May 2009

A Little Progress Report

by Steve Wortham
It's always exciting during the early days of launching your website and releasing your first products. I remember 10 years ago with gldomain.com I released my Nebula screensaver. It was a simple OpenGL screensaver that didn't take me long to create, but it was somewhat unique and perhaps cooler to look at than any of the default Windows screensavers at the time. One night I decided to send an email to 3dfiles.com about it. And to my surprise, the next morning it had been posted on their front page and had over 5,000 downloads overnight. It would go on to be downloaded over 100,000 times across the web. That was a really cool experience for me even if I didn't make a dime from it. It was the first time I had gotten my work out into the world on such a massive scale.

Fast forward 10 years, I've since learned that my success with gldomain.com really was something special. You really have to hit a niche to make that kind of overnight impression on the internet these days. So I don't have those gldomain numbers from the early days, but BucketSoft is coming along.

Since its inception almost 4 months ago, BucketSoft.com has had over 1,600 visits. Data Comparisons Express has been downloaded 46 times from the site, and a combined total of over 250 downloads from other download sites on the web. That's decent but I really need to focus on getting Data Comparisons to version 1.0 to improve its web presence. I have several improvements to make to get it there. Then hopefully this fall I'll have Data Comparisons Professional ready and for sale.

Then there's RegexHero.com, which I launched just 2 weeks ago as another BucketSoft product. As it turns out it's doing even better than I expected. I've had over 550 visits in those 2 weeks, and my search engine placement is already pretty good. I think this site has a lot of potential and I have some cool things planned for it. The nice part about it is that it promotes itself. In other words, other people are starting to link to it on the web because it's a good resource for their readers.