on wednesday at around 3pm i read about milliondollarhomepage.com for the first time and found it to be a facinating story. i decided to make a work-alike site. wednesday evening and thursday was spent thinking about a good domain name. by thursday afternoon i had a domain registered and a skeleton rails site running on a gridcolo box. so maybe 2 hours of coding and setup there.

its about another 4 hours into coding today on friday. the site is okay-looking but the ad placement is, im guessing, even better than MDHP. it allows the advertiser to hand place their ad. im hoping the placement and image merging, with collision detection, will be completely automated. im not sure how MDHP dealt with placing polygon shapes when a jpg,png,etc can only specify a rectangle.

i just got a paypal button on the site. thats always a satisfying milestone. i could do image merging and stats tallying by hand at this point and go live with the site. its a great exercise in ruby on rails development. The new piece being RMagick. im trying hard to avoid code debt but i can already see a couple ugly parts in the code.