New idea

I've been off the webz for a bit while we moved house, but I'm back now. Louis, if you're listening, I have a new Twitter app brewing and I'll send you a prototype as soon as I can.

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Server schmerver

Had a tough few days recovering from a server crash. Most stuff is back, including email and the PopIt automated story poster thingy.

On the plus side, it prompted me to move FriendFeedMachine to Google App Engine. That wasn't too difficult, as most of the smarts are in the JavaScript for the site.

Next project will either be another Aussie focused site or a Mac OS X app, I'm not sure which just yet. We are also moving house in a week, so I'll be shifting boxes and packing for a while and dev time will be limited.

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One more project done

I have completed my latest project, sports.popit.com.au. it's a Social News site targeted at Aussie sports. I also have plans to do Aussie gossip, news, and financial sites based upon the same code, but want to move on to something else for the moment while I see how that site goes for a few months.

The next project I'm doing is in the social network space. I'm starting with a prototype using the Mac OS X Xcode environment. I could do the project in Java/Swing, but I feel like learning Objective-C and Quartz, plus I like the look better than Java. More updates in the next few weeks.

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For Jasmine

This is a totally unrelated post, especially for my beautiful daughter jasmine, just in case she ends up reading my blog way off into the future (she's only 3 atm).

Jassy, I love you so much. You make me laugh, you make me cry; you bring my world to life with your giggles, kisses and questions. I am so glad that you are my daughter, and I can't imagine how wonderful it will be watching you grow up. I love you with all my heart.

And to my wife Marla, just in case you're reading this too, know that without you I am nothing, you are truly my soul mate and I'll love you always <3

I'm the luckiest guy on the planet.

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Almost finished

Most of the functionality for my social news site has been finished ... at least those features targeted for launch. there's still a bit I want to do, but I want to get it out the door and rolling before I go too mad adding stuff. It's a pretty slick site, and it's really only taken me a few hours over two weekends plus a few more hours over three nights in between. I think that by next weekend it should all be sorted and live.

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2 New Projects

I have decided to put my micro-blogging project on hold and focus on a couple of new things. The main reason is that Twitter is starting to be (slightly) more reliable, plus there is now an open source alternative (identi.ca). I will still make something of the app I have written, but I think I may leverage it in an enterprise software offering (more on that when I get around to it).

My 2 new projects? One is based around a kind of 'meta friend" concept, and the other is a customizable social news app that I will use to launch a bunch of Australian focused sites. The basic app for this is about 50% complete after a couple of evenings work, so the first site should be ready to launch next week.

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Back at RealJob

Watched Pirates of the Caribbean 3 last night after reading blogs and sorting my app to-do list. Tonight I worked on a proposal. I am going to try and push through the barrier and get it completed tonight, but I might have to catch some sleep and finish it tomorrow night.

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Clean out

Back into RealJob today, after 2 full days of working on the app and 2 days working/family time. All up I've probably done about 30-35 hours the past 4 days, and have really got it close to "launch ready". I've pulled the site down from the web, as I filled it with junk that took a few hours to clear up, so the datastore is nice and pristine and ready to go. I just want to complete a few more features that I hadn't intended for launch, just to add that extra bit of incentive for new users. I'll likely make a call after next weekend whether or not to launch.

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Very tired

Two full days of coding and the app is really looking good. Still some tidy up to do with field validation and maintaining views across page submits, but it's really getting there. It should be ready for testing in a few days; I will need to clean up the datastore and put some sort of invite only thing in.

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More progress

Completed a few more items off the todo list last night, including likes and loves.

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To do list

Last night I made a big to do list, and tonight I completed a few items. Lots more to do, including some significant functionality, but at least I have a known target for launch now.

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Twitter integration

Made some great progress today but then hit a brick wall. I got some Twitter integration working, where the user enters their twitter username/password, then a random key is sent to their stream (can't send a DM to themselves which would've been preferred). This key is then entered in to the details page of the app tp verify that the users has access to the Twitter account they say they do. This was to be the first step towards integrating with Twitter, and it worked on my dev box. However once it went live on App Engine, I found out that Twitter rejects all update requests that have the Referer header set. Unfortunately, App Engine sets this header and you can't modify it for security reasons, so this functionality will have to be parked for now until Twitter makes a change (fingers crossed).

