GleamFinder.com is very similar to another website I host, BestOfGleam. The purpose of these websites is to help people find giveaways hosted on the Gleam platform (which I am in no way affiliated with).

I created this site because I wanted an automated way to let people find giveaways since there is no official way to do so, many people simply check social media which can be time consuming for people who enter a lot of giveaways.

GleamFinder is custom-made for the purpose rather than using Wordpress like BestOfGleam. This gives me greater control over how things work and allows me to avoid the limitations and bloat of Wordpress.

It is possible to add giveaways to GleamFinder via an undocumented API and I have software which finds giveaways on social media (via their official APIs) and then forwards it to GleamFinder. The metadata of the giveaways is added to the site so information can be displayed before people enter the giveaway.

Since many of the pages do not change often, I have a Varnish server running in front of GleamFinder which will cache them. This also caches the homepage (which does change often), but only for a few minutes and will refresh the cache in the background so users of the site are not delayed by it. This works quite well since I wrote the site in a way which makes it easy to configure caching and saves up to 250ms wait time on some pages.