My IP Status Gadget finally got a review (after being up 3 days). It wasn’t a review, more of a feature request. The reviewer requested two things:
- User settable background
- Smaller size when public IP address isn’t needed.
So now I can improve it and release version 1.1. I am really liking the idea of the sidebar gadgets. For me they are a great opportunity to begin development and releasing software without any repurcussions. The only downsides are they are free and the code can be changed by someone else and re-released. But since they only took a few hours, I don’t mind giving it away. I was just impressed to see the number of downloads steadily increasing.
I have also thought of a way of monetizing it. Right now, it will not give you your public IP address (if you are behind a router) without hitting a ASP page. I wrote a simple ASP page on my website that just does a response.write of the IP address. I am not giving out the URL, because I don’t want my host to get hit with a bunch of requests. But if I made a site that you have to subscribe to (maybe $15/year or something like that), then I could add that to the settings page and make some money off the gadget. I don’t know if I will go through with that or not.
Oh, and my Vista Sidebar post is the 23rd result on Google when searching for “gadget vbscript”. So at least I know Google is checking my blog!
I guess it is time to start doing more posts on developing gadgets with vbscript, since most of the samples you can find are written in javascript. I don’t have anything against javascript, but seeing how hard debugging gadgets can be, I don’t want to have to debug missing ;s. And since most of my software development is in VB.Net, vbscript is just a little easier for me to write.
Micro Software Development 