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Movie night

Gonna watch at least 1 movie tonight. I'll either do some work after that or else watch another one then bed.

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Spinny thing

Added a wait spinner when retrieving replies, updated left side bar to show Google ads, and worked on a few graphics.

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AoC

Played AoC tonight .. not bad. Will get stuck in to likes tomorrow night.

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Not much tonight

No coding tonight, just read blogs and sent the odd email (related to my project). Will lprobably watch a movie now. I have been fixing some minor issues around the refactoring and caching stuff I did earlier. Next big step is to add likes, faves (watched items), and notification channels. I might do one or the other on Wednesday. Not likely to get much done tomorrow night as I need to catch up on some rest.

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Caching

Add a whole bunch of caching (using memcache) and also did some refactoring of the code last night. All up about 3 hours work. Will probably chill with some sports on telly tonight.

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Downtime

Need to relax tonight, either with XBox or Movies.

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Stats

Added some stat tracking for URLs today. Fairly cool, will list the top 20 stats. Should also be easy to search a URL and see how many times it was mentioned. Didn't do much more, but should get stuck into notifications on the weekend.

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Research

Updated to Flock 2.0b, but now the app only shows a blank page :( I think it's probably something to do with the DTD tag but will investigate tomorrow night. Spent a few hours researching video, SMS and XMPP for the app and 2/3 look good. Have also had an idea to add a message type: notifications. Users will be able to add 'channels' that people can subscribe to and then send notifications to the channel subscribers. This works around the problem of link spam as it's more of a permission-based model.

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Automated testing

I ran some auto tests last night and then some more today. Got an exception after 10k messages last night, and after 5k during the day. Most likely just a blip in the Google service more than a bug. After loading up with messages, the search for tags and text is still fast, so it's looking good. I would still like to do some sort of concurrent users testing, but I'm not sure how viable that will prove to be.

I am concerned about that limits that Google places on App Engine, especially with regards to processing cycles and database storage (only 500 Mb). It is possible to buy more, so thats not the issue, it's the cost and working out a model so that I don't have to pay :) At medium usage, the database shouldn't fill up too fast, but if it goes viral I'm not sure about the costs, and if the increase in usage/ad dollars will cover it. Only 1 way to find out I guess ...

Tonight has mostly been research and trying to setup App Engine to point to my top level domain.

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Stealth availability

Worked for around 3 hours last night. I put the site up live for a tester to have a look at, and also to see how it would work running on the proper AppEngine stack. I'm going to try and load the live site up with messages tonight and see if it still performs.

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More progress

Made some more progress after the Rugby ... about 2 hours tonight plus 2 hours during Jas' nap time. The UI is taking longer than expected, I suspect mostly because I'm not a UI specialist. Of course, I did spend a while searching through iStockPhoto for some icons :)

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More sport

Nothing done last night. Watched the NBA finals game 4 then played some Team Fortress 2 on the XBox. Was lots of fun :)

Am working now while daughter is napping, so I'm hoping to get a fair whack done. There's some Rugby Union on tonight, and I'm afraid I may be tempted to play TF2 again when it's over so I'm not holding out any great hopes for tonight. Still on track to possibly get an alpha version up this weekend.

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3 whole hours

I managed 3 hours of dev tonight. Progress on the UI is about 40% complete. I have some nice CSS panels happening now. I still have a fair way to go; next up is formatting the message input and lists.

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Sport

State of Origin Rugby League and NBA finals game 3 on telly tonight so no progress made :)

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The UI adventure begins

Finished off the reply threading tonight ... took about 30 mins. I'm going to mock up some UI ideas now. The plan is to work on the UI for the rest of the week and then maybe set the app loose in the wild for some friends to try out.

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Replies

Sorted replies today, over the course of 3 hours. I've not only coded a way to link all items, but have made an AJAX method so that replies can be viewed inline and expanded. Kewl!!

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Relaxing

Relaxing tonight after my daughter's 3rd birthday party. Too brain dead to work, so going to chill out.

Overall, the nuts and bolts of the app are there. I'll work on the UI next, then maybe add some Twitter integration if I feel it's needed. It may be a week before I get going again, as I tend to mull over UI designs in my head before I finally settle on a direction.

