The above graph uses my little program on randomdomainname.co.uk to show the number of skype users online over christmas day by hour of the day. The blue line is Christmas day and the red line is Christmas eve. The hour of the day is given in GMT and the whole program is built by sampling skype’s feed of users online, which they expose on their homepage, once an hour. I don’t vouch that it is 100% accurate of course but I think it’s a very interesting graph to see to give an indication of the % of people who have their computers on or are online on Christmas day at all. I certainly was one of the peak 6million or so people online on Christmas day even though I didn’t actually do any Skyping.
Preparing for my trip on work to our office in Madrid spain I was pretty pleased with myself. The picture to the left shows my entire kit for travel at 5am on the day I was leaving. This will cover me for working one week and two weeks of holiday for Christmas.
One roller bag, one camera bag and one laptop style bag with my laptop, power adaptors, 4 notepads and a folder with work and travel agenda’s in it.
Getting on top of knowing how to travel is something I guess no one ever gets completely nailed but this is the first trip where I have felt really pleased that I know what I am doing.
In 2006 I have flown 15times for work and I am pretty sure I will be doing that again if not more next year. It’s been a great experience for 2006 and I am pretty sure I will enjoy it more in 2007.
So I have banged on a little about how good revver is and the fact that they pay me for adding value to them as a user of their video service embedding their videos in my website. From experience of using many advertising networks over time nothing is actually worthwhile until you really get paid. Today I received my first payment from Revver:
Revver pay me through paypal and although the payment is only $30.38 of the $400 they owe for last month me at least they are paying me. This is a very good sign. I will of course update if they don’t pay me everything they owe me but I am pretty pleased with how it is going. Below are my current Revver standings.
As I always say… revver is awesome and I am pretty excited I have been paid.
Today I made a change to the cocktail making widget I have blogged about a couple of times. I added a link at the bottom saying “get this on your blog” and linking back to the widget generation page. We will see how that does in trying to convince people to add this widget to their blog. I am pretty excited about the potential though, one month in and a couple of large blogs have started using the widget (most notably get real denver) which means the widget is now at well over 10 000 views a day. I was thinking if I could convince just 2 of those viewers daily (0.02% of those who see the widget) to install the widget I could hit 1000 blogs in a year (with the blogs already signed up and not taking into account the exponential growth potential).
I am going to be really interested to see how this experiment grows and am already wondering what I can make my next experiment do!!!
Today I have been working on my butterfly tattoos website. There is a lot more to come on that website, I have ideas for Flickr integrations and more. At the moment I am getting c. 500 unique users a day passing through the site and I have made 0 changes since 2004. This site needs to be brought up to date. One way I am looking to do this is through enabling users to simply upload their own photographs (this will help me too since I have about 50 tattoos sitting ready to be uploaded). A key part of this is to do all the image handling on the server with pre-existing PHP functions. While working on this idea I found the following code source “create square image thumbnails with PHP“.
This code uses the simple but very powerful GD graphics utilities that come with PHP 4 and 5. I have used them a lot and I won’t reproduce his code here however I will show my use of the code. I create a function which I store in a seperate include and can be called any time. The function will return “none” if there has been no error or will return an error like “I don’t support images of the type image/bmp support png, jpg and gif try converting to that and uploading” if an image format I don’t support is sent.
The best bit of this code in my opinion is the ability to crop the image to a square while maintaining aspect ratio. This is managed by the imagecopyresampled() php function.
Today’s post is something that is very interesting to me. How you can acheive results by just shifting your focus. I have 3 main websites: cocktail making, paper airplanes and butterfly tattoos. A great set of comments on this can be found in the awesome book good to great in which particularly the discussion on Chrysler Acquiring Gulfstream is particularly enlightening. If you deviate from your core, if you look somewhere else than 100% at what is most important to you it will not succeed as well as when you have 100% focus on your most important project.
For me an example of this can be seen in the image below which is the % year on year growth rates for my website traffic and website revenue (I have removed actual amounts) and this graph is mid way through Nov. hence Nov 2006 not looking so great.
