Mike Griffiths

A while ago I wrote how I was setting up a cycle routes website with my Dad. Well, it’s been up for a while now, and has one of the largest collection of cycle routes of any website in the UK.

Because of the website’s uniqueness, it has been spotted by a lot of the nation’s councils. We now feature on nearly every of the UK’s council’s websites, and generate a lot of interest in cycling from all ages.

We are often receiving requests for new routes in people’s areas, and we’re thinking of streamlining the site a little so that cycle enthusiasts and upload their own cycle routes, as was the original intention.

Check out the cycle routes website, have a look around, and get out on your bike.

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.

Well, as you probably know, I like making things to do with football. Notably Football Badges and Football Feeds, both of which are doing extremely well.

My new venture is something a little bit more large-scale. The football badges application gets around 250,000 new unique visits (at time of writing) per month, my goal is to syphon some of these over to the new project, the football forum. At time of writing the number one slot on Google for ‘Football Forum’ only has 25,000 members. This may seem a lot, but when you consider it’s only a tenth of my average monthly traffic on the football badges application, you’ll see that it’s entirely possible that it could be beaten.

Within 3 weeks of launching the forums already have approaching 200 active users. This may not seem like a lot, but consider that this sort of website is viral, and the rate of growth will only increase over time.

If you’re interested in football and want to speak to some like-minded individuals, then head over.

Football Forum

It’s been a while since I last posted, I’ve been ridiculously busy of late with a huge amount of projects coming underway, but there will be more news of that in the next few posts.

A project I started some time ago, which was started fairly randomly is the pub directory. It’s a website with (nearly) every pub in the UK listed. Although the search function isn’t great at the moment, there is the ability to search for a city and pub name – but everything does share the same search box, so searching something like ‘Winchester’ might bring up a few unwanted results.

Other than that the site is doing well. The pubs are all categorised by region, so it’s quite easy to find pubs around you. There are also several nice features, including the ability to add a review to the pub. The pub reviews don’t require any sign-ups, and are protected from spam by a reCaptcha form, which works excellently.

Have a look and see if you can find your pub: Pub Directory

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

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…