- Joined
- Aug 17, 2002
- Messages
- 2,602
- Reaction score
- 1,304
A brief history of MDapplicants.com
So, we're coming up on the ninth admissions cycle to be recorded on mdapplicants.com, and the site has had some ups and downs, most people using the site today don't remember the old site, and hardly anyone remembers where it came from.
Once upon a time, in 2003, I was applying to medical school. As I was planning my applications, I wondered to myself - where should I apply? The SDN forums were full of "stats" threads - i.e., I have a 5.21 GPA and a 51Z on the MCAT, how many acceptances to Harvard can I expect? as well as a lot of people just trying to figure out how many schools they needed to apply to, and which ones were "realistic" given their relative standing. There was one, small document floating around the internet that had compiled a survey of applicants in free text (on Geocities, I think, even), which sort of gave me the idea of making something similar. I was only a couple years removed from my web development background, so over the course of a week or so, I taught myself SQL and PHP, and built some forms and tables.
And this became the initial MDapplicants.com. It grew rather slowly - slow enough that, initially, I actually had a desktop widget that alerted me every time someone entered a new profile. A couple months later, when the functionality was pretty much stable, I re-skinned the site with a new look and feel - a very lightweight, minimal bandwidth, clean look. It stayed, unchanged, in that same form for several years.
After a few years, it had accumulated over a thousand profiles, primarily due to its increasing prominence on SDN. There were quality control issues - trolls would make profiles that were clearly fake, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate. It was pretty simple to remove individual profiles through my administration interface, but it was mildly tiresome. This was the main issue when the site was initially growing.
A little over a year into site operation, Google introduced Adsense, which allowed pretty much anyone to put ads on their website. The first full month of ads ran in November 2004 - and generated $91.34 off of 179,069 page views. For a second year medical student on a student budget, that was pretty amazingly sweet. With money coming in, and with enough free time as a student to maintain it, the site stayed in pretty good working order. As the site became more popular, with more page views, there was more revenue - including a jump up to $405.44 of 396,708 in June of 2006. Again, as a student, this was really neat. Comments were added to the site, and a few more tweaks were made to how you could add/edit your profile, dates were added, new search options were added, etc. I also created matchapplicants.com in a similar vein - which would be used for applying to residency - but there are so many specialties and so many programs, I couldn't possible keep track of everything to the extent I wanted. Matchapplicants.com is still around in essentially permanent beta form, and it's more or less built on the original MDapplicants.com engine, in case you were curious.
The site pretty well coasted along in the same state until 2009. The site was large enough that search results had become impossibly unwieldy - with just hundreds of plain-text results and endless scrolling. The discussion on a few profiles was also so extensive that a few profiles were, likewise, lengthy and full of scrolling. I decided it was time to redesign it.
At this point, I was a PGY-2 in Emergency Medicine - and definitely not up to speed on Web 2.0 programming methodology. I decided the only way to re-make the site was to have it professionally done. It was sort of a painful process. I had a vision for the site that was very much a sort of "social share" - tracking other profiles, tracking schools, using your profile page to inform other people about your process, learning from others, corresponding about experiences, etc. Unfortunately, vision costs money - and, although the site was making money, at approximately that same $300-$400 per month average, that didn't cover the redevelopment costs I was being quoted. I ended up hiring theflowerpress.com, which was the wife of a friend from college, and she did the graphic design while subcontracting out the programming. This cost approximately $36,000, sum total. Coincidentally, when I was pulling up Analytics and Adsense for this post, I found that MDapplicants was precisely breakeven for its lifetime - so now it can start building equity back into the black for the next redesign/update....
In any event, the old-timers here might remember what an unmitigated disaster the new site was when it launched. There were two issues - firstly, it was slow. Slow, slow, slow, slow. The sheer amount of new logic introduced brought the server to its knees. Even today, some operations are so slow that some search result query tables are built once daily during times of low server load. This is why, sometimes, when you update or change things on your profile, they don't immediately become reflected in the search results. After a few months, a new server helped fix these issues. The second issue was simply that it was different. Perhaps my vision for the site just wasn't what people were used to. That was OK on a certain level, but it was definitely a far more negative result than I was hoping.
It's hard to tell exactly what's going on with the site these days because, well, I've sort of let routine maintenance slide. I'm in my first year as an attending at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and I don't have nearly as much free time anymore. A number of new schools have opened in the last year, and, unfortunately, adding schools is sort of a kludgey process that requires me to still manually add them with an SQL query while logged into the server.
Then, it seems as though spammers have defeated the CAPTCHA interfaces and the e-mail verify mechanism, and they've been making automated fake profiles and using those profiles to write spam all over the site. I don't have a good, automated way to cleanse the site of all that spam right now. If anyone has any ideas, I'd really like to hear it - because it's turning into a big problem. I need to find the time to put in a mechanism that makes it easy for me to clear out all the posts they've showered all over the site as well. Fantasy time I don't have, specifically. Case in point for the spam attack: http://mdapplicants.com/schoolforums.php?id=146
So, that's sort of the summary of how MDapplicants.com evolved into what it is today, its limitations, and its outlook for the future. Trying not to let it fold under the barrage of automated attacks, but losing for the time being. Not much time and no spare funds to put back into the site, but it's important to me to keep it operational as a tool for future medical applicants. With unlimited monies, I had a vision of mdapplicants.com growing into an online community for medical students - who would then use matchapplicants.com - which could then lead them to an online community for residents - who could then use the site to network into their attending positions. But, for now, I'll settle just for cleaning house.
