SuggestIt’s First Month
| June 17, 2009 @ 6:27 am | Filed under Google, Internet, Programming |
I know it has been a while since I have written anything on my blog and I always promise myself that I will get better. Well, here is one sorry attempt at getting better.
When I started work for the State of Utah my first project was called the Employee Gateway. It was a web application that was a central point for finding all HR information an employee might need. Well, a few months ago the HR people came back to DTS and said that the governor would like a section added to the Employee Gateway for the new energy initiative they were kicking off. Part of that project was to allow for a virtual suggestion box where employees could enter suggestions about energy conservation ideas and then vote those suggestions up and down.
Well, one of the requirements for the virtual suggestion box was that they wanted to show data from the suggestion box in the actual web site. After looking at options that were already out there they determined that to get a suggestion box with an API it would cost quite a bit a month. After thinking about the idea I realized that I could create an application like that pretty easily. That’s when SuggestIt was born.
SuggestIt has been live for almost a month now and has been evolving. I am still looking for suggestions on how to improve the application so please go and beat on it for a while. Currently the service is free but I have covered myself by including a line that in the future I may be implementing a pricing structure. As most developers know, there are costs to hosting a site. Currently my income for the site is off Google Ads which does not come close to covering costs that I will accrue over time.
SuggestIt is written in Python (one of my favorite languages thanks to Phil Windley). It is hosted on Google Appengine and so far the cost of running the site is free. However as traffic increases (I hope) I will exceed the free quotas. Hence the reason I am planning on working out some sort of pricing for the service. Any suggestions on pricing structures would be greatly appreciated. Any publicity would be greatly appreciated as well.



