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

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.

So I’ve owned Linux Portal for as long as I can remember, but not really done much with it. Originally I created it to aggregate some of my favourite Linux RSS feeds from the sites I read the most, but it became a bit of an effort to maintain for something that had very little rewards, because of that I just left it with some RSS feeds with links to the articles on the home page. Nothing new and nothing interesting.

I recently decided to update it though. A similar principle but putting the sturdiness of WordPress to good use. I now use some of those same feeds that I used originally to pull in the articles. I then publish those articles to the blog as posts, all on-the-fly, and totally automated. I update the blog about once a week and it will grab new posts from the feed and publish them.

There were some initial teething problems though. I had ‘Post-to-twitter’ plug-in along with the Google Sitemap generator plug-in both running at the same time. So, when I added a new feed it would pull in around 50 posts. That meant grabbing all 50 posts from the source, then posting 50 new messages to Twitter (in quick succession), and on each post it would generate a new sitemap.xml, update robots.txt and notify 5 search engines of the change. Quite a massive task for one webserver really. Inevitably, the server came to a standstill every time. I’ve since solved it by disabling the plug-ins but if the site takes off I might create a cron job that checks for updates and then notifies Twitter and the sitemap plug-in to run periodically.

If you’re interested check the site out, there are Linux Articles and Linux News.

Enjoy

Another milestone. Football Badges has now reach 50,000 active users. This is the largest Facebook application that I have created to date.

I will be releasing a new Facebook app in the next few days. It has some functionality and will hopefully keep users coming back to use the application, whereas Football Badges is a sort of one-off thing. Keep your eyes peels and the feed subscribed to!

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…

Yet another milestone, Football Badges now has (close enough) 30,000 users. There are around 15,000 new users signing up per month at the moment, so hopefully we’ll hit the 100,000 mark very soon. There are 300,000,000 people using Facebook at the moment, so I think 1 in every 3,000 people having my application on their profile isn’t such a bad thing, do you?

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!