Personal projects and some other stuff

Taking advantage of the viral way in which facebook’s likes expand, Manu Verrastro and I developed a site that allows users to create small tweetlike ‘pages’ to share in facebook through the like function.

We expect the site to have a high bounce rate but massive amounts of unique visitors per day, that’s why we are looking for advertising systems that pay by CPM (cost per thousands of impressions) instead of CPC (cost per click).

Having the site up and running didn’t take much effort, the code is quite simple, there aren’t any complex database transactions involved, and we decided to give it a clean look that goes along with facebook.

PhotoScale! is a small open source project I started back in 2008. It’s a batch image resizing utility coded in java. I used Swing for the GUI, and the latest version now uses a library called JAI for resizing (the resizing algorithms are much faster than the ones I had implemented previously). It’s a multithreaded application, so it uses all your available cores to do the processing and the GUI never gets locked up while it’s working.

The application is hosted on Sourceforge, and it gets about 50-60 weekly downloads. I haven’t added new features since september 2009 but I’ll start mantaining it again soon.