FiddyP

Am I asleep dreaming I am awake?

Neo.. wake up

I’ve been working bloody hard for the past 13 weeks on something that still isn’t even close to being finished. It’s invaded my brain so much that even whilst on holiday, every time I closed my eyes I would wake up in a sweat thinking about it.

Seriously, almost every time I fall asleep I dream about it. Even my ever faithful friend – the afternoon nap has been compromised!

The Value of Giving

That’s it, that’s the mistress my missus has become increasingly jealous over. Mrs. VoG has been driving me crazy or filling me with joy over the past few months as I try and get her to play nice with amember and pap4 (two other saucy code maidens that I’m bending to my will(y))

Click the image to see if it’s ready, if it’s not just enter your details in the form and you’ll be notified when it is. Be prepared!, this has been a mammoth task to put together and will be a brand new way to do things.. oops, I nearly let the cat out of the bag.. you’ll just have to wait and see, I’m still under a non-disclosure agreement until it’s launch time.

Tens of thousands of lines

Nope, I’m not talking about a night out with Keith Moon from The Rolling Stones! .. I’m talking about the reason this will be so good , why it’s gonna blow everyone away and also why I’m going slightly doo-lally every time I close my eyes. It’s because I’ve written over 10,000 lines of code in custom plugins, modifications and additions to existing plugins.

I’ve needed to do this because even though we’ve spent thousands of dollars on commercial scripts and 3rd party engines, they just weren’t designed to do what we wanted to do. Close, but not quite and the ‘not quite’ bit has required hours and hours and hours of discussions over skype, conference calls, sketches and ultimately hundreds and hundreds of hours at my keyboard.

BIG PROJECTS SUCK ARE COOL

Haha! it’s been a duplicitous wench of a project so far, I’ve never sworn so much at inanimate objects. I’ve torn my hair out, freaked up/down/sideways and out until , as one of the partners, Mark says, “I’ve spent all my freak”

But, it’s also been hugely fun and satisfying to venture into unknown realms of WordPress, affiliate systems, membership packages, payment gateways and PayPal IPN scripts.

I’ve learned new things about WordPress that I never knew existed, things have gone in my head that can be used forever more on a metric tonne of future ‘what if?’ projects that I’m just gagging to get started on (yes, I really am a sucker for punishment!).

This is most definitely the biggest coding project I’ve ever worked on and as much as it is painful, it’s also fun. I’m really hoping that we can get to the open the doors stage soon because, if I don’t start seeing some action and if I can’t stop saying ,”not yet” when my missus asks if it’s ready then I might just get chucked out onto the street and honestly folks, without her, no tappy tappy code monkey.

Stick with me boyshz and galshz

Stick around, keep checking in and coming back to find out more because this is one huge momma of a site and well, it’ll rock the online business / hobby / charity / social and WordPress world. If you’ve ever had a business or a website or both, you’ll see the Value of Giving on day 1.

It always amazes me how much time and effort that people will put in to SEO tricks and tactics, how they swear that they know Google will ‘see’ this or ‘know’ that based on some rumour of a overheard bit of gossip written by a black hat SEO guru. Lol, what is a SEO guru anyway?

It’s an emperors new clothes designer that’s what! If someone tells you that they know what the Google algorithm wants then they are feeding you a line of BS because no one knows and if they did, Google would change it so it would be old news very quickly.

Is all SEO hopeless or even real?

Of course not! there are things that you can do that are known as ‘best practices’ or more commonly known as, ‘common sense’ and you can find out about them from Google itself from their webmaster pages and blog.

A good friend of mine who has successfully got his clients to the number one position on Google for their chosen terms recently wrote an interesting article on SEO and is it real?. He spends his life on and around Google search and even he says that you can try too hard.

The human factor

I recently had emails go to and fro with a colleague and she was quoting another SEO guy who said to bold this term and only do it once and how that is how the Google algorithm ‘knows’ what the article is about.

That makes me lol! Google algorithm ‘knows’ nothing! it can’t ‘see’ anything either, it can only trawl text and html source. It doesn’t look at images, it only stores what they’re name is and whether or not it has a caption and what that caption is.

Here’s a little experiment I want to try to prove that last paragraph..

Take a look at this server load graph showing how much the server was working (on ComLuv.com) for 24 hours..

Seems normal right? that’s right! because my UKFast host detected a spike of 70,000 or so hits coming in to the comluv signup page from an Amazon cloud server and within 30 seconds added their IP to my firewall so it can appear normal again but, look at the next pic after the ad break to see what a difference the banning made..

(continue reading…)

The past month and the next month coming is, was and will be bloody hectic!

I have some major changes happening and I’m going to bookend it with a new hair style, gym membership and new hours of operation. I have to do something! I can’t keep going on like this, I need to knuckle down and focus on one thing and get it done and the only way I can do that is passing off some of the stuff that keeps me tied to the laptop every morning.

