I’ll start by walking you through a rather simple (and frankly, pointless) application and then show some of the options in more detail.

So, fire up Delphi and create a new application, using the option to create a FireMonkey application. On the tool palette select any of the components under Standard and plonk it on the form. I chose a check box, but it doesn’t really matter.

All that should be pretty familiar, but here’s where things start to diverge. In FireMonkey any control can have children. That has some interesting implications, but for now go back to the tool palette select the TFloatAnimation (under the Animations page). Drop it on the page by clicking on top of the checkbox you just added.

The first thing you’ll probably notice (or not notice) is that it doesn’t show up in the form designer, but you should see it added as a child of the check box in the structure pane. If not just drag and drop it within the structure pane to where it should be.

Now, making sure you’re editing the FloatAnimation in the Object Inspector, edit the following properties:

Duration: 4

Enabled: True

Loop: True

PropertyName: Position.X

StopValue: 400

Hit F9 to compile and run, and you’ll have a check box repeatedly sliding across the window.

And yes, animation really is that easy. It’s pointless, of course, to animate check boxes, but FireMonkey includes a wide array of shapes in both 2D and 3D which can be used to create swish designs.

The TFloatAnimation animates a simple numerical value. Having used Delphi for years I wanted to say integer value there but values in FireMonkey are actually doubles, as they need to be for the complex scaling and animation that is going on there.

Look in the Animations page of the palette and you’ll see other animations for such things as simple colours, colour gradients and  rectangles and the intriguing TPathAnimation, which I’ve yet to investigate but appears to be able to do some complex scripting.

Lets take a more detailed look at the TFloatAnimation and what it can do (and other animations have a pretty similar set of properties).

PropertyName is the name of the property to animate and below is what shows as available for my check box control:

It seems to do a good job of finding every available usable property.

Interestingly, PropertyName is actually a string property. So, you can easily set it at run time. I did a test, and if it’s not a valid property name, FireMonkey just ignores it, rather than raising an exception.

Interpolation lets you choose the algorithm for the animation. The default is linear, the full list of options is below:

In the example above we checked the Enabled property to initiate the animation. In code you can also use the Start and Stop methods to start and stop the animation. Or you can investigate the Trigger and TriggerInverse properties.

These start and stop the animation depending on the value of a property. Sadly the choice of properties appears to be pre-defined, though I imaging there must be some way to modify this with custom controls, or by subclassing the Animation control. Here are the available values:

Interestingly, you can specify more than one option, eg. ‘IsFocused=true;IsOpen=true’.

However, I did notice some odd behaviour in my testing. Setting on Focused=true as a trigger for the example above, if I tabbed into the control all worked fine, but selecting it caused the animation to skip to the end and stop (even if Repeat was set). I’m sure this will be fixed in an update.

The TriggerInverse value sets a trigger to run the animation backwards. However, you may prefer to create two animation objects with opposing triggering options to use a non-linear animation. Putting that in simple terms, if you use a ‘bounce’ interpolation (which causes the value to bounce around the start value), using TriggerInverse would cause it to bounce backwards, but using a second animation it would (could) bounce around the final value before getting back to the start value.

As to the other significant properties, Delay and Duration set a pause before starting the animation, and the time (in seconds) the animation takes.

AutoReverse and Loop should be fairly obvious. I noticed in testing that if I set AutoReverse to true the animation would start at the finish point. But further investigation appears to show that that was just an effect of the animation starting before the controls had been fully drawn on screen.

StartValue and StopValue are again obvious. Inverse runs the animation backwards.

One final property is AnimationType. Going back to our example with the itBounce interpolation, atIn  caused the value to bounce around the start value eventually stopping at the stop value. atOut smoothly moves from the start value and bounces around the stop value. atInOut does both of the above: bouncing around both the start and top values.

We looked at ebay and did some experiments with a few items, since this is the easiest way to get a store set up, and soon sorted out some good ways to pack and ship plants and hopefully gained a few ideas about what the market wanted.

I did some more research in google and, whilst there are a number of merchants selling bedding plants, sometimes at very low prices, they concentrate on a small number of popular varieties. If you’re happy with mixed colours of geraniums, impatiens and petunias they do a good job of filling the market, but don’t fulfill the market for customers who wants to choose their own colours, or less common varieties.

The other setback with these companies is that you place your order and receive delivery at some unspecified time in the future. They don’t offer same week or same day dispatch. And you can’t plan your garden over winter and have the plants delivered the week you want them in spring (or whatever other season).

So, the plan is to be experts with a wide range of stock and to allow same week dispatch or dispatch on a specified delivery week.