Thanks for your patience and support.
So, we're coming up on the ninth admissions cycle to be recorded on mdapplicants.com, and the site has had some ups and downs, most people using the site today don't remember the old site, and hardly anyone remembers where it came from.
Once upon a time, in 2003, I was applying to medical school. As I was planning my applications, I wondered to myself - where should I apply? The SDN forums were full of "stats" threads - i.e., I have a 5.21 GPA and a 51Z on the MCAT, how many acceptances to Harvard can I expect? as well as a lot of people just trying to figure out how many schools they needed to apply to, and which ones were "realistic" given their relative standing. There was one, small document floating around the internet that had compiled a survey of applicants in free text (on Geocities, I think, even), which sort of gave me the idea of making something similar. I was only a couple years removed from my web development background, so over the course of a week or so, I taught myself SQL and PHP, and built some forms and tables.
And this became the initial MDapplicants.com. It grew rather slowly - slow enough that, initially, I actually had a desktop widget that alerted me every time someone entered a new profile. A couple months later, when the functionality was pretty much stable, I re-skinned the site with a new look and feel - a very lightweight, minimal bandwidth, clean look. It stayed, unchanged, in that same form for several years.
After a few years, it had accumulated over a thousand profiles, primarily due to its increasing prominence on SDN. There were quality control issues - trolls would make profiles that were clearly fake, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate. It was pretty simple to remove individual profiles through my administration interface, but it was mildly tiresome. This was the main issue when the site was initially growing.
A little over a year into site operation, Google introduced Adsense, which allowed pretty much anyone to put ads on their website. The first full month of ads ran in November 2004 - and generated $91.34 off of 179,069 page views. For a second year medical student on a student budget, that was pretty amazingly sweet. With money coming in, and with enough free time as a student to maintain it, the site stayed in pretty good working order. As the site became more popular, with more page views, there was more revenue - including a jump up to $405.44 of 396,708 in June of 2006. Again, as a student, this was really neat. Comments were added to the site, and a few more tweaks were made to how you could add/edit your profile, dates were added, new search options were added, etc. I also created matchapplicants.com in a similar vein - which would be used for applying to residency - but there are so many specialties and so many programs, I couldn't possible keep track of everything to the extent I wanted. Matchapplicants.com is still around in essentially permanent beta form, and it's more or less built on the original MDapplicants.com engine, in case you were curious.
The site pretty well coasted along in the same state until 2009. The site was large enough that search results had become impossibly unwieldy - with just hundreds of plain-text results and endless scrolling. The discussion on a few profiles was also so extensive that a few profiles were, likewise, lengthy and full of scrolling. I decided it was time to redesign it.
At this point, I was a PGY-2 in Emergency Medicine - and definitely not up to speed on Web 2.0 programming methodology. I decided the only way to re-make the site was to have it professionally done. It was sort of a painful process. I had a vision for the site that was very much a sort of "social share" - tracking other profiles, tracking schools, using your profile page to inform other people about your process, learning from others, corresponding about experiences, etc. Unfortunately, vision costs money - and, although the site was making money, at approximately that same $300-$400 per month average, that didn't cover the redevelopment costs I was being quoted. I ended up hiring theflowerpress.com, which was the wife of a friend from college, and she did the graphic design while subcontracting out the programming. This cost approximately $36,000, sum total. Coincidentally, when I was pulling up Analytics and Adsense for this post, I found that MDapplicants was precisely breakeven for its lifetime - so now it can start building equity back into the black for the next redesign/update....
In any event, the old-timers here might remember what an unmitigated disaster the new site was when it launched. There were two issues - firstly, it was slow. Slow, slow, slow, slow. The sheer amount of new logic introduced brought the server to its knees. Even today, some operations are so slow that some search result query tables are built once daily during times of low server load. This is why, sometimes, when you update or change things on your profile, they don't immediately become reflected in the search results. After a few months, a new server helped fix these issues. The second issue was simply that it was different. Perhaps my vision for the site just wasn't what people were used to. That was OK on a certain level, but it was definitely a far more negative result than I was hoping.
It's hard to tell exactly what's going on with the site these days because, well, I've sort of let routine maintenance slide. I'm in my first year as an attending at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and I don't have nearly as much free time anymore. A number of new schools have opened in the last year, and, unfortunately, adding schools is sort of a kludgey process that requires me to still manually add them with an SQL query while logged into the server.
Then, it seems as though spammers have defeated the CAPTCHA interfaces and the e-mail verify mechanism, and they've been making automated fake profiles and using those profiles to write spam all over the site. I don't have a good, automated way to cleanse the site of all that spam right now. If anyone has any ideas, I'd really like to hear it - because it's turning into a big problem. I need to find the time to put in a mechanism that makes it easy for me to clear out all the posts they've showered all over the site as well. Fantasy time I don't have, specifically. Case in point for the spam attack: http://mdapplicants.com/schoolforums.php?id=146
So, that's sort of the summary of how MDapplicants.com evolved into what it is today, its limitations, and its outlook for the future. Trying not to let it fold under the barrage of automated attacks, but losing for the time being. Not much time and no spare funds to put back into the site, but it's important to me to keep it operational as a tool for future medical applicants. With unlimited monies, I had a vision of mdapplicants.com growing into an online community for medical students - who would then use matchapplicants.com - which could then lead them to an online community for residents - who could then use the site to network into their attending positions. But, for now, I'll settle just for cleaning house.
Thanks for your patience and support.