Staff!

We’ve had a member of staff down all month and she’ll be away until the UK skies get clearance from the volcano ash from Iceland so that’s been pretty awesome for making me cry day after day chopping onions It’s been ok though, I got to work side by side with my missus and I saw more sunlight than normal which has had a strange effect on making me want to get into better shape.

oodles of doodles

I’ve been going through the cartoonists workbook and it suggests lots of things that I’ve been trying. My notebook is always on hand and I’ve been scribbling like made to get myself up to a keyhole ken level of comic making.

It’s been going well, my doodles now only resemble that of a teenager! here’s my first effort

Comic blog!

Come and visit my comic blog and leave a comment, it’s got commentluv. woot!

I’ve been reading xkcd and Explosm for ages and I’ve always dreamed of having a comic blog. Well, more specifically, being able to draw well enough to have a comic blog!

Now, I’m not gonna let a little thing like not being able to do something to stop from doing something. I mean, how hard can it be?

Any stick will do

I have seen some literally LaughOutLoud good comics that are nothing more than a few straight lines on my stumbleupon sessions and I can’t help but think that it should be a breeze to do the same. oo-er, famous last words eh?

Check out this strip, it’s simply drawn and it made larf for ages. I sent it to 3 people!

I tried to make one in this style and it was hard! I did manage to make a simple comic once before on this blog, I used an online stickman comic maker which made things easier..

I wonder if it’ll be easier this time?

Comicpress wooot!

Enter in Comicpress which is a fantastic bit of WordPress shennanigans that enables anyone to create and update a comic based blog without worrying about ftp and specific filenames.

It’s currently powering a huge number of comic blogs and has helped a lot of regular folks create gorgeous comics like Starship Moonhawk or Dakota McFadzeans’ Blog and I want in!

It wont be able to help your drawing skills or your humour bone tuning but it will leave you to only worry about the drawing, all the rest will be handled by the system. It can handle graphic novels, simple strip comics, multi columns, custom colours, fancy pagination and a whole lot more!

It’s mildly overwhelming how many options there are to choose from so I think my best approach will be to start with a simple default layout and get creating and publishing. As I get used to the system, I’ll know what I need to change or update.

Learn me and you some learns

I’m all set up to start doing some more screencasts on my super fast PC and the weather is getting nice enough for me to be able to stay at the main pc without my fingers becoming frozen so I think it’s time to make some tutorial videos!

What better way to generate blog fodder than to start a tutorial series! and.. what better platform to do it on than ComLuv? (and it means I can use it as a legitimate ‘work’ activity)

ComicLuv

I have done some testing and I am fairly confident that it will work just as well on the live server. So, over the next few days I will be installing it to the ComLuv site as a supporter only feature. Anyone with a fiver a month can have a comic blog too!

I will be creating the comic blog and using the blogging side of it for tutorials and tales of my progress as I figure out what I use to draw the comics and other important stuff like how to draw or what is funny?

Freebies!

I’d really like to hear from you if you’ve ever considered making a comic blog, It’d be awesome to be able to have someone to compare notes with and share the journey.

What do you think? fancy making a comic on the ComLuv site? In exchange for taking the plunge with me and being someone who can chat with me about comic making, I’ll give you a full supporter account with access to all the themes and comicpress addons and a bunch of credits to get things like extra URLs on your comluv account.

It goes without saying that your new comic blog will get plenty of promotion and be mentioned along with mine in as many places as I can fit it

What an interesting week. Not content with crashing hard drives and losing data, I went through a round of Ubuntu weirdness that meant I had to change the monitor to one with a larger default resolution.

Fixed that and just got used to the mammoth monitor that now looms over the counter and Ubuntu decided it wouldn’t play nice with vmware any more. I need that vwmare to run the ancient Win98 system that handles the delivery orders.

All I can say is welcome back XP. Spent bloody ages installing an old OEM version that was lying about and even longer taking it through SP1, SP2 and SP3 updates. At last though, it all plays nice with my virtual image and USB serial adapter (for caller ID). I had to take off the webserver though which I use to serve the new order pages. I need that to work, we have new drivers who need maps!!

Home Pc plays it too

Windows 7. RC1. Finished.

New Windows 7 Ulitmate installed and functioning with a VMware image of Ubuntu which is now serving the pages to all the PC’s on the shop and home network…. just in time for my Sky router to start playing up. Now a direct cable connection spazzes it out and the wireless keeps dropping off . bwahhhh!

Work..WORK

I had lots of fun things planned for ComLuv and other pet projects these past two weeks but it’s all been put aside so I can fix these real life, gotta work or we dont get paid, things. I think I am on top of most of it (except the sky router) but I’m so knackered from doing all the fire fighting that all I wanna do now is watch some movies and pretend I don’t have a PC (for a little while).

