Mike Griffiths

So, another AdSense site is up and running. British Kings and Queens was built in PHP using CodeIgniter. There are a lot of pages, mostly generated from the database.

I wrote all of the content myself, which took around 4-5 hours. I’m hoping this unique content will pay off, but I’m currently not seeing much traffic.

Check the site out, I actually learnt quite a lot about British History and past Kings and Queens of Britiain whilst writing it.

British Kings and Queens

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.

Well, it’s a new year and as everyone else are starting their fitness regimes, I’m thinking about what projects need finishing off, beginning and pushing.

2009 was a good year for me and some great accomplishments were made. I graduated with my Software Engineering Degree, I got ‘best project’ of 2009, I started my job as lead developer over at Reckless New Media and I have begun several important projects of my own.

Towards the beginning of 2009 I began work on the Football Badges app, which now has (at time of writing) well over 35,000 active users, with over 15,000 signing up each month. With the success of this project I decided to branch out with some similar projects including University Badges and more recently Baseball Badges. As expected Uni Badges has not been as popular with only 1,000 active users, Baseball Badges however is growing very fast, and it’s rate of growth reflects that of Football Badges.

Another finished project taken on this year was Downtime Preventer, a system built to notify web site owners of downtime via email and SMS within minutes (if not seconds) of the downtime occurring.

A joint project that is completed that was launched earlier this year is QueryLife. QueryLife is a social network that asks thought-provoking questions to users every day. Users can add their friends and view/comment on friends answers. Answers are not simple text-based answers, but can instead be stories told by text, imagery and video. The project has been created in a partnership between myself and the guys over at Creative Happy.

Other projects that are VERY close to deployment are ‘Officing’ and ‘Dont U Forget’, both web applications built for specific purposes and unlike anything out there at the moment.

So, my plan for the first quarter of the new year is:

• Promote Downtime Preventer
• Complete Officing and deploy live
• Complete Dont U Forget and deploy
• Market QueryLife

Once I’m happy that this list has been satisfied I will not doubt begin a new project, maybe something to do with Andoird…

Similar to Football Badges I have just released Baseball Badges. The ideal is exactly the same, you add the application to your Facebook profile and it will display your favourite teams badge. Most major league teams are listed but more can be added on request.

Baseball Badges

Ubuntu is an operating system that runs on most computers. It is a completely free alternative to Microsoft’s Windows and Apples MacOSX. Ubuntu comes with all of the software you need to get up and running; from a fully functioning word processor (capable of editing and creating Microsoft Office files) to a web server and media player.

Ubuntu comes pre-packaged with most of this software and it is all free. There are no licenses or trial periods to worry about and absolutely no additional costs. There’s plenty of software available, all available online or via Ubuntu’s built-in package manager that allows you to search for and download free software and the click of a button.

Ubuntu, being a Linux variant, is extremely stable and secure. You don’t have to worry about anti-virus, trojans, worms or any other nasties whilst using your computer.

The Ubuntu Store is now online offering the cheapest copies of Ubuntu around.

Buy Ubuntu

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

Well the title of this entry pretty much sums it up. My football badges app now has over 7000 users and 200 ‘fans’. It’s quite an achievement for what was essentially an experiment. The app itself logs over 200 hits per day.

Excuse any typos in this post as it is being made from my phone, in bed whilst suffering from a stint of insomnia!

I recently had the pleasure of having a tinker with the Google Android SDK. At first I was extremely impressed at how well the whole thing had been put together. There is a whole array of developer tools, from the very realistic and thorough emulator to the activity logger and the Eclipse plug-in.

I quickly turned from an impressed Mike to a very frutrated Mike. It seems Google’s example code on the ‘Hello Views’ section of the SDK web site is completely flawed. It simply will not compile. Of course, I didn’t expect the code to be wrong, so I didn’t even attempt to hunt round for a solution, I instead blamed Eclipse for being unreliable and thought it had picked on me and decided not to allow me to compile any applications, for no particular reason.

One I got around that issue I found the framework to be reliable and very developer-friendly. I have had some experiences with the iPhone SDK which I do not rate. Apple’s version is bloated and I found it to be quite sluggish. Apple being Apple it wouldn’t be complete without a huge price tag too, charging developers a licence fee for the SDK and then a further fee for publishing the application and then a royalty fee for every instance of the actual app that gets downloaded. Just out of principle I decided to not develop my application on the iPhone. Not to mention the fact that you must use Apple’s own language to develop in.

Enough of an Apple rant anyway. You can built your Android apps in the universal language of Java, which makes everyones life much easier with the tons of IDEs, forums and code snippets out there to use, not to mention a massive user base. There’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing a sharp rise in the amount of apps available for Android in the near future as more and more devices come on the market and more people become frustrated with the iPhone and it’s price tag.

I’ll be creating a few applications over the coming weeks and will post my findings.

Ever heard of Geocities? Most web savvy people have. Well it’s parent company, Yahoo have decided to pull the plug on Geocities and tomorrow (26th October) Geocities will be gone forever and all web sites currently hosted on there will be deleted.

In the late 90’s and early 00’s Geocities was the first (and only for some) port-of-call for anyone looking to set up a web site in the cheapest and easiest way. It’s What You See is What You Get (WYSiWYG) designer tools was at the forefront of it’s technology at the time and made making web sites easy.

Yahoo itself will be deleting all of the content hosted on Geocities so, if like me, you created your first web presence on there then I suggest you try and remember your log in details and go grab the files. A few companies have been downloading copies of all files from Geocities for some time now, including Archive Team.

Onwards and upwards.