I've finally gotten around to organizing and uploading all of the pictures I took (and some that Paul took, still waiting on Jon to send me his) while on vacation last week. The images can be seen here:

Europe 2009.

I opted to not upload these to my own gallery, and instead signed up for a Flickr Pro account. This way when I need to backup my website, or move it somewhere, I don't need to download and re-upload gigs of photos. Plus the features and options for organizing pictures that Flickr has are way better than what I have.

I finally got Tony's set of pictures from our roadtrip a couple weeks ago and they're posted up in my gallery, along with the pictures I took with my cellphone (the ones that were supposed to be automatically uploaded to the roadtrip site):

Tony's Photos
My Photos

Last weekend myself, my cousin Anthony and 4 of our friends Gianluca, Mike, Sal and Tony went on a 4 day roadtrip through about 11 states (see the map here: http://bit.ly/k0vuf) to watch two AC Milan friendlies - one against Chelsea FC and another against Inter Milan - while spending a day inbetween in New York City

The pictures of this adventure are posted here: http://johncaruso.ca/gallery/AC_Milan_Roadtrip_2009_-_Sals_Photos

It really shouldn't have taken this long to do, and really should have been done before we decided to start linking the site around, but I've finally purchased a proper domain name for Infinite Monkey Comics: InfiniteComic.com.

The final decision on the actual domain name was the result of what was actually available, and a desire to keep it short and simple. So InfiniteMonkeyComics.com, even though it contained the entire title of the site, was too much to have to post anywhere or to remember. InfiniteComics.com (note the 's') and InfiniteMonkey.com were already taken.

With the new domain came the worry that all the comics and links that people have already created will no longer work. I solved that easily with a very simple line in the .htaccess file of the old website:

Redirect 301 /randomcomic http://www.infinitecomic.com

That is automatically redirecting any links to the old site along with their query strings, which is what I use to pass all the details to the comic generator, to the new site. So every single old URL will still be perfectly valid. The only issue is that when tracking referral links its going to show up as vealonabun.com instead of the actual website that it came from. While this sucks, it is a very necessary evil in order to keep all our original users happy.

The other thing that really sucks about moving the site to a new domain is that I'm going to lose the relationships between the old history and new history of the site using Google Analytics. So while I'll still be able to look back at the history for vealonabun.com to see how the site did, I'll be starting from scratch with the new site. So any returning users will be recorded as new users, and any user trends will basically not be trends until they actually start happening over and over.

With all that said, here is a graph of the 'old' history:


The large peak is 567 unique hits, Thursday March 26 2009.
The next dot is 315 unique hits, Friday March 27 2009.
The next dot is 122 unique hits, Saturday March 28 2009
The sad low point is 57 unique hits, Sunday March 29 2009.
And the last point there is 83 unique hits, Monday March 30 2009. The last day of tracking on the old domain.

The next step is a site redesign, so people don't leave the site before even trying it out because it looks so hideous.

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.