November 1, 2010 – 8:40 pm
When I started the plantality.com project I knew I wanted it to pay a reasonable monthly income after five years. Back in August I realised I hadn’t specified exactly what a ‘reasonable income’ meant. So, after a brief think I figured £1,000 per month would be a good starting place to declare the project a [...]
August 7, 2010 – 10:10 am
If you google for most plants the first entry you get is usually to Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedia is a great site packed with information, but as far as plant entries go it’s also full of botanical jargon and glaringly short of practical information about how to actually grow a plant. Other search results will return [...]
July 2010 Stats are as follows: Visitors: 196 Pages: 1670 Total earnings: 10p (about 17c) Pagerank: 0 Alexa rank: 7,219,006 So, still very quiet, but that’s hardly surprising considering how little has changed. There is one big area for development, though: Phase II is now available, or rather Phase II beta 0.9, which is to [...]
(The following article is based on UK practice). In this day and age it’s important to cover your back legally in any business ventures, especially one based on the internet. Here are a the things you will need to think about if you are running a UK based socail networking website. Firstly you will need [...]
If you read my last post you’ll know that I’m moving from google ads to banner ads for affiliate programs run by online retailers. But most retailers only target a single country. Showing ads for an American store to visitors from the UK would simply be a waste of ad space. So I needed some [...]
Last week I wrote a blog posting on the site about a common shrub called Spiraea Snowmound. It’s typical of posts I write on there describing a particular plant variety. The plant name is placed in the pages URL, the title, the text and even the photograph file title and alt text. An search of [...]
With the site released I thought now would be a good time it give a breakdown of the costs of getting to this stage. To convert any costs to US$ multiply by about 1.5. Laptop: £666.13 First up I needed a new notebook. I know I should really do development on my desktop machine, but [...]
I’m pleased to report that I got the first click on a google ad today. ‘ve now recouped about 0.017% of my expenses. Wahey!!!! I’ll admit I was getting a little worried that I’d never get a click, so this has really pleased me. I just really wish that google would give some kind of [...]
It’s mid May. The site isn’t quite ready for release but, as far as I’m concerned, I can’t wait any longer and it’s time to start on some promotion. The first step will be familiar to many mISVs – Using Al Harberg at dpdirectory.com to send a press release. Al normally sends releases to the [...]
I’m continually amazed about how fast it is developing in Rails. When I created plantality I knew I needed some static pages for things such as privacy policy and help pages. As a temporary measure I created a controller called ‘static’ and added each page as a separate view. This worked but it meant that [...]