MangleBracket on the Google App Engine

July 12, 2010

MangleBracket (the Word document to HTML power tool) has been offline for several months. It's back up now, not in its feature complete form, but still functional. Check it out at manglebracket.appspot.com.

The problem was that the Word import process requires a fleet of OpenOffice processes, which need a dedicated server or at least a virtualized server, since it can't run in a shared hosting environment. This costs money. I tried to monetize MangleBracket with traditional means such as AdSense, but traditional means rely on crawling your site to determine contextually relevant ads to show. This doesn't work with web applications, where the contextual relevance data is in a private session and locked up in server-side variables.

I also tried Amazon affilate ads, by hacking their JavaScript snippet to feed it a special URL that contains the contents of the uploaded Word doc. So that say you upload an ice cream recipe, ads would appear for ice cream makers on Amazon. It did work sort of, but it took about 30 seconds for Amazon to process the contents, meaning I'd have to show generic untargeted ads in the meanwhile. And the conversion rate was abysmally low.

Since then, Google announced AdSense for Ajax, which sounds like it perfectly addresses my issue, however it appears to still be invite only. No self-service signup.

Then I started thinking, maybe ads wasn't the best way to monetize. 37signals' DHH would probably say "if you have a useful app, charge for it." I'm inclined to agree. So the plan now is to leverage Google's up-and-coming web app distribution network, either with the Google Apps Marketplace or the Chrome Web App Store, or both. Those systems don't yet provide an integrated billing solution, hence MangleBracket is free for the time being. But when they do, I'll integrate with it, and perhaps make enough monthly income to pay my AT&T/iPhone bill. ✜

Using Orbited with Django

February 25, 2010

This article got lost when I set up my new blog and several people have e-mailed me to complain. Here it is restored.

Using Orbited with Django ✜

Craigfetch: A teaser in screenshots

December 20, 2009

The Craigslist experience on the iPhone sucks. The website is poorly formatted for mobile safari, and the apps are just garbage. (That's right Craigsphone, I'm talking about you.) So I got to thinking, maybe the iPhone doesn't need a new Craigslist app — it already has a rock solid app built-in that can handle messages arranged in hierarchical folders. It's called the Mail app.

 

Then the more I got to thinking about it, the more it just made sense. Respond to a posting via email by simply hitting "reply." Respond via phone by tapping the auto-linked phone number. See where it is by clicking the auto-linked address.

 

Searching, check. Photos, check. The smallish Craigslist photos actually fit the iPhone's screen perfectly.

 

This is just a teaser, I'll have a full project page for this up soon. And, if you want to try it out yourself (as simple as setting up a new IMAP account at craigfetch.com) let me know and I'll give you demo account credentials. ✜