adding insult to injury

Category: Caption Machine (page 1 of 1)

Caption Machine Logo Contest!

The Caption Machine needs a logo so we can sell cool CafePress gear rather than beg for donations. I would like anyone who has a creative ounce in your body to submit what you think a cool logo/corporate identity for the Caption Machine would be.

What am I looking for?

Simple yet memorable logo (see Apple, Disney mouse ears, The Fray).

No gradients or fancy 3d crap.

Muted simple colors so it matches the site (single color or black is good).

Doesn’t have to have “Caption Machine” on it.

Submit a vector based (or whatever) file to me ( logo at captionmachine dot com ) via email.

What’s in it for you?

My deepest gratitude, your name in the credits, pride, and a prize! The winner will get a T-Shirt with the logo they designed on it! Hey, we’re a free site, like we have any prize money sitting around.

Deadline?

The sooner the better. If you get your submissions to me in two weeks or less that would be great. So July 3rd is the deadline! Make me proud.

Crap, more traffic

Caption Machine (aka Bandwith Sucker) is listed as “New and Notable” on a popular yahoo page. If the traffic isn’t curtailed dramatically, I’ll be flirting with my 20 GB bandwidth limit as well as my 15,000,000 sql query limit. Not good.

Update: Actually, it appears to be on the my yahoo pages. Really, really not good.

NY Times

I just finished an interview with a column writer for some paper called The New York Times. The Caption Machine and I will see mention, albeit a small one, in a bi-weekly column. This is kind of fun.

Update: The article will be in the May 23 edition of The Times.

I hate banner ads

38,000 views. 16 clicks. 1 lead. I hate banner ads. Note to self: cancel BMW M3 puchase off to-do list. The banner ads on caption machine won’t even pay for your caffeine addiction.

Downsample Downsample!

I never thought the day would come when I would approach the 20 GB per month bandwidth limit that my host allows, but I have. According to thier FAQ, less than one tenth of one percent of the sites exceed their limit. The Caption Machine has been averaging around 1.2 GB PER DAY for quite a while. Not good. They charge $8/GB if I go over, which is reasonable, but not feasible. It’s time to optimize and down-sample the quality of my jpegs before I get charged like crazy. There was a 30-day stretch overlapping 2 pay periods that I hit 33 GB of traffic. There is no way I’m paying $128/month for hosting.

If you’re looking for a good host – you can’t beat the price/feature ratio of Dream Host. Their generosity is the only reason the capiton machine didn’t get shutdown weeks ago.

Caption Machine Stats

The successful request for pages stat has hit 2.8 million so far for April (this is a bit deceiving because of the php includes), but 75,000 distinct hosts served in 17 days is more than I can shake a stick at. I should be making money off this… annoying banner ads coming soon.

Getting Screen Saver’d

Today I get to find out what it’s like to get “Screen Saver’d”. It’s a term for what happens after a site gets mentioned on the Tech TV show The Screen Savers. The typical scenario is the thousands of click happy folks that are watching the show head to the site essentially flooding it with traffic and ultimately bringing down the web server. Tonight on the portion of the show they call the Twisted List, my siteThe Caption Machine is going to be mentioned in the top 5 things learned from weblogs. I’m scared.
Update:Here is movie of a portion of the segment. (click to view an AVI – it is quite lame)

Caption Photo Round Up

Well, I’m about through all of the caption photos that I think are worthy, the others are either too naked or poking fun at retarded people. So, if you have some interesting photos that don’t fall into one of those two categories, I would very much appreciate the uploads. And there will be proper credit if you want it.

Photo Caption Thing

I scrapped together a caption machine last night. Blogger and PHP power the thing. Also, it’s currently using a lame-o blogger template. I haven’t put any design effort into it — it’s just a proof of concept/technology preview. I plan on building my own complete system (independent of blogger) but that will come. Anywho, I am severely lacking in the caption worthy photos department. Please send me anything you’ve got that you think is worthy of such a cause. I will post a link or give credit where do. Post a bunch Sidenote: I know this isn’t exactly a cutting edge site premise, but I was bored.