Mike Griffiths

So, the Apple iPad came out a couple of months back. It’s advertised as being “unbelievable price of $499″, which at first glance is pretty unbelievable, as I can get a pretty high spec computer for that price.

However, I’ve had chance to play with them a few times and someone in work has one. As with most Apple products, it looks good. I like most Apple products apart from the computers (had a lot of issues with them in the past and find OSX to be difficult to work with), and the iPad is no exception.

I was privledged enough to have a play with one before they were released. I wasn’t too impressed with it. Ok, it seemed great when I slid the slider across and got to the menu, but that was about it. Because it was pre-release date there were next to no apps for it available, and those that come with it are fairly limiting. I was bored in less than 3 minutes.

I have since played with a few iPads that have been loaded with apps though, and they do, for the most part, seem pretty good. There are a few decent games, some of which have been ported over from standard platforms, others have been made specifically. Command and Conquer, for example, is pretty slick.

As much as I do like the product, I cannot justify buying them. People who own them swear by them, but whenever I ask them when they use them the only answer I get is “on the toilet mostly” – so it seems to be an expensive toilet break. I think I’d rather spend the money on a new laptop that I can take anywhere and run anything on. It probably won’t look as cool, but I’ll be able to run anything I want, wherever I want, and if I want 3G support I can just pay £5 a month for a dongle, rather than the ~£25 that Apple ask.

As with most Apple products, from day dot there have been a large number of iPad Accessories available, things like iPad socks, sleeves, screen protectors, etc. As with any touch screen device I would highly recommend getting a screen protector to try and protect against scratches. These things get grubby and marked very easily, so it is important to try and protect them.

On my travels round the interwebs I’ve stumbled upon an article I wrote a while ago about Electronic Cigarettes. It appears that someone has published it in my name, and it wasn’t me!

Take a look at the article in question: electronic cigarettes

I use this blog for lots of technical chit chat, and for publishing the odd bit of code. One thing I don’t use it for though, is general crappy ramblings or design-esque talk.

Because of this I’ve just launched my blogger account, it’s over at Mike on design. Over here you’ll find chat about latest design finds, logos and lots of nice looking things.

Enjoy.

Most web developers have their own code base that they refer back to on a regular basis. Many have even developed their own simple platforms that do a lot of the leg work for them, that they know inside out and can easily deploy on a new project.

More recently though, at least in the last 4-5 years, frameworks have been popping up left right and centre. From CakePHP, which is generally considered to be a little unstable, to the super-reliable ZendFramework, built by Zend – the PHP company.

Zend and Cake are not he only frameworks though. After trying a lot, I find my personal favourite to be CodeIgniter, which is built by EllisLabs.

CodeIgniter comes with libraries and helpers that can be activated at any point within the framework. These helpers try and simplify many tedious tasks involved with making web applications. Things like form validation is a breeze, and the functions used are much more powerful than something that can be drummed up quickly in any normal PHP app. Image manipulation is made easy, and emailing through PHP can be done well without needing to load in the bloated PEAR, which the documentation recommends.

CodeIgniter uses standard MVC (Model > View > Controller) to create it’s systems. Although at first glance this can seem a little silly and over-thought, but it makes life a lot easier for everyone involved. The MVC structure is standardised, reliable and fast, and every developer should follow suit with it very easily.

CodeIgniter also makes debugging applications very easy. The built-in profiler shows all of the POST, and GET data, aswell as all database queries. I used a customised version of the profiler that I tweaked to also show SESSION data.

When working with lots of small, simple queries CodeIgniter also makes life easy with active records, their database library. It allows queries to be written with a fraction of the amount of code. Let’s say we want to pull off everything from a table, simple: db->get(’table’) – no need to write a full query to do it. Active records do support large queries with unlimited amounts of JOINs, but my personal preference is to compile these myself and throw them into a normal query using the DB library’s db->query() method – probably because I’m used to the structure of the queries and the syntax so I can spot errors more easily. If you’re not hot on SQL though, you’ll probably benefit massively.

My personal framework recommendation is definitely CodeIgniter, but make sure you check out all of the others available too. CodeIgniter has a massive community that helps solve any problem you may have, the community includes forums and live chat rooms, which the EllisLabs developers often frequent.

The site over at Electronic Cigarette Reviews has recently reviewed Smart Smoker USA. Smart Smoker did excellent, and has been rated the best electronic cigarette company that they have seen.

Head over to the site to take a look.

Electronic Cigarette Reviews

Electronic Cigarette is quite a new product to hit the market. The tiny devices are powered by a small battery, and are the size of a real cigarette. The e-cigs take cartridges about the size of a finger nail which contain nicotine and last about the same length of time as a pack of 15-20 cigarettes.

So why buy one of these things? Well the base unit costs about $50, not as cheap as a cigarette. The cartridges though, they cost around 70c, and are the equivalent of about 15-20 cigarettes. That’s a massive difference in price. The average smoker (20/day) saves around $2,000.00 per year using these things.

Not only is it easy on the wallet, but the electronic cigarette is harmless, and contains none of the nasty things that you’d normally find in a cigarette – there’s no tar, no carbon monoxide/dioxide and they don’t stink, give you bad breath, or make you go yellow.

The e-cigs look and feel real. When you take a pull on one the end lights up the same as a real cigarette would, and the device even smokes just like a real cigarette, the only difference is that the device’s smoke is actually water vapour, making it totally harmless and odour free.

Electronic Cigarette

A couple of nights ago I decided to do a little experiment. I was going to create a generic website with a few hundred pages of content, SEO the hell out of it, and see if I can earn anything from AdSense.

The website is All Phobias, and it lists every ‘known’ phobia out there. It’s written in PHP ontop of CodeIgniter. I created a small C app to scrape all of the data off a few different websites and generate some SQL for me. All in all the whole thing took about 4 hours to make. The design is some crappy free one I downloaded, as I’m not really interested in how it looks.

I’ve made sure every page has everything it should like unique titles, h1 tags and all the meta tags to go with it. I have also made a couple of blogs on external websites and made 5-10 posts on each, some linking to the site, and some not. I’ve submitted to some free submission sites, as well as linking from all of my major sites with a decent page rank.

I’ve submitted a hefty sitemap (I think there were 750 pages) to Google, but the domain is still in the incubation period, so I guess I’ll need to wait a couple of months to see any real progress.

Since the site went live 2 nights ago it’s earnt me a whopping £2. Which, to be honest, isn’t bad at all. If I can earn £1 a night from 2 nights work then I’ll be a happy man. Do the math on that, 15 sites per month, for 6 months, that would be ~£90 per day, or £2.7k a month. Not bad. My hope is that in 6-8 months time it will be top of Google for a lot of keywords ‘all phobias’, along with many of the actual phobia names and short descriptions (’fear of spiders’, for example), at which point the £1 a day would easily jump up to £5-10 per day, with a bit of luck.

I recently worked on and launched a website for a very large, and very well known global organisation. Within a couple of hours of the site being launched it was receiving thousands of unique visits every hour.

The website in question was quite busy, but the business it was involved in is quite light-hearted and probably not the most competitive in the world – not by a long shot.

This being said though, within a day of it’s launch the server was on it’s knees. After some quick tests and looking through the logs it was obvious there was a Denial of Service (DoS) attack going on. Not a very sophisticated attack, as I just added a few rules to the firewall to totally block it, but someone had still gone out of their way to attack the website from a handful of IPs from all around the globe. I traced the IPs and they came mostly from mainland Europe, each from various countries.

I find it quite amazing that someone has taken the time and effort to try and bring someone’s livelihood to it’s knees, for what appears to be no apparent reason. The website doesn’t have any real competitors so this attack seemed to be either totally random or an unprovoked malicious attack. Pointless either way. The site has since been running totally smoothly without a single hitch.

In the past I have used several different online ad platforms for a little bit of advertising here and there, but the two that I (along with the majority of e-marketers) prefer is Google AdWords. Recently I have begun using Google AdWords more heavily.

There is a lot of hype about Google AdWords and how it can work wonders for your website. I’m not entirely sure I could agree with that. Google definitely have the biggest audience for the ads, but that doesn’t mean it’s better value for money, or whether the audience is more targetted.

Facebook Ads is the Ad management tool for displaying ads on Facebook, and personally my favourite ad platform. Due to Facebooks nature the customisation of the Facebook ad’s is phenominal. I recently launched an advert for one of my Facebook applications (you can advertise anything*) that is designed for Baseball fans. I was able to tell Facebook that I only wanted to display the advert for users who are in the USA (where the Facebook app is hosted) and who are fans of Baseball and like some Baseball TV shows. This was a great help as it meant maximum exposure. Having said that, it doesn’t neccessarily mean I’ll save any money…

Pay per click is what it says… you pay every time someone clicks your ad. Google AdWords is pay per click. Facebook allows you to run campaigns on a pay per click or a pay per impression basis. This gives huge amounts of flexibility and allows you to save money depending ont he type of advert. If I was advertising a car insurance company then I’ll want to have it display to a large number of people, so I’d run pay per click, only paying if someone clicks through. But if I was advertising a car insurance promotion that only female students aged 21 or above, attending university in the UK, then I can easily drill down to only have the advert display to girls in 3rd year of uni or above who live in the UK – it’s then much cheaper to pay per impression, as less people will see it, but the one’s that do see it are more likely to click. Facebook also tells you how many users it has meeting this criteria.

Facebook is also MUCH cheaper than Google. I recently ran a campaign for the project Downtime Preventer. The average cost per click on Google was over £5. The average cost per click on Facebook was £0.05. You can see that this is a massive difference in price. However, the reason Google excels is the amount of traffic it receives. It took me a month to get through £15 on Google, for ‘downtime’ related keywords, hardly worth doing. On Facebook it was quite difficult to pick specifics for the campaign, so ended up going for ‘All users with their on company page’, hoping that would be small business owners.

Another plus Facebook has over Google are the ads themselves. Google is text-based only. Facebook allows more characters and one small image. The Facebook ads are subtle enough to not disturb the user but allow the advertiser to get their point across more easily.

Although my preference is definitely with Facebook, Google has it’s plus points. Facebook can only be used for so much before Google comes into it’s own. If you’re advertising a huge campaign then Facebook just won’t cut it, the audience just isn’t the same. The Downtime Preventer example is a good one, as it goes to show how difficult it can be to advertise something niche.

The bottom line is this: Google knows what people might be looking for and displays your advert, Facebook will display ads that people might like.
If you remember that golden rule then you’ll probably make the right choice.

Recently I began a project with two other guys. The idea was simple; get a group of people signed up to a web site that asks you a unique question every day. This question changes at midnight and you can view your friends answers and comment on them.

The project was finished about a week ago and it’s been met with excellent feedback. Everyone seems to love the idea and we’re seeing a steady increase in our userbase.

We aim to have 1,000 users by the new year, at which point we’re hoping for an explosion of new users as the word spreads.

Similar to my Facebook App Football Badges we have integrated into Facebook Connect. This seamless integration will allow users to sign up at the click of a button, providing they have a Facebook account. Logging in is a breeze too, just hit the log in button and we use your Facebook session to log you in. The idea is that every time a Facebook user answers a question the question and answer is posted to their Facebook wall.

Check the project out, it’s called QueryLife.

QueryLife