What a load of bollox! This seems to be the week I experience maximum crashage.

Hard times/drive

First, my shop pc had a hard drive crash. A massive one. The drive wouldn’t even spin! I tried the usual methods found on a Google like putting it in a plastic bag and putting it the freezer which is supposed to fix a jammed disc.

nope.

Then I tried what this page tried. Basically, swapping the logic board from an identical drive to the faulty one. That actually got the drive spinning and recognized in windows but unfortunately, it was completely trashed. Every sector screwed and no matter what software apps I threw at it, it wouldn’t play. (so I took it apart to see how it works)

Lost code

All my backups of my server where on that disc. All.of.them!

In a great wave of relief, I found that 99% of it had been updated to the live server only the day before. The 1% that didn’t just so happened to be my awesome edit of the pay-to-blog plugin which I was about to put on ComLuv. dammit, that was some good coding I added to the plugin.

It would have allowed me to set a free time limit on new blogs of say 30 days and when that runs out, the next time the blog owner tried to log on, they would be presented with a page where they can pay a piddly 5 USD to have the blog enabled for a year. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t pay then they could request a free blog and that would notify me by email and list the request on my admin page.

I’ll have to rewrite the code and I bet I can’t remember how I did it!

New install, new problems

I managed to grab another hard drive and put it in the box to replace the poop one. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 and vwmare and got all the shop POS software working with the ancient equipment we have. Sweet! until… only 24 hours of nice working, it went pooooop. Something to do with i810 video drivers missing. Cue 5 hours pissing about with sudo apt-get and other linux bollox until at last, it is working again.

And then Vmware decided to stop working with the serial port via USB. Pleh!

More sudo apt-get and 2 hours later, I found an old vwmare image for the win98 system and copied over the contents of the .vmx file and ta-da! it worked again.

No more please!

No more. thanks. done it now.

New Wheels

Even these got delayed by 3 days. Next day delivery bleeeeuuurrgh!

A customer came in to the takeaway we run and mentioned that he got to our website (Fired Wok Chinese Takeaway) only after he added the word ‘takeaway’ to his search term.

Confusing because, I was quite pleased with how the SERPS are for Firedwok and ‘chinese takeaway lancaster‘ which results (at time of writing) to this..

Straight on the map and number 1 on results (with added tags)

It turns out that he was searching for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ which made the site past page 5 on the results!

Bring on the featured links!

A few days or weeks ago, ComLuv got put up to PR6 on the homepage from Google. How nice! I mentioned this in the email newsletter and within a few hours, two links were sold on the sidebar for 30 days each. One with a subscription! woot!, might this be the first month Comluv pays for itself? lol

I thought I’d take advantage of this PR increase and put a text link for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ on with the paid ones and left it a while. In the meantime, I put some more posts on the blog portion of the takeaway website and put in some ‘oriental food’ references on the homepage.

Got me some SERPs

And now, a search for ‘oriental food delivery lancaster’ results in a number 1 position (and number 2)

1 portion of SERPS please

Very happy with my text link purchase, and because I own the site it means it was free! haha

I guess I can take it down now, it’s done it’s job and it can make some space for another paid ad.

It’s not just me

A paid customer bought a link for UK payday loans back when that search term had them after page 10 (I tested it when they first bought the link) and now that term results in them being on page 1 of google.

They even asked why I had no subscription option for the ads! I switched it on and straight away, I had 50$ per month subscriptions coming in. Very nice!

Get YOU some links

If I can sell a few more links on subscription, I’ll have enough to upgrade the server to more memory and a faster processor. It’s typical that the first time the site has made enough money to pay for it’s own server and bandwidth, it reaches capacity again and needs upgrading! lol. what a fun ride!

You can buy featured homepage links and network wide footer links on the ComLuv page here

This picture taken yesterday by NASA

Click the image to download a high-res version.

I used to love winter, I used to love it even more if it snowed. Snowy roads, especially in the UK, means massive disruption to public services and roads. It used to mean no school, later it meant no need to trudge to work. Now, as a business owner with a large percentage of business relying on deliveries, it means glum faces all around!

Ice skating anyone?

It’s not too bad, we still get the usual suspects who battle through any kind of weather to get the chips, fried rice and curry sauce in a box. Somehow, the grocery deliveries happened and only the carrotts were missing! They’ll battle through the narrow streets to us again just deliver a bag of carrotts. Try that in London..

Tomorrows forcast is for bright skies, I hope it clears the snow off the roads long enough to get some sweet & sour chicken out to the masses! The weather doesn’t look too good for the South of the country though, there’s a 18 inch snowfall predicted down there. oo-er!

How has the weather been affecting your area? do you love the snow or hate it?