I think my grandmother said that once (but the parentheses are mine of course). And if she had ever been into web design, I like to think that she might have made some cool sites by following this principle. I’ve made a bunch of websites over the past few years, but very few of them require much work. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, but I prefer to think I’m super-efficient.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of my sites, and how I’ve set them up in such a way so that they don’t require much attention. Keep in mind these are all just hobbies, but at the same time they are really fun ways to learn new methods of gathering, organizing, presenting, and monetizing web content.

LooksLikeBoobs.com

LooksLikeBoobs.com

Yeah, you read that right. This is my latest – and by far my most ridiculous – web project. It’s a photo site devoted to all things that look like boobs (but not including boobs!). I’m not sure when I had the idea for this site, but I know it gained momentum after I met Eric Nakagawa, the dude who created LolCats. I love the idea of having users drive the content on a site, submitting photos to a moderation queue where I can approve them or send them to the trash. There’s a random picture function, and star ratings as well.

For anyone who’s curious, LooksLikeBoobs was created using Wordpress and the TDO Miniforms plugin. And when you think about, this functionality is pretty amazing for Wordpress (believe me, I thought long and hard about Drupal). It doesn’t require users to login, so the barrier for user participation is really low. This plugin also works well with the GeoMashup plugin, making for some cool geo-specific possibilities.

P.S. Follow @LooksLikeBoobs on twitter!

DSninja.com

DSninja.com

When I started this Nintendo DS site back in January, it was just me. Since then three more writers have jumped on board, and they’ll all awesome: Blue Lightning Ninja, Black Mamba Ninja, and Purple Monkey Ninja.

My original revenue sharing plan was to allow each author to insert their own Google Adsense or Amazon Affiliate code into their posts. But I was pleasantly surprised last week when the site sold its first ad ($250 for 6 mos), so I’m hoping to send along a few modest payments via paypal to the writers as well.

DSninja is still looking for new writers, by the way, so if you’d like to join the clan please drop me a line. Writers write when they can, and I don’t ask any more than that.

2JPN.com

2JPN.com

This is a collection of Japan-related links that I slowly add to whenever I feel like it. Generally, I privately bookmark links on Delicious with a ‘2JPN’ tag as I discover them, and later input them all at once when I get time. People also submit useful links using the suggest page, and that really helps too.

As for promoting the site, people have been great by reciprocating my link outs by adding some small 2JPN buttons to their site. It’s optional, but always appreciated.

PandaPassport.com

This is my old China blog that I sort of neglected for quite a while after moving to Japan. And while there’s no user-submitted goodness on this site, I really like how I can use the Publish2 wordpress plugin to collect interesting China stories, and then publish them later on from the Wordpress admin panel, typically once a week. Cheers to Chris for the invite to Publish2, and cheers to Daniel Bachuber for some awesome work on the plugin. For anyone who doesn’t use Publish2, I believe Scribefire performs a similar function.

Note to Self, There are lots of other things I’m shamefully neglecting:

• My OldNewfoundland.com idea
• Learning Programming
• Learning Japanese

While I’m on the topic, I should mention that Drupal is pretty awesome for building a site that draws input from multiple users, and DalianDalian is a great example of this. Chris’s Tools for News does it really well too, and I’m hoping to pick his django-fied brain sometime soon about how exactly it does what it does.