When I looked at this graph I was shocked (I first looked at it in March 2006) to see my revenue growth year on year had gone negative in Nov and Dec 2005 (actually first time in 10yrs of running my own websites). This corresponded with me planning and executing emigrating to the US in December 2006. After settling into the US things clearly recovered until March 2006. This was a huge month for me with my first major international summit, the first class I taught at our marketing college and my parents visiting the US.
I did a lot of things to produce this reacceleration (I launched a cocktail widget, I totally recoded my cocktail site, I added videos to my paper airplanes site and more) but the key point is the focus and this is what I want to say. When you can contribute significant focus to something it will go better than with partial focus. I am now thinking about that a lot as I work and play.
So today I was browsing around a few of the sites that are hosting my cocktail of the day widget and had a few awesome anecdotes but first I want to point to the traffic light cocktail on my website because wow is it a favourite. This is a long juicy cocktail with plenty of kick and extremely sweet. I would definitely suggest you give it a go.
So today I was browsing around the sites showing the widget and came across an article about how the quality of spelling on my cocktails was strongly correlated to the strength of the cocktail! I sadly can’t find the article (if anyone can point it out to me I will link to it). Either way from now on when you see the cocktails on my site or the widget around the web, look at the recipe and think about the hours of research that went into finding you that perfect recipe 😉
So I have been creating lots of new features for me to maintain my cocktail making website. One feature has involved me setting up a new mySQL 5.0 database (with cool stored procedures I am only starting to understand now) in order to do some tracking of what is happening on the site and with my widget. This has required me to use two databases at once for the first time. One to check if a user is signed in with admin rights and the other to check the tracking out of the other database (php security is really tricky so I am slightly nervous posting even this here :s ).
However I did want to note how you close a connection with a mysql database using PHP in order to open one with another mysql database since it’s really simple but I found it hard to get info. So when you open databases try closing them, I know I will in future for good practice, it makes everything much simpler if you add another database at a later stage.
So I have had a random idea for a little project that could be fun. We all know about Google Trends, eBay Pulse, the Overture Search Suggestion tool. Now I think all of these are truly amazing tools. Something we don’t neccessarily know about is the supply side of this equation. All of a sudden that is really interesting me. It would be relatively simple to set up a CRON job that runs once daily and pulls the abundance through the various API’s available. It could also be really fun to see how trends shift over time (perhaps looping in Technorati and a couple of other sources). It could even be a fun tool for an eBay seller to help me monetize it a little bit… hmm I think I may build this at the weekend and if I do I will post the resulting graphs on this blog as well as on a little site I recently purchased with 1 and 1. YAY!
It has been quite an amazing experience delving into the world of widgets. One which is costing me money in bandwidth charges and my own time and (as yet) I see no real way to make money out of. Money is usually a key driver for me to expand my new ventures. Yet I still want to proceed further with creating the widget and getting people to use it. Behind the scenes I have created a little dashboard to allow me to manage most of the functionality around the cocktail making site and to the right is a screen dump of the widget dashboard midway through Sunday Nov 12th in the US (although all days and times are UK).
At the bottom of the page you can see a section entitled “Top Domains Calling this Widget”. I now tend to take a look daily at the blogs hosting my widget since (a) I want to make sure it’s working right for everyone (b) I am excited that people would want to feature my stuff. For this blog post I wanted to feature a couple of the fun blogs.
The first one I want to feature is by a nice lady called Amy Ferguson who has named her blog “Chef Amy Ferguson’s Travel Blog”. She is evidently a chef from Texas who is heading back for a holiday in Paris (where she studied 31yrs ago) and telling us all about it. I love the passion in the blog and hope she keeps it up, I will be reading.
The next one I am posting since it’s a fun one for me as a bloke. The blog is called “H’s Doghouse” which is a fun name and best of all the strap line to the blog says “H’s Doghouse provides the blogger with the most important information in the universe. And if you don’t think so……too damn bad”. There’s a cool post at the moment about his favourite beers although bluntly he has never tasted Old Peculiar from the theakston’s brewery or abbott ale from green king if he thinks that :). Have a read and I am sure you will enjoy the random musings. Also note my widget in prime position (top left hand corner), I was pretty chuffed when I saw the widget there and I’ll probably be pointing people at this blog just to see it 🙂
Well that’s enough for now but I suspect I will be reading enough random blogs thanks to the widget that I will be posting a fair few on here.
