A place to pontificate

As a self-employed web developer, I’m often getting distracted onto various projects, 99.9% of which are just for fun or to try and make some dosh for me. I’m not into working for other people anymore as I prefer to try and be creative, and I’ve never really worked well to schedules, timetables and specifications, yet alone applied myself to support and maintenance. My mind drifts (Pisces – nuff said!)

So over the past few years I’ve developed a few projects, some of which are rubbish, some of which are consigned to the historical dustbin and some of which sit in a small corner of the web. A few gather dust, a few make good money, a few don’t do bugger all. Here’s a selection:

www.tvsmash.co.uk - this is my latest hobby site. Actually, I think it’s probably the most useful thing I’ve ever written and I even use it myself! Basically it drags in UK TV listings every day, you set up search terms you want to monitor and then walk away. Any time a TV programme title or description contains any of your terms, it emails you in advance, then reminds you on the day. Nifty huh? Well I think so.

www.packageholiday.com – a personal blog all to do with…yup, strangely enough, package holidays. It’s actually a Wordpress installation, but it’s a testing ground and full of wonderful snippets of code, plugins, all sorts of clever stuff that I just like to fill my time with. Plus it’s somewhere to write up my hobby of travel when I go away. The plan is to build up traffic and sell it on in years to come. I paid a lot for the domain name, but it’s an investment. I’ve since acquired a domain for Vacation Packages too which, while not as strong as the above, may well produce some traffic if optimised right.

www.zapits.com – this was a “for fun” learning project to create a “post-its” tool for Internet Explorer. Lots of AJAX, javascript and DHTML and lots of fun to do, but ultimately pointless. I had intended to take it and build it into a desktop app, or a facebook widget, but just couldn’t be bothered.

www.onlinecasinosvegas.com – this is a free games site. The clever bit is that it is built to fit in with the “semantic” web…hAtom compliant and not a table in site. It also has some unique games from IGT and it’s quite popular with just over 1,000 unique visitors and around 10,000 game plays a month. Just fun really but gets a tiny trickle of players.

www.winthemes.com – on the surface, it looks pretty crap now, but originally when I designed it, it integrated a web application into Window’s Active Desktop and allowed people to add modules (effectively webpages and feeds) into their desktop. With limited success as not that many people trust ActiveX technology. But again, a lot of fun to write and achieved what it set out to do, but then, once again, I got bored. Another site that gets over 10,000 visitors a month but mainly because it’s SEO‘ed quite well and has good Google rankings, not because it’s a particularly useful site now Vista is around.

www.witric.com – I got somewhat inspired by the MIT “discovery” of “Witricity”, wirless electricity back in 2007 so decided to set up a site documenting some of the stuff they found. The concept has now apparently been taken on by Intel with a view to commercialisation in the next few years. Interesting stuff, although the website itself is a standard Wordpress installation.

There’s many more domains/sites in my roster, but they are all fairly average sites to be honest and most are gambling-related, so I won’t bother listing them here. Not sure what’s next on the list…sure I’ll think of something