Ryan Plesko

I just got back from South by Southwest Interactive and despite the nasty weather had an awesome time. I didn’t go to any of the sessions - I didn’t even have a badge What I did do was attend all the parties, meetups, and social things I could. There are some awesome people there if you’ve never been - I heard it described by someone online before I got there as “The entire internet in person.” I agree.

My buddy Ben from The Creative Space and I were having a beer at lunch on Friday and we were brainstorming the stupidest things we could come up with to tell people we did when they asked us (just to be idiots). The funniest thing we came up with was an elaborate ponzi scheme. Then we thought, “this might actually be pretty awesome if we give money to charity.”

So we bought ponzr.com using the godaddy mobile site (sidenote: I think an iPhone appliction instead of a slightly clunky iPhone web version of the site would be a great idea for godaddy - there would be a lot more drunken, impulsive domain registrations). Anyway, we bought the domain and registered the twitter account while still in the bar and started scheming. Turns out we didn’t really understand what a ponzi scheme was (it’s not the same as a pyramid/multi-level marketing scheme) - but we hatched a plan (technically a pyramid scheme) to get a dollar from our friends and pay them ten cents for every one of their friends that they recruited to give us a dollar. For all of the friends of their friends that signed up they would get a nickel and one level removed past that they would get a penny. We decided that we would be totally upfront and give half of the money raised to charity - we chose One Laptop per Child.

We had a good time planning the whole ridiculous thing - I did the user interface for it - Ben did the backend using Merb and we integrated Paypal for payment (which was a really bad idea since they charge .30 for every transaction and we were taking one dollar donations). I included pictures of pyramids in the background, a big tagline that said “We’re not gonna lie — Ponzr is a ponzi scheme,” and a modified picture of The Fonz from Happy Days we lovingly renamed “The Ponz.” We made up some pretty ridiculous frequently asked questions - it was very clearly done as a joke to play on the current news about Bernie Madoff (I made the badge you see above :))

We built the site in a little over two days (and still had time for parties and drinking) - conceived at noon on Friday and launched on Monday morning (could’ve been faster with more reliable internet - there were too many nerds there using up all the bandwidth). I learned a lot about Rails and HAML - more to come in a minute.

Anyway, turns out that pyramid schemes are illegal in like 15 countries. I’m going to talk to Ben about donating all the money to OLPC and taking down the site (Anyone wanna buy a memorable five letter domain name that got decent hype during SXSW?). Despite all the high fives and laughs we got out of the whole thing I’m not really up going to prison. I’m not sure being arrested for a pyramid scheme would give me the street cred in jail to keep me from becoming someone’s bitch.

Anyway… That’s that… Now about Rails and HAML… Totally awesome! I’m learning Ruby on Rails - it’s decided. Everything makes sense and we built a completely functional application in two days. And HAML is totally fast to write! Understanding good information architecture and valid HTML is still necessary, but CSS classing and IDs are faster to set and it creates clean, structured code (I’m guessing you can still eff it up if you are lazy or careless). I think the most difficult part of everything is going to to be setting everything up - that part doesn’t look that easy to me (I’m not a server guy). I’ll keep you updated

NOTE: Ponzr has not been taken down yet - please don’t donate on there - I enjoy my freedom.