Websites of thenaterix.com

I'm an idea man and a programmer. When those two things collide I do strange things. That can be seen by my plethora of projects below.

Proxy Websites

These sites are mainly meant for kids to be able to bypass school filters via web proxy. Yes, it's probably not the best thing to get in to but kids will be kids... and it's only MySpace. All of these sites are hosted on a Virtual Private Server that I manage myself. There's a great deal of Linux administration that I have to do with these. From configuring MySQL, Apache2, PHP, Perl, and BIND 9 to monitoring everything to ensure maximum uptime and site availability. I also handle abuse issues and have to create home-brew methods to track and block spammers, guys wanting to look at kiddie porn, and script kiddies. I'm using Glype Proxy and have customized it a little to suit my needs and a multi-site but one software install environment.

• fastbadger.com/portal  
• turtleterror.com  
• imright.net  
• quizcreate.com  
• dirtycelebs.info  

Full Websites

These are projects that I've invested a good amount of time in to with the hope that they can become he 'next big thing.' While most are great technically and/or code wise, I'm a programmer and not a marketer. Maybe someday I'll stop tweaking and start promoting but there are onyl so many hours in a day and there's so much to tweak!

• http://www.gobloggo.com Have a camera phone? Can it send an email? You're in luck! Here's a site where you can add images from your camera phone, post comments to images, and insert a post directly in to your Live Journal. Each user gets an RSS feed so they can do what they wish with the content. GoBlogGo even sets you up with your own moblog. Racy pictures welcome!  
• http://www.adulthookupclub.com Yes, an adult dating site. There's not much to say about it. I've wanted to crreate one for a while because sex sells, and I like girls like most guys. The site is VERY ajax heavy. (Using a PHP library called xajax.) This site needs a little more work from me to become technically smooth. I started creating the site before I had a decent framework laid out and caused a lot of extra bloat. But it does work, and it does get a slow trickle of new users. I'm hoping one day that trickle will grow to a flood and I'll be encouraged to work on this more. Of course, that goes against the 'If you build it, they will come' mantra but I've built plenty of sites before and no one showed up :(
  (Again, I blame my marketing guy, me)  

"Creative" Ideas

Personally I rate creativity on how well you can draw. In that respect I'm not that creative, but I often come up with creative ideas for new websites and try them out. No matter how useful they are.

• http://looreview.thenaterix.com A small site where anyone rate and review both public and private restrooms. The website is using my current favorite content management system, Drupal. This is a site where content rules more than my technical or programming abilities. I've let this project go a little as far as updates but I plan on making this work out some day! Everyone else is encouraged to add their own reviews however marketing is also another small weak point of mine. So the site's popularity, and lack of a catchy non-taken domain name, has caused this project to loose it's steam.  
• http://search.thenaterix.com This was a technically challenging project that performance and code scalability wise could be improved upon. This is a search engine for people. What sets this apart from just typing 'Nate Fanaro' in a search engine is that with every result that is returned, the information retrieved in that result branches out in to another search and returned back to the user. An example would be if you searched for someone by their name, one of the results might contain their email address. That email address goes in to the pile to search for and all of the results of those two searches are returned at once. There's a lot of screen scraping going on here along with some creative uses of any API that I could find that would help bring in more results. Looking back at this project I would love to try again using Perl than PHP. Some of the Perl modules available, along with threading, would improve the accuracy and speed of this site tremendously.