It's a Doozy!
http://whencanireusethiscalendar.com/
Now you can go digging through that chest of crap from the 1990s and pull out your favorite cute puppies calendar. In 2010, you can re-use calendars from 1999, 1993, 1982, 1971, 1965, 1954, 1943, and 1937.
As with most of my web toys, FeedSifter.com started off as a tiny tool that served a very simple need I had. Assuming a handful of people might have the same need, I publish most of these utilities and some of them actually manage to become fairly popular.
FeedSifter is a simple service that allows you to filter an RSS or ATOM feed for various keywords. There are many other services out there that do this same thing, but this site is anonymous, uncluttered, and intuitive–exactly what I wanted at the time.
Looking at the traffic stats today, I’ve found that feedsifter.com managed to become fairly popular while nobody was looking. Over the past 8 months, daily traffic has been steadily increasing and it is fast approaching 2,000 requests per hour. That’s a pleasant surprise and a good indication that I should put some effort into finishing those final few features I never got around to implementing years ago.
I’m looking for one or more advertisers who would be willing to sponsor the package tracking RSS feeds generated over at Boxoh.com. As it stands, only about 5% of the traffic to the site is via web browsers. Last month alone, I got just under 1.5 million hits to the dynamically generated RSS feeds for package tracking. The Google ads on the web page are hardly reaching my audience.
Unfortunately, commercial RSS advertising systems such as Feedburner will not work as they are geared towards blogs with a small number of feeds to monetize. Since Boxoh delivers individualized feeds based on package tracking numbers, the number of unique RSS feeds is vast.
If this sounds appealing to you, please get in touch with this contact form.
My Google maps making, RSS feed slinging, universal package tracker has moved to greener pastures. Boxoh.com is your new go-to place for tracking UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Airborne packages.
Backstory: In 2006, I posted a handy new utility I’d cobbled together which was a mashup between package tracking for for multiple services. It quickly became by far the most popular page on this site, with more than 1.4 million tracking requests last month. It gets more than three times the traffic of my movie theater RSS generator and four times the traffic of another spinoff site, FeedSifter, a simple RSS/Atom feed filter.
If you are familiar with MediaTemple’s GridServer service, you’ll know that using up all 1000 GPUs (server work units) for the past several months is not a good thing. Those cycles weren’t just going to waste on poorly written scripts, either. Each hit to the tracker consumed an average of 0.0002 GPU (WordPress uses 8 to 16 times that with each hit). It wasn’t always this way, though. Check back soon for an upcoming post on how I managed to cut down the CPU usage of the package tracker by 90% with some intelligent code analysis and a creative caching solution.
Boxoh.com is now hosted on a screaming VPS server with plenty of spare power. I’m taking full advantage of APC caching and several other behind-the-scenes tweaks one can only get a grip on when they are running a dedicated server.
Thanks to all of the people who have made the service so popular!
Also, thanks to Juplex for a fast and friendly site design!
This is the first growing season in our new house. We have quite a bit of gardening space, so my wife and I will be attempting to fill that space with beautiful and edible plants.
In an attempt to keep this information handy for my own reference, I have decided to start a journal. I’ve made it public in the hopes that it someone might care to share some advice or learn from my inevitable mistakes.
The blog is called The Nu Leaf.
I’m working to revive the Seattle PHP users’ group. If you’re interested in PHP and live in the Seattle area, come to our next users’ group meeting at the new Seattle Northgate library on September 12th.
Details can be found on the SEAPHP wiki:
http://seaphp.net/
Add it to your calendar:
After last month’s Google AdWords Policy Reminder, I’ve decided to make it perfectly clear that you are by no means authorized to click my ads. You should avoid them at all costs, even to your own peril.
In case this isn’t clear, I have repurposed my magnetic words script to serve as entertainment on a new site dedicated to reminding you that you should not click my ads. Check it out:
I subscribe to several fast moving feeds. Most of the news in these feeds is of little interest to me, but I’ve remained subscribed just so I can catch the occasional gem.
This problem begged a simple solution, so I’ve created FeedSifter.com. It is a very easy to use service that allows you to monitor any RSS/RDF/Atom feed for multiple different groups of words. FeedSifter automatically determines what sort of feed you are filtering and gives you only the entries that you care about. You can generate as many filtered feeds as you’d like, and you can change your filter at any time by returning to the site.
For example, say you want to filter the FatWallet.com Hot Deals feed for free items, NewEgg.com deals, and drives of all sorts (USB, harddrives, etc). You could use a filter like the following:
Free
NewEgg
GB,drive
Once entered, you are provided with a filtered feed URL and you’re all set.