Last month I coined the word “textgasm”. (Google reveals that I’m wrong, as the word appeared on the web before I thought of it, but we’ll ignore that.) It was a natural marriage of concepts I enjoy thinking about. It didn’t end there — I also registered the domain textgasm.com. After the impulse purchase, I didn’t know what to do with the domain.

I asked around and a friend jokingly suggested that I host ASCII porn. Someone else said to use the site for text-related scandals, such as the Detroit mayor’s scandalous text messages. Finally, Iain Cochrane suggested that the site be used for people to type out their fantasies in 140 characters. I liked that idea and worked with it.

Instead of fantasies, though, I broadened the topic to secrets, hopefully attracting a wider audience in the process. I found an Ajax voting system that degrades gracefully if Javascript isn’t enabled on the user’s machine, so I incorporated that into the site. Tijs Vrolix allowed me to essentially adapt the design of his Guestbook 2.0 Experiment to Textgasm.

For two weeks, nonstop, I coded my first web application almost exclusively in PHP and MySQL. On May 14th, the site went live, and I announced it on an online message board. Within a week, the site garnered 4,000 unique hits, many from StumbleUpon and two European portals I’d never heard of: Startkabel.nl and Surfplaza.be.

Some users played with the site in ways I didn’t expect or intend. A spelling mistake in my code allowed for someone to vote 20 times in a row on the same secret if Javascript was disabled on their browser. Another hole allowed for XSS attacks (i.e. posting malicious Javascript code as a “secret”), but someone attempted to exploit that only after I fixed it. And yet other holes allowed people to vote and comment on secrets that didn’t exist. (All holes have since been patched.)

The traffic for Textgasm has dropped off drastically in the past week, but I’m not done with it yet. I have a couple of features to add to it in the next couple of weeks, and then it’s up to the web community to decide its fate. Regardless, this has been a huge learning experience, and it makes me wonder: If Textgasm took me two weeks, what can I accomplish with more time, knowledge, and experience? I can’t wait to find out.