Skip to content

Results: Pad file and directory submission, did they do anything for me?

I’ve just been looking at analytics and webmaster tools, specifically at keywords. I’ve compared our 2 shops.

The jewellery site is about 6 months old and the maths site is over a year old.

About a year ago I created pad files and submitted the site using mikes directory submitter.

If I look in AllTheWeb for each site, as you’d expect I have lots link for the maths site and a handful for the jewellery site.

In analytics the traffic is almost identical, the graph never goes beyond 40 visits per day.

So the pad files and directory submissions have givwn me no extra traffic and PR is the same.

by JM

Tagged
2009 11 26 Dipsy Link Building
Search Engine Optimisation Comments (1) Permalink

How to get technology to work on the second attempt

I’ve just had a bit of a nightmare replacing an ink cartridge, gone through two yellow epson compatible cartridges.

Over the years, I’ve found with pay phones and slot machines and anything which accepts coins that if you breathe on the coin, most of the time the machine accepts it.

In desparation I tried it on the chip of the cartridge and hey presto it first said the cartridge was empty, then accepted it.

This was after I removed all the cartridges and switched the printer on and off.

by
JM

2009 11 25 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Will I just be giving code away?

I’ve got a set of MFC/ ActiveX controls I wrote 6 or 7 years ago that could be quite useful to me in the future. I’ve never released them in a product or used them to make any cash. The thing is, I’d like to possibly demo some capabilities/ possibilities to some companies next year and I’d like the controls to be ported to C#/ .Net. I’d like to do this simply because they’ll be easier to work with and .Net support for graphics is better than MFC’s. .Net components are also a lot easier to deploy in my experience too.

In total, there’s about 20,000 statements. Pretty complicated code too. I spent a couple of years on and off putting the code together originally and I don’t have the time – it could take a few weeks of effort – to do the port myself for a few months at least.

So, my question is, if I use something like RentaCoder am I simply giving away the code for a useful set of controls? Will I be able to trust anyone I hire?

2009 11 21 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (2) Permalink

A Pad Spec, which is rejecting some of my progs

Theres a new Pad file specifaction which is being adopted by download sites.

In particular, theres now a 70 character limit on URLs, with my mcls domain this causes me problems for my M program and ideaspad. Not sure about my new M program site.

So maybe its time to move to a new domain for ideaspad and ditch my M program…

Hmmm

2009 11 13 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

How to get a reply for a posted question?

In the last couple of days Blue and I have been posting some questions on various sites and forums. Initially we haven’t had a good response.

I haven’t posted many questions recently, but I remember what I’ve done in the past to get the goods.

The key is to ask simple / short questions, with a good title.

Then once you have someone interested in helping you, you can discuss more detail. As programmers I think we are always too keen to give detail and precision up front, but this scares people. I know when I’m faced with a big proeject specification I’m quite scared, its the same with questions.

This advice has been good for expert exchange, rentacoder and digital point forum.

by JM

2009 11 05 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

How to quickly budget each month with MS Money 2000+

For a long time I’ve moaned about how time consuming and depressing it is to budget each month. I’ve always used MS Money 2000, but I got so fed up with it I’d leave it for a few months and get into trouble financially.

What I used to do was, download all the transactions for the month from my bank and go through the process of saying yes, that the transaction I have listed in my bills and the amount has or hasn’t changed, used to take me an hour sometimes.

Heres how to get the process down to 10 minutes.

Initially you will have to setup all your bills in MS Money, I’ve even got birthday, Christmas, garage costs and anything I can think off. Now, set all of the bills to auto enter, so you don’t have to confirm each transaction. Don’t include stuff which is variable like shopping.

We’ve also got a shopping bank account.

Now at the start of the month when most of your bills come out of your bank account, get a mini statement or log onto to your bank account online and get a balance.

Look at the balance in MS Money and minus that from your actual balance and add a “Balancing” miscellaneous transaction to MS Money. You should now have a matching balance.

Got to the forecast and see how much money you’ll have till the start of next month (or when most of your bills come out) and minus this from your current balance or the balance you’d like to have next month.

Then transfer this amount to your shopping bank account.

