Category Archives: AltruistClick

AltruistClick.net is two weeks old!

altruist-medium

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

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!

Birth of an idea….altruistclick.net

I haven’t given myself a ‘project’ recently, but two things happened in succession this morning to give me an idea. First, I watched Richard Herring’s Christ on a Bike. It’s a good atheist rant, but at the end, he suggests that the good stuff about Jesus really is good stuff, and we could all be a little nicer to each to other.

So there was that. Then my Facebook feed had one of those clickbait headlines “Words cannot describe what this man does”. Turns out that words *can* describe it perfectly adequately, once you click through to the advert laden website in question. Recently, a lot of sites are repackaging someone else’s content, giving it a sensational headline, and then sitting back watching their ad revenue roll in.

So, I wondered what it would be like to create a clickbait site which simply gave away any money it made!

So that’s my next project for a few week…I called it altruistclick.net. I know, it’s a mouthful, but it was available.

Watch this space!