1st of 12

In January I’m going to complete the backend server side compnent for my personal advertising newtwork. I like many web people have quite a few domains that sit around doing nothing. I’ve been placing handpicked affiliate links on there just to see if I get any bites. I think I’ve earnt less than $5 from it so far. Still it’s not always about the money is it?

Currently the system is all javascript based and simple picks an advert and text from an array at random. The adverts are in the style of “The Deck” or Fusion ads, so one image, no animation, a link and 140 charachters of text.

The pplication I’m building will need to allow an administrator to upload an image, text and link. There will need to be start and end dates for the advert to run along with the option for a single adverto to be a road block. Road blocks are where one single advert is displayed for 24 hours.

The application will need to rotate adverts evenly and record statistics on how many times each advert is displayed. It will be worthwhile tracking which website is displaying the adverts.

These statistics will be displayed in a graph format to the administrator, or downloaded as a CSV if there is enough time to jam it in.

I’m going to build this in Ruby using the Sinatra framework, it’s light easy to use and very flexible. For the graphing I will use Raphael.js, I’ve used it for a similar application in the past and have been very impressed. I’d also like to get to know it a little more. It will either be hosted on Heroku or my production server.

This is all fairly safe technology that I’ve used before there is nothing new here. I could have built this in node.js, I do want to do a project with node. I’ll probably use MySQL as the database, MongoDB or one of the other sexy NoSQL databases might well be more appropriate. The reason I’m usng tried and tested technology though is to get the app completed as quickly and painlessly as possible. I want this first side project to be as quick and as painless as possible to trick me into thinking that this year of side projects will be easy.

Memories and attitudes are based on the first and last experience. First kiss, first day at school, first race, last race, last day at work. To associate 12 in 2012 with a positive result in my mind will make me more motivated to complete that harder months where I have to battle new technologies into submission.