Find Motive

I’ve posted some numbers about EchoPic on the site’s new blog. Below is an excerpt.

Today is EchoPic’s 2 month anniversary. I want to say thanks to everyone who has been using EchoPic and helping the service grow. When I launched EchoPic I didn’t expect it to grow like it has. It was just a fun side project. Well today, 2 months later EchoPic has become more than what it was intended to be.

Some Stats:

* Over 100,000 unique visitors a month
* Traffic spikes of up to 30,000 visitors per day
* Almost 10,000 views per day to hot linked images (these are not counted in monthly visitor stats

Link: http://blog.echopic.com/2007/11/echopic-two-months-later/

I started using Moola almost a year ago and I just recently picked it back up out or boredom. Basically Moola allows users to play flash based games against each other to make money. Users are forced to watch an ad before the game which is how moola makes its money. Every time you win a game your money is doubled.

LINK: Moola.com

is a new web based ad service with a new twist that allows viewers to say whether or not they liked the ad. The service looks very promising mainly because the ads that they show so far don’t suck.

The dashboard that adpinion provides publishers is minimal, but I like the fact that it gets to the point. All I need to know is how many impressions/clicks/money have I earned. This is the only ad network I’ve seen so far that I would actually like to advertise with. I’ll be keeping my eyes on this one.

Artist KT Tunstall performed at Apple’s 2007 keynote speech with her song Black Horse And The Cherry Tree. I must say she is very talented. For those of you who didn’t notice she is using a loop machine to provide the background instrumentation and vocals. She creates the loop on the fly when she starts the song.

I’ve been quietly working on a new project the past few months that I will be releasing soon. I was a little side-tracked by EchoPic and its surprising popularity and growth rate, but now I am back onto ChartVote full time.

What is it?
ChartVote is a new music discovery service that allows users to listen and vote for music they like.

Vague huh? Well thats all I can say for now =).

We are looking for artists
Yes sir, we are. If you are an artist who wants to participate in joining ChartVote you can email me at info(at)chartvote.com

Go to ChartVote.com and submit your email address and I will notify you when it launches.

Its almost 2008 and the use of generic file controls on web forms are still in major use today. Why are we still using this old ugly technology when there are much better solutions?

Reasons not to use them
- They’re ugly
- There is no way to limit the file types displayed in the “Browse” window
- You can’t make them look good very easily as they lack alot of CSS support
- They’re ugly
- You can’t see how much of the file you have uploaded.
- No way to select multiple files to upload at one time without multiple file controls
- They’re ugly

Solution
There are multiple solutions, but the one I always use and is the most widely supported is using flash to upload files from a web browser. Using flash I can tailor the upload process to the site’s UI and design needs.

SWFUpload is a great premade script that allows you to upload files with flash.

Even though I avoid using the file control as much as I can, I still find it useful sometimes…sometimes.

This PHP code will limit the download rate for a file being downloaded by a client. This is useful if you are streaming MP3s from your site and you are trying to distribute your bandwidth as evenly as possible.

For example: If you are streaming MP3s with a bitrate of 96kb then you would at the minimum only need to send 12KB/s of data to the client. Now to be safe I would send around 16KB/s to allow some buffering just in case some packets get held up somewhere.

Code