Category Archives: My Sites

New Traffic Goals

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 12, 2010
To help keep me moti­vated, I have a block of code on this web­site that com­pares a few of my web­sites’ traf­fic to another website’s traf­fic. For a long time, I’ve had the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor and Fake Mail Gen­er­a­tor on that list. They’ve been con­sis­tently at 2x-20x the traf­fic goal for so long that [...]
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Unexpected Traffic

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 11, 2010
I woke up this morn­ing to find a nice lit­tle sur­prise wait­ing for me in my Google Ana­lyt­ics account: Woah! Where did all that traf­fic come from? After look­ing at the refer­rers, I dis­cov­ered that the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor was fea­tured on Existenz.se (sort of a Swedish ver­sion of I Am Bored, I think..). So how much money [...]
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Mobile Money

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 10, 2010
I’ve been want­ing to make an iPhone app for the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor for months. The prob­lem is, I don’t own a Mac, an iPhone, and the half dozen devel­op­ers that have promised to make me an app haven’t actu­ally done so. To make it worse, the Android has come out, cre­at­ing yet another plat­form [...]
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SVG Barcode Generator

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 9, 2010
The past few days have been spent writ­ing a PHP class that will gen­er­ate bar­codes and save them as SVG files. This class is going to be used in an upcom­ing barcode-related web­site I’m building. Cur­rently it supports: UPC-A: The nor­mal bar­code you will see on most prod­ucts in the US. UPC-E: A smaller, com­pressed ver­sion of UPC-A. [...]
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What is my IP?

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 18, 2010
This past week­end I found a fun domain name for a project: ipaddr.es. Yeah, it is miss­ing an “s” at the end, but I think it is still a fun domain. So I threw up a “what is my IP” style page and am hav­ing some fun with it. What makes IP Addr.es bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion? A [...]
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Oracle rocks!

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 13, 2010
Cur­tis, an Ora­cle employee, con­tacted me a week or two ago to ask for per­mis­sion to use data from the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor at Ora­cle. I freely license the data under both a Cre­ative Com­mons license and the GPLv3. While these licenses are won­der­ful licenses for peo­ple work­ing on open projects, they leave a bit [...]
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I made it!

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 8, 2010
I made it! I’ve hit my earn­ings goal for Cor­ban Works! Back in March 2009, I decided I’d start track­ing my online earn­ings, and set a goal for where I wanted to be. My gross earn­ings at the time were about $160 per week with all my sites run­ning off of a shared host­ing account. I [...]
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PIC Code Site

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 6, 2010
When my wife leaves town, I like to spend my time work­ing on web­sites. With her out of town check­ing out Rice Uni­ver­sity, I put some time into a project I’ve been mean­ing to do for a few months. A while back I found this site, a very old school ghetto PIC/CIC search site. Hav­ing had [...]
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PHP: mysql or mysqli?

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 3, 2010
As you may know, I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time try­ing to make the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor as fast as pos­si­ble. I’ve started using a CDN, I’ve made minor code tweaks (like doing ++$i instead of $i++), added APC caching, and a bunch of other stuff, but still feel that the core of the [...]
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Save money AND make your site faster using a CDN

By Jacob Allred | Published: January 28, 2010
My most pop­u­lar web­site, the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor, recently ran into two major problems: It was using too many server resources. It wasn’t as fast as I wanted it. To solve these issues, I turned to Sim­pleCDN and their awe­some “mir­ror buck­ets”. Basi­cally you setup a bucket, point it at your base URL (in my case, http://www.fakenamegenerator.com), then [...]
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