broke that goal, but more than doubled my next highest month.
It really started to take off at the beginning of this year when I started to rank well for relevant keywords. This past summer, I switched domains to make it more memorable, and my ranking suffered pretty severely.
My rank in Google search never recovered, but my traffic from other sources / direct traffic has increased quite substantially such that this doesn't matter anymore.
Google analytics showed a decent amount of traffic from users searching for asliceofpizza, abitofpizza, etc, and I talked to some users that indicated they had trouble remembering the domain. Bought the new domain for ~$600 over the summer.
My direct traffic has increased a lot since then, so I'm inclined to say it helped.
I am ranking for terms like 'pizza codes', but I'm assuming that's due to my domain name (and the traffic from this is considerably less than I used to receive). I've pretty much just accepted the loss of organic Google traffic, and the site's doing pretty well without out it.
If anyone has experience with this, and has any ideas, I'd be eternally grateful. I spent a considerable amount of time looking trying to figure out what was wrong with no success.
Unlike Groupon it wouldn't be about big deals but simply more people calling the local indy than the big chain which pumps the coupons out.
So many food websites focus on big cities or daytime office deliveries, but there is a lot of delivery pizza business in the midwest and other more spread out places.
For me, knowing when they stop delivering at night at a glance would help too.
My current ideas are:
1. Use the yelp api to add local pizza stores to the current site - this is probably the easiest way to keep the database up to date. I could then reach out to local pizza stores, and try to get some promotions added. The biggest challenge with this is keeping the promotions for local pizza places up to date as a single person working on this.
One idea is to somehow encourage users to 'adopt' a local store, and keep the promotions up to date for that local store. Still trying to decide if there's a good way to do that.
2. Make the local pizza places a separate site / app and push users to use it for just finding local pizza places, less about finding coupons, and run it next to the current site.
I really appreciate the help.
Now it's almost entirely promoted by other people sharing links on twitter, reddit, slickdeals, etc. About a month back it got posted to '/r/YouShouldKnow', and got ~3k 'upvotes'. Didn't notice it was posted until I saw the big spike in traffic when looking at the stats for the day.
More recently I've been testing out reddit ads, but I need to work on my targeting (my ctr has been ~0.7%). Paid advertising is a bit challenging for a site like this since revenue per user is on the low side.
Retailmenot was part of the inspiration for the site - I always found pizza coupons on their site to not be very accurate.
It's a project management app for freelancers and small businesses. Hopefully one day soon it will be more than a side project.
I ended up getting a SealLine shoulder bag which are pretty pricey but excellent.
Via album sales, Spotify streams, iTunes, etc, all done through TuneCore (https://www.tunecore.com).
I got to my current rev with a mix of self service plans and enterprise deals.
It was during the bp oil spill ordeal, I heard Lindsey Williams on a talk radio show talking about all the toxic chemicals and gas the spill would produce, and how the worker were getting sick from it.
up until then I had never heard of anything like this in main stream news, so I wrote a lengthy article on it. A few days later guess what... The story was a hot item in main stream news! Not only did alternativenewsdaily.com have the top position in search, the distribution channels I submitted the story too made up the rest of the serps. Traffic poured in by the thousands and my ads were catching clicks like crazy. Later on the momentum wore off and I was drowned out by NYTimes, huffpost, and others, but that short time I was on top was freaking awesome.
I still have decent ranking blogs that I will try to post breaking news on as soon as I hear about it to try to get a jump on mainstream outlets, I monitor drudgereport for that, but I doubt I'll ever get anywhere close to that day traffic surge.
for a good laugh you may be interested in my post http://ta.gd/boyband how to start the ultimate boy band in 5 easy steps (no ads)