015 — Fixed It!

All Play w/ Ryan Hefner

I did it! I was able to fix LinkCards and stabilize the service. And, to my surprise, it actually looked like some of the traffic was actually legitimate open graph images being generated. Once I was able to stabilize the servers, and finally access the dashboard I noticed that my site pkgstats.com has almost 2 million images generated for it, so I guess that’s what was causing all the issues. One of my sites was taking down the other, kind of, go figure!

As I was thinking about how nice the service is—when it is working—it started to make me realize that I should probably try to clean things up a bit, optimize a few things, and maybe slap a price tag on it and see if others would like to use it as well. Except, if I am going to go through all the trouble of re-writing and turning this into a real product the one thing that has always bothered be about it was the name, LinkCards.

For one, the .com for LinkCards is currently some kind of malware phishing site, so not a good thing. That, and the name is kind of limiting. So, after a bit of searching for a better name on the registrars I ended up coming across, OpenGraphs. At first I saw the .io, .org, .net, .app domains were all available, which already had me thinking this is a much better name for the service. Then, I realized the holiest of holies was potentially within my hands reach, opengraphs.com. It was available as a BIN (buy it now) on Namecheap. It was a little expensive, but at the same time was probably the cheapest it will ever be. And that got my mind wandering...

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics