What kind of music/artists do you listen to?
All but rap. I'm not picky.

What do you do in your spare time, if you have any?
<laughs> Watch TV and reading. nothing terribly exciting.

What is your favorite movie?
I would have to say that "Matrix" was the last kick ass movie I saw.

What has changed most in your life because of your site?
Mostly I live the same life as I did before, but with a few more toys. It is easy to start collecting more and more junk like CD's and DVD's. I also eat out alot more.

What made you come up with the idea for this site?
This was an after the fact thing. A friend asked if I could do something that would email him the current going rate for a country every day and I did that. Then I realized that it would be just as easy to grab all the currencies and offer it to more friends. Being a web-guy I then decided to display the same data on a HTML page. Friends and visitor feedback grew the site to what it is now. My main reward and driving force was that I was doing something usefull with skills I had just learned (Perl), the site was secundary and just a tool.

Who else do you give credit for the success of your site?
Credit for the success of x-rates goes for my co-worker Mike, who also tried to buy it for $1,500 in the first month of the site. Without his experience in web issues and advertising x-rates would have never existed. The name x-rates came from a Swedish friend who said that if I got tired of having a currency site I could use the name to make a x-files site. At the time the owners of exchangerates.com wanted $1,500 for the domain name and I thought that was absurdly expensive.

What is your average monthly income from your site?
Around $3,500 / month

Where does most of your revenue come from?
Banner Advertising

What was the single most important event that helped vault your site into what it is today?
A listing on Yahoo. I hate to give Yahoo any credit but thats what really drove traffic to x-rates in the beginning. I was top of the list, with a cool icon.

When you got your first check, what was the first thing you bought as a present to yourself?
I don't recall. Probably small thing like CD's and dinners. My first big toy after a while was my car.

Has the site caused you any personal problems during it's development and maintenence?
No. A certain amount of stress due to the responsabilty of keeping visitors happy maybe, as well as financial responsabilities like paying taxes. I don't like having responsabilities.

What kind of growth have you seem on your site in recent months?
A slow but steady increase in visitors. I actually thing it's probably a decrease compared to the number of people joining the Internet every day, and that I should be working on the site to make it better.

Have you had job offers because of potential employers seeing your web site?
No. Maybe some little contract work as a programmer.

Would you recommend any particular software to other webmasters?
If you are on a windows computer, use Homesite for your HTML. I have never heard anyone say anything bad about it. I used it before Allaire bought Homesite and it was free. It still rocks.

How about any favorite web sites or books that you use for reference when developing?
I like most O'reilly books and always have a couple around me for good luck. I am also a devote fan of dictionary.com.

What is the one thing that sticks out most about your site you'd like to change?
Design. I am not a designer and yet most of the design on x-rates was done by me. It is lousy. I can only get away with it because it's a financial site, it is easy to navigate and most of my visitors come from yahoo, which is worse.

Are there any technologies that you are excited about using or seeing grow?
I would love to see more people using Linux and FreeBSD. I also think that Open source software will become more and more important and that Apple hardware with have a comeback of sorts. I am also excited to learn that Perl 6 is starting to be developed from the ground up.

So in a year or two I hope to be programming in Perl 6 using Linux on a nice plexiglass computer with no fan and a big flat panel monitor!

Are you working on any other projects that you would like our readers to know about?
My main goal right now is to do laundry next Saturday.

Do you have any advice to other webmasters out there trying to make their site "go"?
Don't try too hard to make your site "go". Try instead to make your site a good, usefull site. If your site makes a good impression, good unexpected things will happen that will make it go on it's own. When developing, think less of the banners and revenue, and more of why people would like to come back. Think of traffic as many individuals, not of individuals as traffic (hey! that's a pretty good phrase). If all else fails, buy keywords on goto.com and plea for links from everyone else.