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Reply threading

Only spent 30 mins tonight reading blogs and writing some reply threading code. It's my daughters birthday tomorrow so I need to do a few chores, then I'm going to XBox360 it for a little while then head to bed.

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No progress

Caught up on my blog reading and now about to XBox360 it up until the League is on telly at midnight. I have put some thought around the new direction for my micro-blogging app, and I think I'll try and focus on conversations. As I said before, most of the building blocks I need are in place, so I'll mainly need to concentrate on the UI.

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Status

Watched a movie last night and am going to probably play XBox360 tonight. I think I'll rethink my complete Twitter clone strategy and perhaps tackle the micro-blogging idea a little different. I'll keep all the building blocks I've already created, but I will use a different UI. I'll also probably scrap twitter integration other than perhaps double posting and import of twitter friends. I'm definitely going to include XMPP though, most likely as a premium add.

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More productive

Did about 1 1/2 hours tonight. Tired but satisfied. I now have friends and followers working well ... just need to add a delete function to remove friends, and a block to block followers. It took a little while to work out the best way to use BigTable, but I got there. Of course there's no guarantee how well it will all work when friend lists get into the thousands (or even hundreds for that matter), but then that's part of the experiment really.

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A little coding

Only about 30mins invested tonight in actual coding. Just coded a view function for viewing a users profile, though this is still unfinished as I want it to get the user to view from the URL rather than a get param.

I also did a bit of research in to XMPP and REST. I'm not sure I want a full RESTful service, but I think getting XMPP to work will be a good challenge and also something that will be a killer feature if it scales. I believe that AppEngine will soon be making memcache available so I'll hope to make good use of that to offset an expected deluge of XMPP requests.

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Resting

No progress last night (watched sport and a movie) or tonight (watched sport and caught up with blogs).

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Another night off

To tired to code after a stressful week ... maybe some more movies or Xbox360 tonight.

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Night off

RealJob stress levels were getting a bit high so I've taken tonight off and watched a few movies instead. Back to it tomorrow night and the weekend.

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Friends

Halfway through the friends piece of the puzzle. This is proving a little more difficult as I try and get my head around the whole BigTable concept. Parts of me continually want to try and make relations, but it's just not the way to go. I also have to have a think on how to get around the lack of OR and NOT clauses in GQL. All in all though, I think I should get the friends bit there by the weekend. I only spent about 1 1/2 hours tonight ... it's getting harder and harder to get started each night as the week wears on, mainly due to fatigue from RealJob.

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Short night

Started late tonight so have only got in about 1 hours work. Have managed to implement DM's though (they don't go to twitter yet).

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Done for tonight

Just short of 2 hours dev ... in that time I have implemented text search on message bodies, listing of posts by user, and replies (a little more work still required). I've also added code to link a message with the equivalent tweet id so when I consolidate lists I won't get double entries.

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Work plan

I've decided that I'll spend 2 hours a night after RealJob working on my new project. So, by the weekend I should have invested 15 hours total and will hopefully have something close to a finished product.

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Last thing tonight

Completed the final thing I wanted to do tonight; simultaneous posting to Twitter. Very easy once I worked out how to encode the credentials using base64 (remember I'm a Python newb).

One thing I will need to do once I have all the functionality finished is polish the UI. It's just raw atm, and also has no error handling or validation. I think that maybe by the end of the week, I might have a twitter killer done :)

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Searching

Have now implemented searching on tags ... cool. Only about 5 hours spent all up so far. I think the challenge will be threading of messages, but mainly because there is no OR clause for GQL, so it will be either tough or tedious to come up with a list that combines normal messages with threaded comments.

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AppEngine rocks

Wow. After about 3 hours total of coding today, I've managed to get an app going (locally), do the whole user thing (using Google user sign on), and accept messages (and show the most recent 10 on the front page). Oh, and I don't know Python; what I've learnt has been by just reading the Google AppEngine docs.

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My new app

It's been ages since I've blogged here. I've been mainly working on my FriendFeed app FriendFeedMachine. I think at this stage however, FriendFeed hasn't reached enough people to make further work on the app worthwhile.

