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I've run jsonip.com for years. It supports millions of requests a day. More than anyone else, its organic growth and scale has surprised me. The server I have c

by geuis 13y ago

I've run jsonip.com for years. It supports millions of requests a day. More than anyone else, its organic growth and scale has surprised me. The server I have costs $50. That provides me with enough capability to support jsonip and other sites. There's not a chance in hell I'm going to kill it. That being said, things have been tight for me recently and I'm trying to get this straightened out. But I figured it would be worth the 10 minute effort to see if any of the hundreds-thousands of people that use the service on some very, very high traffic sites were willing to chip in a bit since its been free, and will remain so indefinitely.

matt_heimer 13y ago
But you aren't checking to if your users are willing to support it and honestly you have almost no way to reach your users. Your users have no reason to visit your site, most probably don't even read the about page linked to in your output. If you do implement donations you need to some way more than just adding a donation link in the output or to the about page. I'd suggest trying to drive some traffic to your human readable site once you have donations setup. The only people that will probably care enough to visit your website and see a donation button are the people that are about to use your service for the first time. Unless they are just stumbling across your URL in some stackoverflow post and then you'll probably never get a chance to connect with them. Create several tutorial pages on how to call your service. Create a library for people that don't know JavaScript enough to use XHR. Make a library with XDomainRequest support so IE 8 & 9 will work with CORS. Make a jQuery plugin, etc, etc. Don't do it as blog postings, make a real tutorial section. Every single code example you create should embed the donation URL as comment.
- geuis 13y ago
  These are actually good, practical examples. Thanks.

by geuis 13y ago

matt_heimer 13y ago

But you aren't checking to if your users are willing to support it and honestly you have almost no way to reach your users. Your users have no reason to visit your site, most probably don't even read the about page linked to in your output. If you do implement donations you need to some way more than just adding a donation link in the output or to the about page. I'd suggest trying to drive some traffic to your human readable site once you have donations setup. The only people that will probably care enough to visit your website and see a donation button are the people that are about to use your service for the first time. Unless they are just stumbling across your URL in some stackoverflow post and then you'll probably never get a chance to connect with them. Create several tutorial pages on how to call your service. Create a library for people that don't know JavaScript enough to use XHR. Make a library with XDomainRequest support so IE 8 & 9 will work with CORS. Make a jQuery plugin, etc, etc. Don't do it as blog postings, make a real tutorial section. Every single code example you create should embed the donation URL as comment.

geuis 13y ago
These are actually good, practical examples. Thanks.