A Million Pixels US : Fundraiser for Masonic Youth Groups

This blog post is to announce that I am launching a new website and blog.

I know this may seem all of the sudden, but this is something I have been working on for a while. I won't say too much about this site in this post because it is pretty well covered in the other blog entry.

I am going to ask, nay beg, my Masonic friends to donate. Just click on the page and donate anywhere from $4 to $100 to buy some advertising on the site. Email me an image, description, and hyperlink to your site and I will add it into the page. This is a great way for the online Masonic community to make a small donation and get a little acknowledgement in return.

My son's DeMolay chapter has been struggling with fund-raisers this past year. Recently we held a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser which was an enormous amount of work for a fairly modest return. Conventional fundraisers involve shaking somebody down by selling them some candy or magazines they don't really want. Meanwhile, the average person doesn't mind pitching in a few bucks to help a youth group go on a trip or something.

So, why not sell a little bit of internet advertising? Is it really that weird? It's big business for Google and other sites. We have this active Masonic community online and the idea of having a single site that hyperlinks to blogs, message forums, or commercial sites sounds appealing to me.

My main design goals for the site was that it stick to a theme and be visually attractive, even after all of the advertising is sold. Even though the page contains 'a million pixels', I am only selling about 500,000 of them. The rest are reserved for the image itself and clear borders to set one ad seperate from another.

So, my friends with other Masonic blogs, how bout you help a brother out? There are only 201 links available for sale. Why don't you be the first?

On a final note, the software that created this website is kind of interesting. Believe it or not, the code that sub-divides the image into a bunch of discrete components was based on some artificial intelligence path finding code I wrote a long time ago. At a later date I will update my code blog with a detailed description of the algorithm and the source code. The entire website is auto-generated from a tiny C++ app I wrote today. That's pretty old school to all of you ASP/PHP scripting junkies out there.

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