I’ve burned some serious midnight oil these past few months on a couple side projects I recently launched. I also went camping at Big Sur two weeks ago. That was fun. But back to the web projects.

I created a philanthropic URL shortener to generate passive income for important organizations. It accepts Amazon.com URLs and appends the affiliate ID of a non-profit organization before shortening them. Anyone who follows the shortened link and buys something makes Amazon give ~ 4% of the order total to a non-profit org. The URL parser under the hood is super smart and fully ajaxed-out (while failing gracefully with javascript disabled). The goal of the site was to make it as simple and straightforward as possible to encourage people to use the service. It also generates Open Search browser plugins so Firefox and IE7+ users can replace their default Amazon search engine with a feel-good version.

I’ve been helping a local art gallery increase their support base by building out a website. It sports a custom Drupal theme and is stupidly easy to update. They shouldn’t have a hard time keeping their content fresh. The artist boxes on the homepage load in a random order on each page refresh to prevent sibling rivalry. Unfortunately, it makes caching impossible. :/

I spent all of half an hour setting up Gallery 2 at memedump.com. It helps me keep track of all the funny and profane things on the Internet. The website looks like crap and is loaded with crap. Thus, it makes total sense that it’s way more popular than my other projects and already reports 50,000+ page views. I later created memeaday.com for those people who want just one meme a day.

There are a couple other things in the bucket including a video mash-up website but online video editing is, well, hellza problematic. So that one’s going to take a while.

Lastly, my housemates and I had a blast acting out scene 330 of Star Wars: New Hope. Star Wars Uncut is a great project and you should sign up to film a scene right now. Let me know how it goes. Our shoot was a lot of fun.