This blog is running votay software and it's all open source, but there isn't any documentation. Until now that is. Okay here is the quick and simple docs on how to setup votay on your own google app engine account and run your own blog. This isn't for everyone yet. You'll have to really want to run votay to jump through these hoops but hey, it's free. Also I'm hoping someone else forks the github project and really runs with it. Then someday we can have a product that competes with wordpress.

Step 1. Clone the github repo and change the app.yaml application name to your GAE app name and deploy the app.

Step 2. Goto http://yourappname.appspot.com/admin and select the create author link. Make yourself at least one author.

Step 3. Go back to the main admin page and select manage images. You can't delete images yet. Upload it again with a new filename to replace an image. Once image is uploaded copy the filename to your clipboard.

Step 4. Go back to the main admin page and select create post. Give it a title, and paste the image filename into the textfield. Write your story or paste in some html to the markup textarea. Notice how to use an html comment with the word break to tell votay where to stop the preview and make a "read more" link.

So you've been thinking about using Amazon's S3 to store and serve the images for your website. Good idea. It's a good poor-man's Content Delivery Network.

But there's also Google App Engine. Can you store and serve images from there just like S3? Yes. But you need a little python program installed on it first. Oh and unlike S3, Google App Engine is free. If you exceed very large limits you have to pay, but it's free for normal use. With S3 you have to pay for even small use.

Glossy Tooth is an open source project to make Google App Engine work like S3 for storing and serving images. This will reduce your bandwidth bill for hosting images yourself, and make your site faster and better. Is your hosting provider as good as Google for serving up images to people from all over the world? I didn't think so.

I wasn't planning on diving back into the world of running the voting site teavee.com, but after writing a blog post about the history of the site I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The biggest problem I had back in 2006 was dealing with hosting options. Now that Google App Engine is available and free, it seems there was no excuse. Might as well put teavee back up and see what happens. I took the votay code base and changed a few things around. Biggest lesson learned from votay is to go ahead and repeat data. So I have "Show" objects stored in the DataStore as well as "Winner" objects. Each show and winner model have a title, permalink, summary, and votes. But forget about trying to join a winner's table over to the show table. Instead, at the end of each week I create new Winner objects with the data copied over from the Show objects. When listing winners I have all the data needed. No joins required.

Note: The following is a guest post by David Rolland, the narcissistic creator of Pablochiste.wordpress.com. Depending on the social situation he might describe his occupation as either writer or teacher. The easiest place to check out more of his writing is by renting the children’s movie Finding Rin Tin Tin. Much of the dialogue is his, but none of the toilet jokes.

George Costanza said it best on an episode of Seinfeld about why he wouldn’t pay for parking. “It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free.”

I  won two tickets to see the bands The Dandy Warhols and The Silversun Pickups and I couldn’t find anybody to go with me. The show was at the Gibson Amphitheater, which is nestled in the Universal Theme Park. I was by myself so I parked way outside the premises. I climbed the giant hill following other concertgoers. I started dripping sweat and thought maybe this wasn’t a good idea. I’d picked up some kind of canine or feline or maybe even human flu and started feeling the symptoms that day. But I finally made it to the apex. I walked into the theater and took a seat in sick exhaustion behind the first of two partitions. The two piece band Matt and Kim were playing. I caught the end of their set. The drummer climbed on to the kit and started beating the percussion as a huge shower of confetti poured from the ceiling.

After trying to use Amazon as a drop shipper stopped working, I turned my attention to the other way to make money online: advertising. Unlike affliate programs where the user actually has to buy something for you to make money, advertising just requires the user click the ad. Sometimes even less, they just have to load a page with an ad on it. Before you start thinking about commiting click fraud, keep in mind there are systems in place to make sure the clicks or views are legit.

While running the high traffic amazon affilate stores, I had ads in addition to the products for sale. About $20 a day came in from just the ads. The best part about that $20 was: no returns! All the product revenue might not be "real" but no one returned their ad clicks. And it sure seemed easier to get someone to just click vs. take out their credit card and buy. I registered the domain teavee.com and made a site where people could vote for their favorite TV shows. Ads from Google's adsense were all over the site, so I would make money if enough people used the site. But this was 2006 and hosting options were different back then. There was no Google App Engine. It was a constant struggle to keep the costs of the servers well below the revenue coming in from ads. At one point I had six dedicated servers from godaddy at $100 a month each.