AltruistClick.net is proving to be an enjoyable side project, and I’ve posted a summary of its first two weeks on the site itself.

Some of the more popular posts included

• Priceless Amazon Product Reviews
• These Voices Will Give You Goosebumps
• How Languages Sound to Foreigners
• Russian Drivers Doing Amazing Good Deeds

I’m learning from the unpopular posts too. I’m aiming to write one post per day (I tend to write several at a time and schedule them for gradual release)

Technology behind the site

For the first few weeks it lived on an old Linux server in my loft, hooked up a to Virgin Media cable connection. Not brilliant, but fine for a low level of traffic.

I want to the site to cope with spikes in traffic, but I need to balance that against the cost. I found a good balance in Digital Ocean, a cloud provider which can provide a reasonable virtual server for just $5/month, with plenty of options to scale it further.

The site is based around WordPress, and to keep things zippy it uses a combination of Nginx and Varnish to deliver things as fast as possible – around 20 times faster than the relatively dumb setup it started out on. It could be faster still, but it’s a good trade off of time-spent-tweaking vs time-spent-creating-content!

What’s next

I’m writing a WordPress plugin which allows quite sophisticated ‘What X are you?’ type quizzes, as I’d like to have some more interactive content on the site. Plus, it’s an interesting project in itself!