The numbers are in, January’s total income was $21.63. On the surface that’s a pretty average number, but the month started out at a crawl and ended with a bang. For the last nine days in January I earned $9.40 cents. That’s a per day rate of $1.04. I reached the dollar-a-day target and sustained it for over a week! I’d love to say it was something I did, but it appears I just got lucky.

I had two nice bumps in traffic, one from Reddit and another from Facebook. Both refers directed new visitors to my labor predictor. Overall 67% of my traffic was for the labor predictor, with another 24% on the Reading Ease Analyzer, leaving just 10% of the traffic for the rest of the apps. The Readability Ease Analyzer’s traffic is still down about 8%. At this point I think I have to assume it’s the new normal.

This month I wrote five new Apps:

Image Color Pallet – The tool finds the colors in an image using k-means clustering, and then applies color theory to find additional colors that complement the image. I plan to use it for my design projects. My Christmas cards tend to be monochromatic because I’m not very good at pairing colors. Now I can generate a color palette that complements of family photo. I hope it will also be useful from anything from everything scrapbooking to web design.

Name Blender – Take two names and combine it to find your celebrity couple name, or a unique name for a child. I came up with this idea when a friend told me he loved seeing what the Name Generator came up with because some of the names were clear combinations of two existing names. Like the Name Generator, the Name Blender uses a language model to generate natural flowing names. My personal favorite in Jenjamine (Benjamine + Jennifer.) Take that, Bennifer.

Name Explorer – A table view of the baby names from any past year. Each name is given a gender score (based on the number of males and females with the name), and popularity score. You can search for any manor of names: mostly feminine, truly gender neutral, pseudo-common, etc. You can even specify a substring to match names against if you have a specific sequence of characters you want in the name.

Personalized Savings Motivator – You give it a target amount, a save by date and it comes up with a plan for you to help you reach your target. It also tries to give you some personalized motivation (such as how much interest you could earn) to help motivate you to save.

Debt Repayment Accelerator – Enter the debt you have and you can calculate precisely how much a prepayment can save in terms of interest and time. It also shows you how much a refinance will save you over the course of a loan so you can decide if it’s worth the refinance fee.

Of the new apps, the Name blender is currently the most popular.

I also updated my writing assistant tools. You can now upload a plain text document, save, and resize the text window. If you click on another writing tool the text in the text window will be ported automatically. Thank you Brian for your suggestions!

My plan for February is to focus on new apps in new genres. Diversifying my app portfolio is the best way to guard against sudden dips in traffic. That way if one app, or one category of apps, become less popular I have others to generate revenue.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft