Item No. 113
Written on Sunday, April 26, 2009
A couple of months ago I began work on a new website, intended to be a movie/tv blog with the main purpose of generating revenue through ads. Brad was on board as a contributor and I set to work on a design, implementing the site with Expression Engine as a sort of project to also learn how to use it at the same time.
Expression Engine is pretty sweet, and very flexible. I still had to wrestle with some parts of it to make it do what I wanted, and it’s less focused on being a CMS for blogs than Wordpress is, which was good in this case. I also set up my first AdSense account which wasn’t difficult at all, yet interesting to finally get a chance to play with it.
We did a soft launch (unannounced) of our site, We Invented Fun, a few weeks ago and started to populate the site with content and news that we culled from other sites on the interwebz. We inadvertently made it “big” when we prematurely announced the cancellation of “Dollhouse,” which we rescinded a few hours later. Nevertheless, it managed to make it to the front page of Reddit and our site now shows up as the third result when you google “Dollhouse cancelled.”
Since making it onto Reddit, the site has garnered a total of 9,998 visits over a span of about 11 days. How much has this made us? $9.27.
Needless to say, we’re pretty much over it. It was a good experience, but there’s a lot more effort involved in running a blog full-time than we had anticipated. But hey, it’s a testament to Reddit as to how easy it was to get promoted to the home page, while over at Digg our submission barely made a dent.
About
Eric Lim works as a front-end developer in Orange County, California and spends his time squandering his potential.
In his spare time he surfs the internets, pirates music and movies, pets strange kitties, and makes a big mess when he eats. He also tends to say things that make no sense because he doesn't really listen to himself when he talks.