Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Website traffic, the learning curve

I’ve built plenty of websites over the years.  Some – from scratch, others – mere customizations and adaptation of someone else’s work.  But when it came to web promotion, I’ve usually handed it over to someone else.  Don’t get me wrong – I have a pretty good idea about how these things work, but I didn’t keep up and I haven’t practiced in a long while.

Currently, I am involved in the project, where the web promotion bit is my responsibility.  Until the project grows and earns enough to hire a professional.  So I’m using it as a platform to refresh my knowledge, catch up with current trends, tools, and techniques, and to try out a few ideas of mine own.  It is an interesting experience.

One thing I like is that the website is brand new on a very young domain with no previous history.  The A/B testings and statistics cuts are very clean.  There is an opportunity to measure the effects of this or that campaign with a lot of precision and no interference from any other traffic sources.

A lot has changed since I did it the last time.  One thing that amazes me is how dirt cheap the web traffic is these days.  I mean that when I first went in to buy some, I had a price in my head.  I paid less and I got more than I expected.  Then I studied it for a few days and got a way better price.  Then I tried something else and got an even better price.  I’m sure I’m not at the end of the tunnel yet either.

Of course, this is a random, not targeted, pretty much not convertable traffic.  But it does have its pros this early in the game, and given the price – it’s well worth it.  Even with that I’ve got more conversions than I hoped for.

Let me mention it once again – I am pretty much a newbie in the practical terms of this.  If you have any advice or any resources that you think might help me out – please share and let me know.  Once I get a better hand of it, I’ll share my thoughts and experiences too.  Right now though it’s too embarrassing to do so.

Open Source or not?

Slashdot has an interesting discussion on whether or not a small start-up company has to Open Source their code or not. From one of the comments I followed a link to an excellent blog post by Tom Preston-Werner, one of the co-founders of GitHub.

Lastly, it’s the right thing to do. It’s almost impossible to do anything these days without directly or indirectly executing huge amounts of open source code. If you use the internet, you’re using open source. That code represents millions of man-hours of time that has been spent and then given away so that everyone may benefit. We all enjoy the benefits of open source software, and I believe we are all morally obligated to give back to that community. If software is an ocean, then open source is the rising tide that raises all ships.

In a nutshell he basically says that you should Open Source everything, except things that are at the core of your business value. His arguments are insightful and I suggest you read the whole thing.

Interestingly, this reminds me of a few discussions I had on outsourcing. And I was saying is that a company should outsource as much as possible, except for things which are at their core business value. As in, IT company should outsource accounting and legal, not IT, while accounting companies should outsource IT and legal, not accounting. And so forth.

That leads me to think that Open Source community is a huge outsourcing resource. Something that I’ve known for a long time, but now arrived to through a totally different route.

Coffee shop code of conduct

I found this image in Web Workers Daily post and I think it’s brilliant. More and more people are spending their time in coffee shops using laptops and other devices. Too many of them have no idea that they are surrounded by people. Hopefully, at least some of them will see this infographic and, perhaps, think for a moment.

Good news from CheapVPS.co.uk

Through the years of hosting this blog as well as many other websites, I’ve received plenty of bad news from hosting companies. “We’ve been hacked”, “we lost your data”, “the company is shutting down”, “we are increasing the hosting fees for your plan”, and so on and so forth. In fact, now that I see an email from my hosting company I automatically assume that it’s bad news.

Gladly, my current hosting company – CheapVPS.co.uk – is better than most that I had experiences with, and it’s working hard to change my perspective. Their efforts seem to be paying off. Here is an email from them I found in my mailbox this morning.

Dear Customer,

We have some good news regarding your OpenVZ VPS!

Over the next 4 weeks we’ll be migrating all of our OpenVZ customers over to brand new, much higher specification servers.

There will be no changes to your account or your billing and the only downtime we anticipate should be for around 10 minutes while IP routes are updated to point to the new servers. Your IP address will not change.

Whilst every effort is taken on our part to keep things backed up, we recommend that you ensure you have adequate backups in place, prior to this planned migration.

We will be starting with hardware node vz1uk on Tuesday 29th November and working our way through to vz43uk. You will be able to check the node you are on, from your SolusVM control panel, we will also email you the night before we move your VPS over.

So to sum up:

  • No changes to billing
  • No changes to your account or IP address
  • Upgraded server hardware for no charge

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to submit a support ticket at :
https://secure.cheapvps.co.uk/

Kind Regards

CheapVPS

Thank you guys, you are awesome!

How to build Android application and keep your sanity

Today is is a big day and I am celebrating. I am celebrating together with my teammates the release of the ImpreStyle Color application for Android, version 1.0.0, demo. It took all four of us to working hard over a much longer period of time than anyone would be willing to admit, but we pulled through.

While there are many aspects, details, and lessons that we’ve learned during this period, I’d like to focus on the ones that are mostly related to the actual Android application development and publishing. I share this for the next time I decide jump into something like that, as well as for anyone else who considers such a possibility.

And before you run away scared, let me tell you this. It is possible. And the fact that we’ve accomplished it proves it once again. As 500,000+ other Android applications currently available on the Android Market.

Continue reading How to build Android application and keep your sanity