The following are samples of some NSFW projects I built. I've always hesitated
to include them in my portfolio, but I'm really quite proud of some of the work
here. Also, my wife tells me its lame of me to not post this work. As if I should
need to worry that it will reflect poorly on my professionalism. The first lady
has appeared in soft-core porn, and a project manager I once collaborated with
who actually managed to shock ME with the number of times he
said the word "Fuck" in a half hour meeting.
Not necessarily knowing anything about the culture of the people under his
management wasn't unemployed the last I saw activity on linkedin AND I AM,
so clearly trying to keep up a clean professional appearance isn't helping me
enough to be worth hiding behind a shield of run-of-the-mill conventionality.
Fuck it!
And FUCK YOU IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT!
If I spent 30 seconds interacting with each person on this planet, I would get kinda close, but I would not finish speaking to everyone in 100 years. In other words, I have not got time for people who don't like me exactly how I am.
... AND NEITHER SHOULD YOU!
The design on
bucketoffuck TGP is, in my opinion, one of the more beautiful
creations for web I've made entirely on my own. Furthermore, though it is lost
to time, the code that I created to build that site was ahead of its time.
In researching the project, I reached out to many of the big name sites of
the time (2006) and got a few of the webmasters to speak with me. Of particular
interest was a conversation I had with the creator of PicHunter.
Something I said rubbed him the wrong way and he unloaded on me a massive
criticism of the direction I was taking with development.
At that time, and I'm not sure how it's done now, it might be somewhat the same,
but back then pay sites would provide affiliates with Free Hosted Galleries
and Asset packs that affiliates could use to create their own galleries.
They would host on their own site (and pay for the bandwidth) I had
initially set out to sort the Free Hosted Galleries so those with the highest
resolution images would show up first. I used a curl command to request just
the http headers describing the file without downloading an entire image as I
only wanted to store a number representing the filesize of a random
image in the gallery. I setup a web form where I would select the niche and paste a
list of links to Free Hosted Galleries. My script would run through them all
checking to ensure no galleries were submitted twice, and run my curl script to
get a numeric value representing the filesize of a random image in the gallery.
As you can imagine this didn't work out all that well. There turned out to be a
large number of galleries that were made from video screenshots that had file sizes
of 0.3-0.5MB, among the largest file sizes for images in the Free Hosted Galleries.
I dealt with it by excluding such galleries from my import, but I never really
found a better way to achieve what I had hoped to achieve.
Back to the criticism I received of my development. I initially built the
site using Macromedia's ColdFusion because, at the time, it was the web scripting
language I was most familiar with having used it at my first real job
after graduating from college. I honestly never looked into the benchmarks
for ColdFusion vs other languages, but according to the critique I received
this was the absolute most ridiculous decision I could have made and would
certainly result in the total failure of my project if I ever managed to
get enough traffic to my site to make it profitable. I would need to use
PHP if I should have any hope of success. (and really there was no hope for me as
I was a "stupid american" evidenced by the sheer idiocy of my question).
He then went on at length about how much traffic porn sites needed to be able to
handle to be profitable vs. other types of websites and then talked about castle
in Czechoslovakia he purchased with the money he made building PicHunter and how he
made it his top priority to leave this terrible country (USA) as quickly as
possible.
The conversation left a pretty strong impression on me. This webmaster had this
huge-asshole personality. And, to be honest, this is really not uncommon among
devs of his age group which I estimated to be Gen-X, but he was right
about a lot of stuff. I was going to figure out the least load intensive way
to serve pages possible. The first thing I figured to do was instead of
dynamically generating the pages when a visitor made a request,
I would pregenerate my pages. I only really needed to regenerate the site
content every few hours, not on every page load. So I set down and created a program,
in Java this time, that would generate pages for each of the niche
categories, a home page, a page of video galleries from mixed categories,
a page image galleries from mixed categories, a page of image galleries sorted
from largest descending with, I think, a lower bound, and then a random sort...
I have no idea... you get the idea though. In total, my script would generate
around 100 pages full of gallery links and store them as html. Each time I
ran the script, it would randomize the links on the page. Further, I set
dates for galleries I imported to begin appearing so entirely new content
would appear among the links. So, in a way, here in 2006 I created a
static site generator. And I'm honestly surprised these didn't begin showing
up much sooner because the utility is clear.
But I still felt more could
be done. What could I do to further decrease the load required to serve
one of my gallery pages? I clicked a link and heard the sound come out of
the development server I had converted my old computer into.
It was the sound of a magnetic disk seeking and reading. Yes. I asked a
developer friend if he knew a way to get apache to preload my website content
into memory so it could serve pages directly from memory. My entire site build
was far smaller than the memory available on my dev server and my production server.
There wasn't a configuration option in apache, but it was possible to mount a
portion of the system memory as a ram disk. So I did just that.
And I wish I'd run benchmarks and stored the results to share, but I didn't.
There's lots I didn't know to do back then, but all the same I'm very proud of
what I DID think to do so early on in my web development education.
It's no secret that I'm a hard leftist. So, no, I don't support the US occupation of... anywhere.
And to me, supporting the troops means helping them to realize how they are being
manipulated into risking their lives and mental health for a scam. One day at work, a
friend of mine sent me a link to the GoArmy.com website and asked, "hey, do you know
how to write ActionScript, what do you think about reverse engineering this thing?"
I didn't really know ActionScript (the language to code flash objects interactivity),
but I'm versatile. Before I even began to search for a decompiler, I opened up web
developer and viewed the network activity that occurred when I clicked on various parts
of the homepage flash. It was too damn easy. This flash video was reading an XML file.
I downloaded a mirror of the webpage, recreated the xml file and began making edits.
too much fun!.
I wonder is "noarmy.com" available?
nope
who is the owner, email them. show them what we have.
message sent.
the next day we received a response
"I bought this domain like a decade ago hoping to do something what you've done here,
sure send me the ip address where you're hosting it, I'll point the domain There.
And so it remained for several years until the novelty faded. Now the page reads
"Something new is coming" so maybe another generation has taken on the task of outdoing
our attempt at culture jamming the US army recruitment site :).