A couple of months ago I announced our new API, as well as a crrrrrazy contest to go with it.
Well, the contest has been over for three weeks now… which, even I grudgingly agree, is more than enough time for my trusty band of interns (no offense Greg) to review the dozens of submissions we got and decide which ones get to share in the $10,000,000 $10,000 of fabulous cash prizes!
One Ado
Before we get to the winners, I thought I’d first reminisce on how far the API has come in just two short months.
Since we started, we’ve added a test API account (use it to test out the contest winners if you want; username: apitest@dreamhost.com key: 6SHU5P2HLDAYECUM), the ability to get your results in xml, json, and “perl”, and of course tons of new functionality (included just-added mysql and mail filter-related).
Without further ado, the winners in the first official DreamHost API Crazy Contest are:
One Further Ado
Oh yeah, one last thing I wanted to say.. we had a real hard time deciding on the winners, there were so many entries of similar quality and essentially identical utility!
So, as a cop out, there are a lot of ties among the winners, and… we decided to give EVERYBODY who didn’t win a $100 DreamHost account credit as a consolation! It’s already been applied to your account.
Without further further ado, the winners:
The Early Bird Prize: $2,000
For the best application completed before May, we had an early-bird prize.. and the winner (as previously announced) was ChirpBot, a twitter interface to the DreamHost API.
Re-mentioned here for completenesses-sake.
Fourth Place: $750
A three-way tie between all the iPhone Apps created to manage your DreamHost account:
Why the three-way tie?
Well, Sweet Dreams seemed to have more functionality than Dream Admin, but Dream Admin looked better. DreamApp looks good AND has a lot of functionality, but as of the time of judging it wasn’t available for download at the iTunes store! So in our minds, that all works out to a happy three-way-tie!
Third Place: $500
Uh oh.. ANOTHER tie? This time it’s a tie in the more traditional sense, but not so traditional as to be a formal decoration worn around the neck, just in the traditional sense of only being between two contestants:
Second Place: $1,250
(Not a tie!)
First Place: $2,500
A tie again!!!
Grand Prize: $5,000
After all those ties, how could we possibly give away the Grand Prize to a single contestant?
The truth is, we could!
But, we didn’t.
The Grand Prize winnerS are:
And That’s That!
Congratulations to all winners! You should check your email for a message from DreamHost Support asking if you’d prefer your money via check or PayPal!
And hey, just because the contest is over doesn’t mean the API is! It’s going to keep working and keep growing and improving, so please check out all the applications people have developed so far… and maybe even consider making your OWN.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Yes, in fact I *do* collect money on Free Parking. It’s like hitting the jackpot.
Some cool apps, but to be honest, I don’t think I’ll be using any of them. Hitmap looks cool, but I generally don’t care. I tried DreamMount, but I’m not a MacFUSE fan. I prefer using an AFS mount instead.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Hitmap is incredible! :)
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:44 pm
The twitter app is freakin’ coool!! Congrats to all the winners.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Congrats to Chris for his awesome DreamBot!
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Thanks for the 100$ credit ! It’s a nice consolation.
I can’t believe a cheap flash animation won the third place! I agree it’s funny but not very useful. And who would trust a website asking for your user’s password? It doesn’t make sense.
Anyway, congratulation to all participants. It was fun to work on that project!
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Thanks TT. I did put a lot of thought into DreamBot. Congrats to my tie MemCron too! That is a bad ass app as well. Congrats to all the winners. This is definitely a scrapbook moment! I guess I have to make the DreamBot site prettier now :(
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:57 am
I totally agree! That flash animation is funny for the first time, but that’s it. $500 :-) I guest that is why this contest is truly crrrrazy.
Most of all I really appreciate DreamHost who decided to credit all participants. That’s THE BEST prize :-)
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:29 am
After reading my comments, I thought I should clarify my comment on Hitmap. While it’s neat that it’ll show a world map of visitors, I’m not so into statistics that I want to know how widespread my visitors are. I already get a glimpse of that from awstats. I like getting visitors, but it doesn’t matter to me from where they visit. So it’s not that I don’t care about Hitmap, I just don’t care to know where my visitors live.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
First of all, congrats to all the winners! I can’t believe my entry won the grand prize, this is so amazing! Thank you so much to all the judges who think memCron is useful enough to win this API contest. Congrats to DreamBot too for the grand prize tie, good job!
I hope memCron can attract more people to start switching to DreamHost PS because the flexibility really helps to scale your site nicely! ;) Say no to internal server error forever!
June 24th, 2009 at 12:28 am
My best wishes to all winners
Josh, I have a kind suggestion. It will be more secure if you make username value in Dreamhost API’s different from the dreamhost login name. It would be great if it can be also generated uniquely??
Then there will be no need to publish our email and login name to use upcoming API’s.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:27 am
Hi:
First of all, congratulations to all the winners.
Second:
@ Josh: Why didn’t you test my app? I’ve been waiting for a mail to create an account for you so you could test it (as I stated on my contest post entry)… But I’ve received none. So I think you didn’t test it at all. Watching the logs I can confirm that you haven’t ever clicked on the link. It’s very sad to see 2 weeks of hard work going to the trash.
This is my entry in the contests post:
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/09/big-boy-time/#comment-144895
And this is my app:
http://neurohost.neurofun.com/
I’ll be waiting for an explanation. I don’t understand this…
Thanks,
Javi.-
June 25th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Ack, I’m sorry Javi!
I remember trying to test it out, but I missed the part where you said “Please Dreamhost people send me an email to javi@neurofun.com and I’ll create 2 test users for you”! I first just went through the list of urls I found in the posts and updated the wiki.dreamhost.com/API_Apps page, and then I went through the apps and reviewed them.
When it came to Neurohost I just tried logging in and couldn’t figure out a way to create an account so gave up… I didn’t see your note there at the bottom of the first page! (There were a couple other web apps that didn’t seem to really work right so I figured this was just another one.)
I’m very sorry about that! I did decide to give everybody the $100 account credit for participating though, to try and at least partially acknowledge the amount of work that went into each entry, and also just in case there were some semi-unfair judging irregularities!
Don’t feel too bad though.. for example nobody even had a Nokia device to test the guy with the Nokia app on!
josh!
June 26th, 2009 at 3:48 am
I would like to thank the DH guys for this Crazy contest, the API and of course the prizes ;-)
Congrats to all the winners: great job!
@Josh: thank you for the $100 credit. I think this is a great way to repay for everyone’s effort.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:29 am
Ehi! Dream Admin is 2.99$ on the itunes store, not free.
June 27th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Hey! thanks for the $100 credit, but how do I get them? Do I have to request ‘em by sending any email or anything like that?
My app was the vpsreboot command line tool.
Best regards.
Antonio.
July 4th, 2009 at 8:44 am
I just tried logging in and couldn’t figure out a way to create an account so gave up… I didn’t see your note there at the bottom of the first page!
July 8th, 2009 at 1:33 am
I don’t think I’ll be using any of them. Hitmap looks cool, but I generally don’t care. I tried DreamMount, but I’m not a MacFUSE fan. I prefer using an AFS mount instead.
July 8th, 2009 at 1:40 am
I didn’t see your note there at the bottom of the first page! (There were a couple other web apps that didn’t seem to really work right so I figured this was just another one.)
http://www.nkssnet.net/detail/link-43556.html
August 17th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I know I am late to the game, but I thought somebody might come across this and find it useful.
I’ve recently developed a CodeIgniter library for the Dreamhost API. This allows you to program the API features right into a CodeIgniter application. I hope somebody finds it useful.
Link: http://www.blueemberdesign.com/codeigniter-dreamhost-api-library/