joshtronic

Projects

I wasn't really sure what to call this page. I have sites that I run. Some of those sites have become businesses. Isn't [music][music] technically a project?

I'm hoping to piece together some timelines for these projects. There's also a lot of gaps, as I always have some half baked idea cooking. In the meantime, here's a quick brain dump of the adventures I've taken over the years.

Active Ventures

Holiday API

Started as an open source project to help me build a reward system on into another site I was running. The solution at the time was to maintain a list of holidays, updating them annually for the coming year.

"There has to be a better way", I thought. I was right, and after making the hard decision to reposition as a for-profit, I focused on expanding the available data.

Fast forward a dozen years later, I'm proud to say that I've been able to build a 6-figure side hustle (again). The journey's not over as there's still a few nuts that I've been trying to crack.

VPS Showdown

I've hosted with Linode for a long time. But that doesn't mean I'm blind to the options out there. Back in 2013 I decided to see what DigitalOcean was all about. Because I'm always looking for new topics, I blogged about it.

Over the years, I've done more comparisons. While not as successful as some of my other projects, I've done pretty well for myself with this one. The current tally is ~$80k in cash and credits from referrals.

Seeing an opportunity, I I eventually expanded into comparing a few other providers. This led to establishing a regular monthly cadence to keep the content fresh. This was good, but a lot of work.

While I had automated a ton of the process to do my VPS Showdown posts, it wasn't fully automated. Also, it was always in the back of my head that I didn't just want my blog to be choked out by this kind of content.

Somewhere in there, I took a break. Then I started back up. Then I decided to see if it was feasible to use agentic coding to build out a fully automated system.

Turns out it was quite feasible, so here we are.

Shark Tank

Still can't believe I snagged the SharkTank.co domain on a whim one day. I originally built this out to keep track of the investments made by the sharks, to make it easy to see how much money was being invested per season, per shark, etc.

This eventually evolved into being more content-based than data-based. I blame my detour back into using WordPress instead of sticking to building out a static site. Also, tracking the investments is hard, so many weird permutations that go on in there.

The site's still maintained, but I think I'm going to rebuild it again before the start of Season 17.

Little Free Card Shop

If you collect trading cards, specifically if you rip wax, you've run into the problem of having too many cards. They add up quick, especially if you're only chasing big hits, or a couple of players.

I like to set build, and with getting back into the hobby, I explored a lot of different products. Instead of trying to collect pennies selling common cards on eBay, I decided to make packs and drop them in the Little Free Library locations in my neighborhood.

Hopefully the cards are being found by kids and it's sparking some joy, and not those adults I see at the Target camped out for the new card releases.

CSS Cursors

Not too long ago I wanted to see what each of the CSS cursor styles looked like. The best I found at the time was the MDN article where you could click through to see an example of each of the property values.

Instead of clicking through to see each example, I opted to waste even more time and build something. The resulting page is exactly what I was looking for, a list of all of the property values, and the ability to hover to see the cursor.

This may or may not be part of a bigger plan, I'm not sure yet.

In the Freezer

I have a few things I've started recently but I wasn't actively maintaining them. Since I was paying for managed WordPress hosting at the time, it made sense to just take a static snapshot of the site and keep it afloat.

In the Ground

SceneKids

I had this wild idea to create a micro profile website that functioned as an online popularity contest. I already owned SceneKids.com and "scene" wasn't as big of a thing anymore, but I figured "what the hell".

Launched while on vacation, and after some creative guerilla marketing efforts, the site ended up getting some traction. Enough positive traction that people actually took the time to submit feature requests.

Features were implemented, the site blossomed into a full featured social network. Ad revenue grew, I quit my job, ad revenue grew some more. After getting to 6-figures in annual ad revenue, the tides shifted.

Ad revenue is fun like that. So back down the mountain I went.

The site tread water for years after, but eventually the dark side of the Internet made it too hard to continue. I was nearing 40-years-old, and my fun coding adventure was mostly just moderating dick pics, and personality conflicts. Fielding subpoenas isn't high on my list of things to do either.

When it stops being fun, it's time to bounce, so I shut the service down.

Honorable Mentions