Could you add an option to keep to the current tab when following a link, rather than opening a new one? While this isn't as annoying as it used to be when it actually opened a new browser session, it is still a little annoying when you go to hit the back button and it doesn't work.
Congrats on the sale, best of luck and keep up the good work.
Write down all of the ideas, so at the very least they are not lost forever, in case you should get some time to come back and work on them. I can't tell you how many ideas I will have during some idle moments of the day or when I wake up in the middle of the night, but don't bother to write them down and end up losing them.
If you are wondering which to implement, my suggestion would be to see if one really sticks out as cool to you. Don't worry about making something to get a lot of money/girls/ice cream (I know, that was first on your list of desires wasn't it...). If you have several ideas and they all excite you... Before I finish let me emphasize this point -- they all excite you. You are a lot less likely to finish or even make significant head way if you don't care about the idea. Now back to your regularly scheduled post. ... talk to your friends, see which one they get excited about.
Not always, but typically if you have a good idea, it should only take a few sentences (at most a paragraph) to get others excited about the idea. This isn't 100% perfect, but it is a nice rule of thumb.
If all else fails, just pick one. One thing all good programmers, from the Knuths to the Zawinskis of the world, have in common is they all program/read code constantly.
Last but not least, good luck. If you feel like it, show us the results or (if we are really lucky) the code.
"What Is The Name Of This Book?" by Raymond Smullyan is a great book if you like puzzles or want a playful way to improve your logic/reasoning skills. It does a really good job of incrementally building up to more complicated problems. It starts out with puzzles using basic if p then q style logic and moves all the way up to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in a way that is both accessible by and entertaining to someone as young as 10.
It took me about two weeks to a month to read and give each question due thought at a pretty leisurely pace, though I am sure most would take many much less time. (I had to stop to keep up on homework/study for tests for about a week of time.)
I don't know if I became a better programmer from it, but it is very much inline with the hacker spirit. You can get it probably from the library/inter-library loan (as I did initially), but you will probably fall in love with it and shell out the $10 to get the used copy.
I really like the idea, and thought the site was aesthetically pleasing. I don't mean to sound like I am complaining, as this is my first post, but I want to help you improve the site. (I am no expert on viral sites, but I assume the better the site the more likely it will go viral.)
There are two things I see possibly going wrong:
1. www.3pics.me should redirect to 3pics.me. I know most techies think this fairly common knowledge, and it is quickly becoming so, but I still have family who think you have to tack www on front of all websites you go to. So my basic thought is if Joe Average can't find the site, it will severely limit your audience.
2. You are using just a cookie to remember if someone has already voted. This is a problem. A small script such as the following could quickly inflate the results.
for i in $( seq 10 ); do wget --no-cookie --post-data='upload%5Bid%5D=34' 3pics.me/1; done
(I tested it to check to see if my suspicion was correct, I only ran with 10 requests with one second intervals between each request to minimize any possible damage. upload[id] =34 has 10 extra votes. Sorry.)
Like I said, I don't want to sound like I am just a grouch, but I wanted to give you a heads up before someone else figures this out and abuses it.
Could you add an option to keep to the current tab when following a link, rather than opening a new one? While this isn't as annoying as it used to be when it actually opened a new browser session, it is still a little annoying when you go to hit the back button and it doesn't work.
Congrats on the sale, best of luck and keep up the good work.