BestOfGleam.com is a lot different than anything else I've done before. Gleam is a “business growth platform” (not affiliated with me or my site) which allows you to run giveaways and competitions. Essentially, if you are a business you could give away one of your products to people who like your Facebook page (for example). Gleam verifies your users have completed whatever task you require and gives them an entry to the competition in exchange. Gleam will then use those entries to pick a winner once your competition ends.

Back in 2016, I discovered lots of giveaways were being run on Gleam but there wasn't a particularly good way to find them. You could search on Twitter, but then you would be flooded with lots of fake or low-value giveaways which weren't worth entering.

I decided to make a website which would show a list of giveaways hosted on Gleam that were actually worth entering. I have no affiliation with Gleam, I simply found their service to be better than the competition at the time which is why I focussed on them.

BestOfGleam was created with WordPress and is a very simple website. It has a form which registered users can fill in to inform me about new giveaways and then I can approve them so they appear on the homepage. I wrote a script which requests the end date of each giveaway from Gleam and keeps it up to date in the database, this is then embedded in the HTML of the website. I also wrote a simple Javascript snippet which replaces the raw end date with a dynamic countdown on the browser.

WordPress needs a lot of optimisation to ensure it loads quickly for everybody. The most important speed related feature BestOfGleam has is a CloudFlare Worker script which I wrote. This code runs in Cloudflare's datacenters and dynamically caches pages based on the type of visitor (logged in or not).

BestOfGleam also uses CloudFlare Pro and Argo which offer more speed related features. Thanks to Cloudflare's CDN and caching only about 0.1% of the overall traffic even reaches my server, the rest is handled by fast Cloudflare servers located physically close to the visitors. I'm using a mid-range VPS with dedicated resources as my web server meaning that any traffic which does reach it is handled quickly. My heavier websites (such as IoTPlotter) use dedicated servers but that kind of power simply isn't required for BestOfGleam.

At the time of writing this (27th March 2021), BestOfGleam has an Alexa site rank of #230,583 worldwide and #60,564 for The USA.

In December 2022, I stopped manually moderating new posts and this responsibility now lies on members of the community.