Steve's blog

A blog about what's going on in Analysis UK...

Happy Birthday Dollars2Pounds.com

Wow, apparently it's 10 years ago today that I first registered Dollars2Pounds.com, I'm not sure how long after that it took me to get a proper website deployed, probably a month or two.

Since then traffic has grown nicely, I've had some great feedback via email and the UserVoice community and I've expanded the general theme to a variety of popular currencies such as Dollars2Euro.com and more recently Dollars2Dollars.com to cope with conversion between Canadian Dollars/Australian Dollars/US Dollars and so on.

Initially I was able to get daily updates from the federal reserve but recently they stopped that so the data is now from XIgnite in either 15 minute or 60 minute up dates and I'm looking to improve on that as well.

The server has gone from being a classic asp IIS server back in 2000, then to a LAMP setup for many years, and now back to Windows IIS using ASP.NET, and with a recent transition from a rented server into Amazon's AWS EC2 cloud.

It's been an amazing experience, theirs so many things you just don't appreciate as a developer, the best has to be feedback from customers, so I'd like to say a huge thank you to everybody who uses Dollars2Pounds.com or one of my currency sites (and even my other non-currency based websites!). 

If you are a developer and don't have your own website then your missing out.  Go do something simple, look at Dollars2Pounds.com, how much more simple could it be!, get the experience of trying to host a site, keeping a database and web servers running at 99% uptime, backing up the website, dealing with customer requests, trying to generate revenue, generating analytics from log files and Google Analytics, try buying adwords, and most importantly something us developers always put down, try your hand at sales and marketing your website - I promise you it will be a shock, chances are if you don't get sales and marketing right your website will be nothing.

It's also been interesting to see the UKs take on the Euro, I was concerned early on that I had wasted my time with Dollars2Pounds.com and that the pound would be no more, but it's still going strong.

I've got some more updates in the pipeline for the website, as well as some new websites almost ready to do, so 2010 should be another interesting year.

To celebrate I'm off to the 14th Cambridge Winter Ale Festival!