Mario Lurig

I don’t limit myself to websites, but sometimes I also venture into physical items that people can use and enjoy. Sometimes, when you live on the internet, it is good to ground yourself in the physical world.

Websites

NovelRank.com (October 2009) – Amazon sales rank tracking for books

• Wildly successful as a service, a resource (see the blog), and a learning experience. It continues to improve to this day. Includes the sister sites: MusicSalesTracker and DVDSalesTracker.
• Enterprise Sales Rank Software (Nov 2011) – NovelRank Enterprise Edition (NREE) is tracking software for enterprise customers to install and use on their own servers. Supports all product categories (not limited to books) and includes a completely redesigned backend logic as well as frontend user experience.

PHPcodeChecker.com (April 2011) – Analyzes PHP code for common errors and mistakes

• The service is completely free, used at Iowa State for a beginner PHP course, and will hopefully lead to more book sales.

FlyTimeNotify.com (May 2011) – Airline schedule horizon notifications

• The service is simple: You pick a date and your airlines, and when those airlines unlock those dates for travel, you get an email or sms/text message notification that you can now book your flight. Thus, you get the best flights and the best price when traveling for events and holidays, where prices only go up. Also, if you like to use mileage rewards, this allows you to use those passes before other passengers, because you are first to book.

BicycleTogether.com (August 2011) – A free and easy way to find open group rides for cyclists. Great for training for rides such as RideTheRockies, BikeMS, and more. Includes custom stylesheet and experience for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets).

Physical Stuff

DiceCandies.com – D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, and D20… Dice in chocolate or poured sugar

• A full set, a perfect gift for a table top gamer (think Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, Rifts, Pathfinder, etc). After many revisions, I finally launched it on KickStarter.com for funding this venture and selling the product wholesale to game stores across the USA.

Coming Soon

MUDclassic.com – An old school Bulletin Board System (BBS) style Multi-User Dimension (MUD). Text-based RPG adventure, completely in PHP and jQuery (JavaScript).

FlawList.com – “If you think you are flawless, you don’t have a flaw list.” A way to get anonymous feedback on your flaws from friends and family so you can improve yourself. Also will include a fun celebrity element.

CoDonor (working title) – inexpensive non-profit online software for tracking item/auction donors for annual fundraising events, allowing a rotating committee of people to track who they talked to, the success rate, and ensure local businesses aren’t overwhelmed with requests by multiple people for the same event.

PillowWars – A card battle game that combines girl cards, power-up cards, and 6-sided dice

• The game mechanic has been designed and tested, and the publishing avenue has been priced. Need to design the art style and publish. Another project from 2009 that was set aside, partially unfinished. Using the Print-on-Demand (POD) game service The Game Crafter to create the game, and KickStarter to fund it.

Retired Projects

MadeItBetter.com (July 2011) – A print advertising campaign for M&M’s candies; M&M’s^® Made it Better. All photos, concept, and web-design by me. Some post-processing to clean up the backgrounds done by David Espinosa and Michelle Burdis.

SurvivalGiftShop.com (Jan-Dec 2011) – “Kits for surviving the real world”

• First an e-commerce website that included kits for bandcamp, bachelorette parties, first hostel stay, and more. Then, a placeholder (no e-commerce). It was also linked to a future non-profit endeavor: GapYearFund.org (also retired). It never really took off and after a year of zero uptake after medium marketing, it was retired to concentrate in other areas.

DenverPriceConsultant.com & BestPriceConsulting.com – Domains acting as single landing pages for consulting services. A test run to see what kind of traffic it would generate and to play with some CSS design work. Retired the domain names after 2 years.

KeepOrToss.org – Helping packrats decide whether they should keep or toss an item. Included images, descriptions, up/down votes, and comments.

As a learning experience it was really successful for 2 years, but as a sustainable website, it failed. Like any good entrepreneur, I learned, I loved, and I let it go when it couldn’t return the favor.

SpeakITplain.com – IT Consulting landing page and blog platform. One of my first WordPress installs, and relevant in 2008 when I first started consulting, it languished and no longer provided value once this site was built.

Migrated the most relevant posts to MarioLurig.com and setup 301 redirects until the SpeakITplain.com domain registration expired. To date, this is one of the most creative domain names I ever used.