I saw this the other day when I was shopping for clothes on Gap.com. Apparently they’ve added a brand new store to their line up. Piperlime.com doesn’t make its own brand. It’s simply a reseller. The thing that really attracted me to the site was their great selection. I suppose “great selection” all depends on what style of shoe and apparel you’re into. For someone like me who likes color and variety in my sneakers, it was great! Even for the ladies they have a great selection.

But to further seal the deal they’re offering Free Shipping and Free returns on all orders. Now that is something I’ve never seen done.

From a marketing stand point, thats a GREAT pitch. But from a HR point of view, it’s also a great idea. Less man power than opening a physical store. So what would have been paid to the $7.75/hr employee now goes toward FREE shipping. It’s a win win if you ask me.

Pricing of the shoes. Not the greatest prices in the world, but also not the worst prices in the world. If you live in a state where there is no sales tax, you’re doing good!

So I haven’t blogged about Geekness in a while either. So in my last post I talked about Dingleit.com. Well Dingleit.com has forced me to learn new things about hosting and servers and all that fun stuff. So before I talk about hardware, here is the latest traffic stats off of our Google Analytics for our first month in business. :-)

• 53,010 Visits
• 17,878 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 299,732 Pageviews
• 5.65 Average Pageviews
• 00:03:12 Time on Site
• 19.29% Bounce Rate

We have 4678 members signed up as well.

Okay so given these stats this is the server setup we are using.

• 1 x MediaTemple DV Base Server - This handles all our file serving but no Database. It’s running Litespeed.
• 1 x MediaTemple GS + mySQL Container - This handles all our Database serving. We do also run our development stuff on this grid account. But that traffic is very minimal since it’s just a couple of developers on it.

Traffic does spike here and there but nothing so far that has caused any major slow downs. We decided on Litespeed because Apache was killing our resources. And in the spirit of saving money we wanted to cut costs as MUCH as possible. We will be looking for a redundant solution soon. However at this point, we’re not completely mission critical. So this does us just fine. I’m still loving MediaTemple. I hate managing a DV server. So Josh takes care of that. :-) However, with the DV comes the SPEED and agility. So there ya have it! Thats our setup.

I’ve been extremely busy the past couple months. One of the things that has kept me SO busy is a new project that I am a huge part of. Dingleit.com. What the dingle?!? Yes, thats what most people ask. So the idea started actually about 7 months ago. Henry and I were brainstorming for ideas that we could do that would take the web by storm. One of the ideas we came up with was CockyMeter. Yes, it sounds wierd, but the idea was simple. A place to rate how cocky various celebrities were/are.

Dingleit.com was birthed out of this idea. Dingleit is really a response if you will to the ridiculous free giveaway sites. There are MANY MANY MANY of them out there. However, they all require you to put in a credit card and sign away 3 of your children. Ridiculous. So what is Dingleit? A site where the visitor does not buy anything or get any spam. All they do is signup, start dingling the various items on the site and wait for the timers. When the timers run out, a random winner is selected from the dinglers. Simple! SUPER SIMPLE! And ZERO SPAM!

The second part of Dingleit is the forums. This adds to the entire experience. Being able to interact with other members and really get some great inside tips to other deal sites, or just talk about the newest movies. Dingleit.com is about community.

http://www.dingleit.com

My most recent CMS piece was of course done on Joomla! However, this last round I took a minimalist approach on the back end. Typically I will try to include every component I believe the client may ever want to use. However, this time I stripped just about everything I possibly could out of the CMS installation. I also used two components I’d never used before. Both are of GREAT help in the menu making process. I suppose going forward I am going to take the approach of, “Only put it in if you need it.” Sure there is tons of things that look cool. But not all are actually useful. Also revolutionary for me was the process of creating my template from scratch. I didn’t start from any one else’s template. my CSS, my coding, the whole thing came from scratch. It has taken longer, but is far cleaner and efficient.

So here I am in my 4 month of being on the Media Temple Grid. I switched to the Grid because of some ridiculous down times at 1AND1. When I first came to the Grid it was everything I could have ever wanted and more. However, as probably most know, there was a fair amount of troubles on the Grid. Most of these were due to MYSQL issues. The last upgrade was Grid Master Release 1.2. A lot of “intermittent” issues occurring on the Grid have cleared up since. I’ve thrown a couple of my Grid sites under http://mon.itor.us/. I’ve noticed a HUGE increase in uptime and response times. Right now on the Grid I’m averaging 160ms response times. This can be compared against some of my client’s old 1AND1 sites that sit around 950-1200ms. (Side note, Dreamhost is averaging 130ms http://joshyee.com/ <- My friend’s site).

My trust in Media Temple’s Grid Servers is slowly but surely increasing. Thanks for your continued effort MT! Lovin it!

So I was having an interesting conversation with my cousin Ashbash. Thats her real name. Some how we got to talking about puppies. So it made me think of some things that would make me made if I were a puppy. If I were a puppy:

• I wouldn’t let people touch my tail. In fact I’d probably put brass knuckles on it to really show them I didn’t like tail touching.
• I would never wear a dog sweater. Besides being some of the ugliest things ever made, they’re itchy against nice fur.
• I’d insist on going everywhere with my owner. It gets boring at home. People wonder why puppies chew up everything. My guess is they want to go on Road Trips to California. Sometimes it’s hard to express your inner feelings as a puppy, but thats what they want.
• I would probably lobby for another puppy. As much as the other pupster could annoy me, I’m sure the company would be better than not having any.

Thats what I’d want if I was a puppy.