I've decided to write a micro-blogging service using Google AppEngine. I'll blog progress here, just to see if I have dramas or if it really is as easy as I think it will be.

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Tired

Made some minor progress over the last few days but it's likely that I'll finish up my new project over the weekend and launch probably next Wednesday. This will also give me time to add a little bit of polish to make sure it has a bit more "wow".

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Will I be done Wednesday?

Thats the big question. I made a lot of progress tonight, but not until after I had a little nap. RealJob is taking it's toll; stress levels are creeping up. Hopefully I can keep my focus and get my FriendFeed app over the finish line by Wednesday then chill out for the rest of the week (once I get home from RealJob).

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Almost finished

I've been madly working on a new web site that uses the FriendFeed API. It's been an interesting week. The goal was to try and do the whole thing in a single page using JavaScript and I've been maybe 80% successful. There are a few things that I need interaction for, and so I've had to give myself a crash course in PHP, a language I've always avoided (I mainly use Java). I've actually found it quite easy to pick up, and it seems very quick to develop with. I think that it may become a bit unwieldy when used for a large site, but I will only have a few pages so I should be good.

The other benefit of using PHP is that I can sign up for a much cheaper hosting service and see how that goes. at the moment I have a dedicated server running, so I might try and migrate off that if I can. I think I'll try and learn Ruby on Rails as well and see if I can migrate my apps to that. Java is good, but it does take a long time to get anything done using the full Struts2/Spring/Hibernate stack.

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Sellable?

I've made contact with Fuser to see if they're interested in buying the fblocalmail code. Fuser is kinda cool, but it's an in-browser Java applet and tbh I found it a little slow and awkward. They did point out that fblocalmail was pretty similar to what they do, so we'll see how it goes.

What I should've done first, and what I'll do next if I don't hear back from Fuser soon, is see if FriendFeed was interested. They don't have any Facebook integration, and I'm sure it would be attractive to show new Facebook messages in my feed, and possibly show my messages received in my feed to others (hmm .. not sure about that last one.

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Other news

In other news, I think I'll abandon fblocalmail. I'm going to get mylocaltakeaway up and running fully, with costs for owners and affiliate payments, then use Google and Facebook ads to get some interest. As I'll obviously be targeting Australia only, the effectiveness of the ads should prove to be quite good.

After that, I'm going to develop a few iPhone/iPod touch apps. The SDK has been recently released, and apps go "on sale" in June. I'm also going to learn Ruby-on-Rails, to hopefully decrease the time it takes to implement my ideas.

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Facebook messaging

Facebook is to launch a new instant messaging service (TechCrunch story here). I'm wondering also if they are about to launch some sort of email integration for their messages too. My fblocalmail ads that were running on Facebook have suddenly stopped, and new ones I try to get running have been rejected, even though they don't break the terms as far as I can see. The official rejection reason is below:

This ad includes references to Facebook. As per sections 2 and 8 of Facebook's Advertising Guidelines, ads are not permitted to use Facebook logos, trademarks, site terminology, or refer to Facebook in the title, body, image, or destination URL.

and here's the ad text:

Manage Your Messages
Use your email client to send, receive, filter and organize messages, online and offline.

Now what is especially strange is that I have an identical ad running on Facebook that hasn't been rejected. Also, no matter how high I raise the click bid for that ad, it never gets any impressions. Of course it may be possible that my ads are being rejected because someone at Facebook checked out the fblocalmail website and didn't like the fact that it allows Facebook messages to be managed externally, but it may also be that they buried fblocalmail because they are planning some similar functionality themselves.

I just find it strange that my ads ran for a few days before suddenly not getting any impressions.

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Facebook ads

I've decided to advertise with Facebook too. I'm trying $5 a day and see how I go. So far, I've got a few clicks, but unfortunately I haven't worked out (if it's even possible) how to get my ads to appear only on the Inbox/Messages page.

