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19 May 2010

Help me decide the fate of FactsAboutYOU.com An idea I came up with two years ago to poop on the Chuck Norris Facts bandwagon. [More:]I wanted to make it customizable so it would say "Your Name Here buys canned Whoop-Ass by the case at Costco" when you type in your-name-here.factsaboutyou.com but Dreamhost doesn't like wildcard dns on its cheap hosting plan. I'm in the process of moving everything else to HostGator (which is totally OK with wildcards) and the registration for factsaboutyou.com will expire in TWO DAYS so I must make a decision. I could move the site to another domain (thefactsabout.me is available and .me domains are on sale), but first I need to decide whether to bother at all. In two years with no real promotion, factsaboutyou.com has gotten 6000 hits. So, bunnies, does this sound like a silly little webproject worth my effort or should I go back to work on my 14 other unused domains?
For what it's worth, I really liked these:
You once got an A+ on a math test by solving all your problems with violence.
You once got into a knife fight, and the knife lost.
Scissors are afraid to run with you.
posted by Atom Eyes 19 May | 16:46
The most fun part was always coming up with 'facts' that were not used for Norris or anybody else before (some copying was absolutely necessary), but my creative wellspring on that has kind of dried out, another potential reason to let the whole thing die.
posted by oneswellfoop 19 May | 16:55
I dunno, I feel the Chuck thing has run its course, but if you do this try to work it on Facebook.
posted by dhartung 19 May | 19:30
I think the idea of being able to substitute someone's name (or a website's name) for "you" has some legs, especially if you do something like make one fact appear at a time, randomly (e.g., you have to refresh or click a link to get a new fact).

I also like the Facebook app idea. You could do a quiz or something similar (e.g., a splash screen reading something like "consulting ninja master from beyond to discover YOUR amazing fact") then present the user with just 1 fact they could post to their wall/status update. Might want to do something like do some calculation on their facebook id (or something similar you have access to) to map an id to a fact in a deterministic way -- so that the same person either always gets the same fact or a subset of facts.

The latter sounds like it has the potential to be a massive pain in the ass, unless you're in the mood to learn how to write a facebook app (which could be a useful bit of experience to have under your belt).
posted by treepour 19 May | 21:41
I have let the domain factsaboutyou.com expire, but the list of facts is now safely in a WordPress-served mysql database, accessible through my subdomain thefacts.oneswellfoop.net, ready to be turned into something when/if I get around to them.
posted by oneswellfoop 21 May | 19:22
Do you ever work hard on something, || I hop, you hop, we all hop for IHOP!

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