superic

I made InstaKenny http://insta.ericwillis.com two nights ago as a joke. It was one of those ideas you get at midnight that seem like a good idea until it's 3am and you have to get up soon.

Things I learned/found:

* AForge http://www.aforgenet.com is an amazing .NET computer vision library. I used the less exciting parts of it for image effects but the complete feature list is really cool.

* Uploadify http://www.uploadify.com is a great jQuery plugin for wrapping the file upload dialog with Flash.

* People will immediately upload porn and S&M images of the Giants' Pat Burrel

* I turned off linking to images if the referrer didn't match my domain name which meant I annoyed a lot of people who just wanted to link to images. It was about 3am when I did this and it seemed like a good idea. I wouldn't do that again; rather, I'd deal with the bandwidth overages if it happened.

* Short URLs are key. Who the heck uses a GUID as an identifier? :)

I'm working on something that would take payments (via credit card) from within a desktop application. Is that weird? The purchase is for something physical that would be received via real mail (which the application helped make).

It's not that it wouldn't be secure or anything like that. I'm not going to store the payment information -- just keep a record that it happened successfully.

I suppose I could make it so users would have to buy credits on the website and those credits would show up in the desktop app version as well as online. But that seems like an extra step for some users. I also don't want to hide the real cost of the service from users by saying "$10 is 382 credits and one use of the service is 342 credits" or anything like that. Associating cash cost with the product is fine.

Thoughts? Am I over-thinking this?