Announcing the Red Dot Calendar
Over the Christmas holiday, I put together a free, web-based application called the Red Dot Calendar. The idea behind the website is simple… send a reminder to girls or guys just prior to the start of a woman’s period. This helps remind women that they may need to go shopping and helps remind guys that they may need to go camping (just kidding… sort of).
The actual coding took a bit more time than I anticipated. As usual, almost daily I “discovered” new features the site would need.
The service is free and I will not be placing any ads on the site, unlike every other service I saw out there. The reminders are short and to the point, again without ads. In the future, I may include a short, text-only ad at the end of the email reminder. Or I may not. Time will tell.
The thing I like most about the site is its simplicity. I deliberately designed a site with minimal use of graphics to save on bandwidth. This results in lower costs for me which makes it easier to keep it free to the users.
Regardless of how “profitable” this site may or may not be, I plan to keep it running for a long time. My wife is it’s first subscriber (I’m the second) and it’s currently running off the excess bandwidth of my server anyway, so it’s costing me virtually nothing.
Check out the site and if you have any suggestions on how to improve the service, leave a comment below.
Update (4/13/2009): The Red Dot Calendar has probably flat-lined, as the visitor count is less than one a day and the only non-family member to sign up has opted out. Alas, it has fallen victim to the demands of my PhD program. Oh well, I never really tried to market it. I’ll leave it running, nonetheless.