Ten Grand in 120 Days

What is SiteSellr?

I’d like to introduce everyone to my first contributing project to the Ten Grand saga - enter SiteSellr.com!

I came up with the idea for a service which provides an easy solution for displaying a product’s price in multiple currencies on sales pages and forum threads (for example, in the SitePoint marketplace) approximately a year ago. I found it hard to believe that such a blindingly easy-to-solve problem had not been addressed. I for one hate having to go over to xe.com to find a products price if it’s being sold in AUD for example (not so much a problem for USD though).

Thus, I created a script called MoneyXC, which takes currency data from the European Central Bank, parses it and uses it to provide up to date conversions. The advantage of using a runtime generated GD Image is that on each load the script recalculates the conversion based on the latest exchange rates directly from the ECB. Perfect.

Or not. What problems have I faced?

Numerous issues came to light during the development of my idea, namely:

• What about pages that don’t support dynamic images?
• What if I don’t want it to seem as crude as a simple script which parses $_GET variables?
• I can’t store the images as this would take huge resources, and the images would only be updated if I used a cronjob… What a drag!
• Limited number of currencies availiable
• Limited use of images, designs etc

The fixes

So, naturally, I also came up with solutions for these issues, as any good developer would. And these are what I’m planning to implement over the next couple of days and weeks.

• Fool other scripts into thinking it’s not a dynamic image, but a static one, using .htaccess to convert ?amount=400&currency=USD into /amount/400/currency/usd.png
• Implement a members only system which would have a subscription fee (£4.99/year) and would allow for users to modify colours, fonts and background images for their script.
• Users would also be able to chose how many and which currencies are displayed on each image.
• Free version would also include the ability to modify which currencies are availiable, but would be using the SiteSellr.com template and colours.

And in that order I shall develop these.

Keep your eyes peeled, this is an ongoing development!