Hey presto, you’ve done your budget without having to enter lots of transactions.

by JM

2009 11 04 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink

Where to go next?

I’ve had my shareware site for nearly 18 months now and I’ve got 28,000 software titles listed. I’ve been at about this level for 6 months or so. I get 50 to 150 new submissions a day but I’ve become increasingly vicious in weeding out stuff that even looks like spam. Every so often I go through the listings and throw out stuff that never gets a download or looks spammy or is the type of title I’ve decided just doesn’t belong.

I’m making decent income from Adsense these days but I want to move the site forwards and I don’t really fancy sifting through submissions each day for the next 10 years. I’ve though about charging for listings or only accepting new listings if there’s a backlink or only accepting affiliate submissions. Have you got any experience or stories about moving a shareware site in this direction? In particular, have you heard anything good or bad about AvanGate compared to other affiliate scheme providers?

2009 11 03 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (3) Permalink

When will I officially release my K program?

Well I say officially, I’ll just update my pad file, maybe run the submission software and maybe a blog post, maybe add a news page… Ooo I could email people.

However, every few days I’m make a small tweak and uploading a new version.

I think I’m close to tracking down all my current bugs 🙂

However, I am a little worried about the masks in my full masks screen, maybe they’re a bit scary ?

I’m also worring about clowns in general, some people are scared of clowns, if this is the case I’m going to have a big job to do replacing them all, clowns seem to the most common mask I’m showing on the web and in the program and especially in the full masks screen.

Thinking about RAC’ing someone to do some masks for me.

Thing, if I do track down all of my current bugs, I’ll not get any bug reports and I’ll begin to worry about that 🙂

Comments ?

by JM

2009 11 03 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (3) Permalink

Hosting problems – one thing I can do without

As I’ve just released V2 of one of my products I’m in an ultra paranoid state – will people like the changes, has the product lost some key appeal that convinced people to purchase, is there a crash that simply makes people toss the installation away as rubbish? From some of the recent posts on this site, I guess I’m not alone in being nervous about new releases.

Well, of late, I’ve noticed that the average download size of my programs is down to about 1/3 the program size. Normally the average download size is about 4/5 the program size. I’ve also noticed that the number of downloads is way up. Sales are still OK although overseas sales are down. I’ve had suspicions about the reliability of my hosting for a little while but had been convincing myself people simply weren’t bothered about waiting for a download to complete. However, today an existing customer who was trying to upgrade got in touch and said that he was having trouble downloading. He’d tried to download the update a couple of times but it kept failing part way through.

I think this confirms my suspicions that in the last month or so, my hosting has been unreliable as opposed to people not waiting for a download to complete. Once or twice in the past 3 months I’ve been unable to access my site. When this happens I’ve even been unable to access the hosting provider’s site even though some people still download during my downtime – meaning that my site can still be accessed via some routes. This might explain why I can always download OK whereas other people might not be able to. I’m considering switching hosts even though this will likely take some doing with a day or so spent uploading everything and making sure it all works. Any new host must be based in the UK, be very fast (as fast as possible), very reliable and have virtually 100% uptime. And able to put up with about 1000+ 30Mb file downloads a month, support ASP.Net 2.0 and support MySQL databases. I did take a look at Blue’s site but the monthly download sizes don’t look high enough and I’m wary of overburdening servers.

Any recommendations?

2009 11 02 MikeL Tech Talk Comments (4) Permalink

Silly errors which creep in when your in a hurry

Well its the 1st of November, yikes were getting very closes to Christmas now, erm “RABBITS”.

Don’t you just hate it where you think of a really great idea, which takes a second to add to your software and will add a huge benefit to your program. And you think, ahh that won’t cause any problems, I’ll just compile and upload.

Yep you’ve guessed it I added something and it screwed up my K program.

I wasn’t getting any uninstall questionnaires or problem reports, so I always think Ooooo, people are keeping my program installed and haven’t found any errors. I’ve thought that a few weeks ago after my quiet release.

Well, I guess I can pretty much always bank on their being a problem.

I suppose I should be happy that I found the problem, but their have been a few days of no service, so to speak.

by JM

2009 11 01 Dipsy Tech Talk Comments (0) Permalink