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Upped ante

Google ads are providing lots of impressions, but not too many clicks. However, there's a reason behind this. My "targeted keywords" don't get hit too often, but the Gogle network (basically AdSense I think) provides over 300k impressions in a few days. So, the keywords are the most likely to provide clicks, and these aren't massively high for impressions (about 1k all up). All in all I'm fairly satisfied that AdWords are value for money, so I've decided to expand them but uppin the spend to $60 per month and added Australia, the UK, Ireland and Canada to my targeted countries. The other good thing is that the $60 is a monthly maximum, so it's not like I'll end up owing a ton of money if there's a rush of clicks :)

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Bitten bullet

Well, I bit the bullet and bought some Google Adwords for fblocalmail. Thirty Aussie Dollars per month I've set up, so we'll see what happens.

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The waiting game

Well, I've sent out some emails to various bloggers .. now to see if my fblocalmail app takes off. I'd be happy with very modest numbers, even around the 1k mark would be cool. Of course I'm hoping for more :)

I'm not sure what I'm going to work on next. I may turn my friendsbychance website into a full-on free dating site, or I may finish off MLTA (that's been on hold for ages).

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Ignored

I haven't heard anything from TechCrunch for almost 2 weeks ... I guess I won't. Time to start pimping my app out to other bloggers. I think I'll spread the net wide, and hope I catch at least one or two fish.

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Update

Well, I rewrote the algorithm piece so that it should be very easy for RegNow to sort it. Here's hoping. Unfortunately, they seem to be based in the UK so it's effectively a 24hr turnaround time.

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Muppets

I'm not very impressed with regNow. They keep telling me that there are errors in a java file I sent them, and I keep telling them that they need to put the jar file I also sent them on the classpath for the java to compile. This is pretty basic stuff, and leads me to suspect that they know nothing about Java. I may have to take my business elsewhere. This is especially frustrating because my fblocalmail app is all ready to go, but until I have it available for sale I can't really promote it :(

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RegNotNow

I've had a minor hiccup with RegNow not being able to setup my registration key algorithm. Even though I sent them all the files and conformed to their specifications, they still didn't work out that a jar needed to be on the classpath. *sigh*

As it stands, I managed to work out what the 'buy' link should be for my product, so I could update the homepage and hopefully it'll all work. I'm off to Hobart for 4 days tomorrow morning for my wife's birthday, and I don't really want to be fussing about RegNow when I'm away (I'll take the laptop anyway, I guess ...).

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Released!!

Well, I rushed it, but it's done. fblocalmail has been unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Well, I've sent it to 2 friends and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, plus uploaded it into RegNow for digital delivery. Now I play the waiting game ...

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How to sell ...

The software is ready (except for the about box), and I'll be writing the user docs today. So how do I get my app out there.

I've set up a website (www.fblocalmail.com) which will have information on the product and a link to a reseller. I've chosen RegNow for my first try. I'm thinking they'll take about $1-2 off the price. So I'll set a price of $US10 which will net me a tidy profit if all goes well.

Once all that's sorted, I'm going to send a free copy to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and hope he likes it. I have a feeling he will (fingers crossed).

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Almost there ...

Wow, I've had a productive weekend and achieved a major milestone in the development of my new app. I need to add one more piece of functionality, then optimise the code and package it. I've had a quick look at online software  sales sites, and estimate that my after tax earnings could be $US4:50 per unit. The market I'm aiming at, with no direct competitors, has approximately 59 million users (can you guess where I'm aiming?). If even 1% buy the app I'll be set..

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Progress

Well, just a quick post. I've worked way too late for it to be healthy, but I've managed to finish the part of my new project that extracts data (that's not meant to be extracted) and format it into XML. Next up is doing something with it.

Not sure how I'm going to survive on 5 hours a night sleep ... but I only have to do it for maybe a week and I should be done.

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Trundling along

Well, my business partner has puled out of our venture, MLTA, because he has other commitments. Fair enough, but now MLTA will sit idle because I don't have time for the leg work required to get local take-aways on board.

I've finished a DVD of our daughter full of almost 2 hrs of video and a bunch of photos in a slide show. Man, it took a long time. I guess I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to arty type things, like video and music, so I didn't just throw something together, but it still isn't as polished as I'd like because I just had to wrap it up and get it sent out to my wife's Dad in Canada.

I'm back at RealJob now, so project time is limited. I'm working on a piece of software that is too top secret to talk about here. Once it's done and distributed I'll post details.

Step one of promoting Friends by Chance has failed ... my friends either can't be bothered to sign up, or just don't have the time. Oh well.

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