The donations made me filthy rich, like the developer of the farting iphone app. First I bought a flat TV, then a brand new Infinity, no I'm gonna check out a yacht for the summer.

But seriously, my plan was to first cover the expenses (domain registration, that is) then start further donating to the authors of work I'm using, including this very Simple Press Forum plugin, the Pyrmont V2 WP theme, Notepad++.

Before launching SecondShell.com I imagined that with some luck in spreading info about this app, I'd make about 10.000 downloads, and maybe 1 out of 100 downloaders gonna donate 5-10 bucks putting me somewhere between 500-1000. Purchasing photoshop, huh?
Currently the two released versions made ~58.000 downloads. Out of the 58.000 downloaders, 6 users (I hope happy ones) donated a sum of 26 bucks.

I'm still in the positive, as the first two years of domain registration set me back with about 23$.

This was an experiment checking if anyone working in this model can make ends meet out of donations. I guess I'd stick with my daily job for a while. :)

However after a long time, I plan to start updating SecondShell again with the long awaited configuration GUI, and some changes because of the "tabs on top" browsers like Chrome and FF4.

Before the pcmag.com listing appeared a couple of days ago, the number of visitors went down to ~20-30 per day for a  long time. Now the download count is back to ~100 a day.

The most visitors (4157 unique visits) came exactly a year ago, 8th of April 2010, when there was a post about SecondShell at Lifehacker, and two days later it was mentioned in Kim Komando's newsletter. The next peak was the 8th of September, when a review was posted on downloadsquad.com.

Funny that I couldn't make it into any hungarian (I'm hungarian BTW)  portals or techblogs, no matter how I tried to ask for a short review.
After SecondShell was revied by chip.de, and also mentioned in their turkish site, I approached chiponline.hu – I had to fill a form about my software that I was proposing to get mentioned on the site, and all I got back was an automated answer stating that the information I provided was not true. WTF really.

I also tried promoting Secondshell on facebook and twitter, but I guess I'm too old to understand how those really work ;). I'll ask a teenager later.