WeaponsGradeCode

About three times a year, a bunch of different concepts come together in my head at the same time forming a complete and compelling whole. A system who’s value is greater than the sum of its parts.

The more concepts in the party the better. Best yet when those concepts could make money. One of those complete thoughts was:

http://garage-sale-tips-maps.com
…a site that gathered garage sale data and splatted it onto a google map.

I thought/hoped I’d be the first with the idea and implementation, but, as is the case in this competitive economy, there are almost always people smarter than you with the same idea…

No worries though, I had a lot of fun building the site and look forward to growing it.

The point of the site is primarily to allow its users to quickly discern the number and quality of garage sales around their area. That’s done easily by simply entering your address and clicking ‘Get Garage Sale Map.’ You’ll be presented with a map of your area with all the garage sales marked with little red markers.

Hover your mouse over a marker to see its location. Click on it to see the title of the garage sale. Click ‘website’ to see that garage sale’s web site. Finally, double click the garage sale to queue it up into a list of garage sales you’d like to visit. After queuing up a couple garage sales, click ‘Get Directions’ at the top of the page to generate a list of driving directions.

That’s pretty much it. While simple, it’s quite powerful and fun.

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So I’ve set up my first set of forums on http://www.garage-sale-tips-maps.com using PHPBB2. Everything starts out OK with some pretty liberal settings. It doesn’t take long before the spammers and link scammers discover the site and start creating dozens of accounts with pr0n and mortgage related links in their user profile and posting garbage in the forums.

The wife and I delete the spam as fast as we can and I install/use the great PHPBB2 toolkit to delete the garbage accounts.

We back the registration process back to email verification. No help there. The rate of new bad accounts increases.

I regrettably back the registration off to the admin (me) confirming new members. OK, now you can’t see the spammers and they’re not adding garbage to the site. But now I get 20 new accounts to delete a day. (Hah! three just came in now :)) This is turning into real work…

Restricting accounts with email from mail.ru and a couple other domains helped a bit.

The next step is to continue loitering around the phpbb forums looking for help.

The really sad thing about this episode is that open source is clearly open to attack. This because the spammers have access to the source and craft exploits that circumvent the site’s spam controls and user interface to create spam accounts. Of course, the flip side is that I can create obstacles that block the bots, which I’ll likely have to do.

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I just re-built my wife’s site at http://www.bizzymom.us in of course, Wordpress. Hopefully she’ll update it a little more regularly now, especially after I remove the comment tails from all the images sometime this week.

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StylishGuide.com is my first custom Wordpress site. Its a fun site listing hidden treasures around the LA area, kind of like losangeles.sidewalk.com before Microsoft bought, destroyed, and sold it to CitySearch.

The fun part of the project was building the custom theme for Wordpress. The theme was somewhat generic and had to be dissected and re-assembled to work with the application. Luckily, Wordpress’s templating engine made that easy.

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Holy Toledo this software’s great. Granted, the premise of the tool is pretty straight forward: Accept text and post it in order. No big deal, but the Wordpress folks have really done a good job of highly polishing the tool into something that’s a pleasure to work with. I’ve built a couple sites with it, including this one, and will be building a couple more shortly.

Generally, it takes about ten minutes to install the software, configure a fun theme, configure the settings and plugins, and create a database at the ISP. Another twenty configuring AdSense and you’ve got a compelling, money earning blog built. That’s time well spent.

BTW: To migrate from Expression Engine to Wordpress, follow the links below:

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Export_Entries/
http://www.coderemedy.com/2007/05/10/migrating-from-expression-engine-to-wordpress-step-by-step/

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I’m now running four sites for fun and profit. It’s a ton of hard work and I don’t know how these guys with bigger sites do it all… Check out http://www.foozel.com as it has five new games that are pretty good.

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