I finally have something exciting to blog about!
For the last couple of Saturdays I’ve been putting in some time on a new website idea that Paul had. A random comic generator that aggregates images and words from the web. I settled on pulling images from Flickr and words from Twitter, using their respective APIs.
The result is Infinite Monkey Comics.
We had somewhat of a ‘soft’ launch on Sunday, where we posted it up on Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon. That gave the site about 100 new visits between then and Monday evening. Over the next 2 days the numbers started to dwindle (as you’ll see in the graph below).
Then last night Paul posted a link on the Truth and Beauty Bombs forums. That evening there were maybe 3 or 4 follow up posts by some board members.
This morning, however, was another story. When I got in to work Paul had e-mailed me to tell me that the forum post had gone nuts. There were 3 pages of people posting their creations and it looked like they were having a lot of fun doing it.
I then decided to log into my Google Analytics account to see what the traffic numbers looked like. We were up to about a hundred views at that point (around 9am eastern). I checked back a little later and started looking through the referral links to see if anyone had been linking to us. It turns out that we got a mention on the Publishers Weekly ‘The Beat’ blog. It seemed like a big deal to me since the site was called Publishers Weekly, which sounds kind of important. So I e-mailed Paul to let him know, and he seemed pretty enthusiastic about it… so that confirmed it, it WAS a big deal.
When I got home from work today I finished cranking out some new Twitter functionality that I had started last night. You will now see a ‘From Us To You’ and ‘Your Creations’ box. These boxes display our 5 most recent tweets and the 5 most recent reply tweets that people have posted.
Currently, with all the little additions we’ve been making, the site is starting to look like a mish-mash of differently styled divs. So we’re working on some ideas to redesign the site to give it a clean look again.
For now, I will leave you with a graph of our traffic from the last couple of days since the first ‘soft’ launch (the first little blip you see) to sometime today when we were at 250 or so unique visitors. Right now its up at around 350, and I’m sure that number isn’t real-time, so I’ll have a more concrete number by tomorrow.
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