About NKCSS
NKCSS is an Acronym for Nick Kusters Custom Software Solutions. It all started in 2005; I had grown more confident in my skills as a programmer and decided that it was time to do some web development (untill then, I only did Windows programs).
I registered the name NKCSS under the .com/.net/.info/.biz TLD's, purchased hosting (yay GoDaddy) and started developing my first site. It's still up & running at http://www.nkcss.com/, the first entries were made there in January of 2006.
NKCSS also represents my dream goal; writing software that people love to use, and most importantly, get a nice income out of it. Getting a lot of people to use my software was the easy part; I've written a few tools & services that are (still) begin used by millions of people. The next step is to capitalize on some of the things I created.
Time
I always say: "I think of 20 new things to create, while I barely get the time to work on one of them". I have a fulltime job as a programmer in a very small but innovative company, I recently managed to finally buy my own home and in my spare time, I try to keep my own infrastructure running and help out friends with computer problems. After doing all those things, I barely have time to write code for my own, but every now and then, I still get some time, or out of frustration, make time, but it's getting harder and harder.
NSPR
To work towards becoming self sufficient, I started to finish some of the things I wrote over the years and pack them up into products that can be bought. The first tool was called NSPR, a tool that let you decrypt the Server information you entered into Newsleecher, a great usenet application. The reason why, was that there was no such program on the market, security has always been a topic of interest of mine, and I've stumbeled on their 'encryption' scheme by accident after I was trying to fix a bug in their software. There's a lot more to be told about NSPR, but I'll leave that for another time. I'll close with saying that I was happy to see some people found a use for it and bought it. Sadly, since it's such a nice product, less then 10 people have bought it to date :)
MSNPR
The next thing I wrote was a simple tool to let you recovery your saved MSN Messenger (now called Live Messenger) password. I had this as part of a forensic security application I wrote a few years ago (never released), and figured that due to the popularity of the MSN Platform, it was due to get a few more sales going then NSPR. The only thing I didn't take into consideration, was that there were already a lot of programs out there who did exactly the same as the one I created (and they looked better too), some of them were free, so that's hard to compete with as well. To date, no sales have been made.
StatCounter
I love statistics. Back when I started my website, I used Analytics (wasn't owned by google back then) but it didn't really appeal to me. They had all sorts of nice data, but it just was too fragmented and tough to work. Another thing that was bad, was that there was a huge lag for stats to show up & be reported back. This was around the time I went looking for something better and found Statcounter. While Statcounter might not be as powerfull as Analytics back then, it offered a clean and simple interface, giving you exactly what you wanted. In my case, the 14-day bar chart showing the pagevies Vs. unique visitors Vs. returning visitors. This was a very powerfull and nice to look at welcome page. The other great thing Statcounter had to offer was the "Recent Pageload Activity" page. This showed you almoast realtime who was coming to your site, how they got there, and what they did. It was like you could watch over someones shoulder as they navigated your site. This was exactly what I wanted.
Back to the Bar Chart; I've written more then one CMS for my own personal use, and one of the things I hated, was that I'd have to go into all these different sites to get statistics & manage the site. I'd love to have the StatCounter bar chart in my own CMS. I asked them to write an API but they didn't respond, so, I went ahead and wrote my own tool. It emulated what a browser did, but using just WebRequests. I've overcome all sorts of protection schemes before when automating WebBased games like Bootleggers & DarkThrone, but also a sports betting site once for a client, so after doing some research, I was fairly quickly able to download the chart. I then created my own API, allowing people to enter their login name & password on my API page, which gave you small snippets you could paste in your own site to show a live bar chart. I had a live demo of this on NickKusters.com for over a year, showing the site's growth when I first hit 280.000 visitors (well over a million now). Due to lack of time to maintain the code & keep it working after Statcounter changed their code a bit, and the fact that people don't like to enter their username & password to a strange site, not many people beside myself used it, but that's ok :) Almost all the code I write in my own time was ment to help me more then anyone else.
