Blast From the Past: a Repost from March 2007

A man was riding his motorcycle along a beach when suddenly the sky clouded above his head and, in a booming voice, the Lord said: ‘Because you have TRIED to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish.’ The biker pulled over and said: ‘Build a bridge to Hawaii so I can ride over any time I want.’

The Lord said, ‘Your request is materialistic, think of the enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking; the supports required to reach the bottom of the Pacific and the concrete and steel it would take!

‘It will nearly exhaust several natural resources. I can do it, but it is hard for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more time and think of something that could possibly help mankind.’

The biker thought about it for a long time. Finally, he said, ‘Lord, I wish that I and all men could understand women; I want to know how she feels inside, what she’s thinking when she gives me the silent treatment, why she cries, what she means when she says nothing’s wrong, and how I can make a woman truly happy.’

The Lord replied: ‘You want two lanes or four on that bridge?’

This blog has a CDN!

This CDN now has a CDN. Static files are being served up from Rackspace Cloud Files via Akamai. To bad they switched away from Limelight Networks….

Hosted Community Platform Service

I’m thinking of providing a professional “cloud-based” community platform service (blog, forums, etc..) for people building social networks. It will also allow users to voluntarily place advertising on their site in order to cover their costs, but even the free offering will allow a certain amount of traffic ad-free. Users can change their plans at any time, which are made retroactive to the first day of the current billing cycle if they have overage charges.

My planned prices for this offering is:

Overage Charges:

  • Additional Transfer Bandwidth: $0.25/GB (rounded up to nearest GB)
  • Additional Storage: $1.00/GB (rounded up to nearest 10 MB increment)
  • Additional Users: $0.15/user — each additional users includes 10 MB of storage and 0.1 GB of monthly transfer
  • For purposes of this project, 1 GB = 1000 MB

Free Plan:

  • Up to 25 users
  • Up to 5 GB of monthly transfer bandwidth
  • Up to 100 MB of storage

Bronze Plan

  • Up to 100 users
  • Up to 20 GB of monthly transfer bandwidth
  • Up to 1 GB of storage
  • Monthly Cost: $5.00/month (Up to $8.40 monthly savings over free plan)

Silver Plan

  • Up to 500 users
  • Up to 50 GB of monthly transfer bandwidth
  • Up to 5 GB of storage
  • Monthly cost: $15.00/mo (Up to $62.50 monthly savings over the bronze plan)

Gold Plan

  • Up to 2000 users
  • Up to 100 GB of monthly transfer bandwidth
  • Up to 10 GB of storage
  • Monthly cost: $25.00/mo (Up to $215 monthly savings over the silver plan)

Platinum Plan

  • Up to 4000 users
  • Up to 200 GB of monthly transfer bandwidth
  • Up to 20 GB of storage
  • Monthly cost: $50.00
  • Overage charges are per unit. Each unit costs $1.00. A unit can be used for users, storage, or bandwidth, and are not prorated.
  • 100 users (does not include additional storage or bandwidth)
  • 5 GB of monthly transfer
  • 2 GB of storage
  • For each $100 spent, you get 5 units for free

 

HTML 5 & Advertising

I am doing some research in trying to figure out what some major pain points in building advertisement units in HTML 5 are. Feel free to leave your comments here on the subject! Please leave your email address if you want to talk more about the problem