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I made a web-based graphing calculator (http://fooplot.com) in 2007 that runs on ad revenue and is still delivering about 5X its hosting costs. It only makes enough profit for about a few dinners a month so nothing I can live off of but hey I'll take anything more than $0. It used to make an order of magnitude more back when I had 250K MAU and that was a meaningful addition to my meager PhD salary. But times have changed and (a) people started using mobile apps to graph functions and (b) AdSense somehow decreased the CPC I was getting and I then stopped putting effort into it.

You can put arbitrary equations into the URL, e.g.

http://fooplot.com/1+sin(x)/2



Kind of curious how that works, the url does not match what you land on so I'm guessing something intercepts it but it outputs a unique url? It's not just urlencode anyway.

Are they precomputed to save resources or something? Pretty neat


Oh it's just a base64-encoded JSON that contains other parameters like the view limits and such. You can base64 decode itself and see.


Oh yeah that's neat, what does the type: 0 mean?

I guess as an aside did you write the plotting part or used some library?


I wrote the whole thing from ground up. I don't think I remember seeing any libraries back then. It actually initially used 1-pixel DIVs, then SVG, then later changed to canvas.

type:0 just means a regular y=f(x) function


wow well that's really impressive, the 1px divs sounds interesting




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