This all started at midnight in my hotel room at the Taj Krishna in Hyderabad. With a 13.5 hour time difference from Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, midnight in my hotel room was about the time that Steve Jobs was making the latest announcement from Apple about the glorious iPad. I hadn’t really prepared much for the announcement, but did manage to fire up my favorite domain registrar before the name of the new device was officially revealed.
As soon as the word, “iPad” was shown on the projection screen and transmitted through the magical Internet to my laptop (via the Engadget live blog that I was watching), I began firing off domain registration requests at lightspeed.
Perhaps it was the slow connection from India, but I was only successful at getting about half of the domains I tried to register. Many of the good ones were available one second and then disappeared (presumably being snatched up by someone else) between the time I hit the checkout button and when my payment went through. It was like a virtual jostling of sorts. I suddenly had fond memories of teenage years, attempting to purchase tickets to the Smashing Pumpkins Melancholy tour, working my phone’s re-dial button fanatically until I got through.
About half an hour after the announcement I found myself out a bit of cash (credit) and the owner of a handful of decent iPad domain names.
My intentions for owning the domain names are purely for possible business or project opportunities. I do not intent to sell them, but will try to use them for some sort of website to generate some revenue primarily through either affiliate programs or advertising.
Over the last few months, these domain names have stayed mostly untouched. This was bothering me so on Friday I decided that by the end of the weekend I would get one of them (ipadbackgrounds.net) up and running. If I wanted any of these sites to pay for themselves (at the very least), I figure that I have to get them out there early – less competition and more likely to ride the coat-tails of any buzz during the iPad’s imminent release.
I started thinking of how to best approach the site. ipadbackgrounds.net was to be primarily a free backgrounds website. I realize that there are a million wallpaper sites on the Internet, but there aren’t many at all specifically for the iPad. The site would operate like any other wallpapers site though – lots of pictures, users can register, upload their own backgrounds, categories, comments, etc…
I began with a virtual LAMP server in VMWare Player and installed the CakePHP framework. CakePHP and other MVC frameworks are great and speed up development, but even with a framework like that, I found it hard to believe that I’d have a working site by the end of the weekend. A couple hours of coding had barely given me working authentication. I ditched that idea and turned to Google to try and find what frameworks were being used by other wallpaper sites.
The way I saw it – there are so many backgrounds websites out there, therefore they must be using some common code. Right clicking and viewing source from all of sorts of wallpaper websites didn’t turn up much. I saw traces of Dreamweaver and MS Frontpage (yikes) on some of them and also found a lot of the JavaScript from these sites elsewhere through Google, but nothing really stood out as a common wallpapers website framework. And just when I thought that maybe I should make some half assed static HTML site instead, I came across the Open Source Wallpaper PHP Script at www.wallpaperscript.org – a complete wallpaper website including ACP admin panel for site management.
Are you kidding me??
Less than half an hour later, I had a functioning site on my local machine. Sure it needed some cleanup (the CSS isn’t that great) but it was usable and I certainly couldn’t complain for the simplicity of setting this thing up. Awesome… took no time and able to grab some pints at the pub.
Saturday morning I began scouring my personal photos for possible iPad backgrounds. Being a self proclaimed photography geek, I tend to gather a fair number of photos. I also found some public domain pictures that didn’t have any usage terms (important to note that even on sites declaring pictures to be public domain, read the fine print. Some of usage terms out there even specifically call out wallpaper sites as being ineligible usage for the pictures).
Using the Gimp to re-size or crop the pictures to the 1024×768 dimensions of the iPad and adding some small amounts editing, it didn’t take long at all to put together about 50 wallpapers. I also had a lot of fun finally finding a use for some of the many landscape pictures I’ve taken over the years and working on my photo editing skills. Turns out that some Gaussian blur plus a black to transparent gradient can really help turn a picture into a nice background.
Once I had a bunch of categories and pictures uploaded to the website (and changed the administrator password, which although wasn’t difficult, wasn’t possible without additional coding), the next step was to make it pretty.
Lately I’ve been using Artisteer to create blog themes. This program is freakin fantastic! Artisteer lets me create exactly what I want without having to write a single line of CSS! I’ll rave more about this program later in another post. Suffice it to say, I exported my site design, automatically created (practically) with Artisteer, as a HTML layout and modified the header and footer php scripts in Wallpaper Script to use the new layout. This took some minimal coding – php, javascript, css and html, but nothing substantial.
Adding advertising with Wallpaper Script is incredibly easy. The script has placements for ads in leaderboard, square and skyscraper formats to match Google adsense sizes. Simply signing into the site as the administrator and pasting adsense javascript into the correct spots is all it takes to get functioning advertising on the site.
I still can’t believe how quickly the site came together.
By some time on Sunday evening I figured that things were in a good enough shape that I’d just upload everything to my hosting provider and send out a quick note on twitter to tell the world. I had spent maybe 10 hours over the course of the weekend working on it and most of that time was creating wallpapers. Relatively, I spent no time on getting the site running. I’ve spent more time in the past trying to get a single WordPress plugin working.
ipadbackgrounds.net doesn’t support IE7 that well yet, but I’m not overly concerned. Safari works fine. So does Chrome and Firefox and I suspect that most people browsing for wallpapers will be using one of those browsers.