Well, I did find one supplier who offers what we plan to offer, and fortunately they’re not offering cut throat pricing. So, they’ve proved there’s a market to be tapped and it’s also a market which isn’t being flogged to death with cheap prices. Good.

So, in recent months I’ve spent my spare hours at work creating an online plant ordering system in Rails. You may ask why I didn’t use an off the shelf shopping cart system. Well, obviously creating one in Rails is far more fun than a pre-packaged system, but I also felt that a custom solution would allow us much more flexibility. For example, with allowing the customer to select a delivery week.

A custom solution also allows me great flexibility in playing with the database, collecting information about both pre and post sales data, running A/B tests and arranging and rearranging products in any way I like to see which produces the most sales.

I’ve been reading a number of books about online marketing lately and have a head full of ideas for experiments to run, which I intend to be writing about on this blog in due course.

Fun times should be ahead. The site is now online. If you want to take a look, visit beddingandbasket.co.uk

So, after a brief think I figured £1,000 per month would be a good starting place to declare the project a success.

Revenue for August was 42 pence. I opened up Excel and calculated that to get to £1,000 in five years time, that income would have to grow by about 14% per month.

SO, how have I done since then? Well, ad revenue for October was £10.42. Growth of over 20 times in two months. Growth my prediction showed would have taken two years to achieved.

I’m assuming growth will not be sustained at such a level, but it’s pleasing to see such good progress, and puts me on target for earning £1,000 monthly in mid 2003, if growth continues at 14% per month.

And marks another important milestone. Currently my only expense on the project is web hosting at $12 per month, or about £7. So, the project is officially in profit.

So, when I started Rails development I looked for a suitable IDE. Googling seemed to show that Embarcaderos 3rdRail was the most fully featured environment available, so I bought a licence and settled into development.

3rdRail has it’s issues, it’s slow, it crashes and the auto-completion is painfully annoying. Sometime later I heard about RubyMine from JetBrains. It promised a lot and with Embarcadero seemingly dropping development of 3rdRail I decided to take a serious look when plantality started earning reasonable money.

Fast forward to today. My copy of 3rdRail refused to run, claiming that it’s licence had expired. What? I bought the software outright, surely this was a bug. So I went to Embarcaderos website, dug around and found a copy of the licence to paste back into the software. Still no go. I wrote to their support asking what was happening.

In hte meantime I had work to do, so I downloaded the RubyMine trial figuring I could evaluate it and get some work done while I waited for Embarcadero to sort things out. I haven;t spend long enough wth it go give it a thorough work out, other than to say that it is much, much more responsive and appears to be written by people who care.

And it’s instructive to compare Embarcaderos operation with JetBrains. Emarcaderos website is slow, sometimes painfully so, JetBrains is wonderfully fast. Embarcardero has just a couple of short pages about each product, JetBrains lets me delve into sub-page after sub-page. Embarcadero requires a key just to run the trial, with JetBrains I just download and install. And finally the support.

Embarcadero provides a forum which is frustratingly slow, is almost dead and the closest thing to an official answer is the possible chance of a reponse from a TeamB member – a keen user who helps out in their spare time. JetBrains forum is the exact opposite. It is fast, full of content and the company answer queries themselves, if a knowledgeable user hasn’t got there first. I’ve tried searching for results to a few queries I’ve had and found the answer each time on the first page of search results, if not the first result.

With 3rdRail I always felt that, when I had a problem, I was on my own to sort it out, with RubyMine I feel comfortable that I can easily get a solution to the issue.

Well done JetBrains and I point to you as an effective model for how to run a software company.

Visitors: 374

Pages: 2864

Revenue: £0.42 (about $0.60)

I’ve made an adjustment to the pages figure from this month forward: since traffic  is low and I’m doing a lot of site access writing entries for the plant database, the stats where being badly skewed, so I have removed my own accesses from the figures.

Last month I was firmly in the ‘one month doldrums’. That’s the term for a startup which hopes to do well and end up being disappointed with early results. But these figures show at least 200% growth on the previous month, which shows that my aim to go for long tail search results is paying off.

Also, before release I reckoned that it would take five years before I was earning reasonable money from the project, but without a precisely defined figure for what constituted ‘reasonable money’.  I’ve now pinned that figure down at £1000 monthly revenue.

With the help of Excel I worked out what that really meant. Starting with Augusts revenue of 42p, that means I need a shade over 14% month on month growth. Whilst I doubt this months 200% growth will continue it does give me hope that the target figure will be achievable.

Add to that that I am writing this on the 8th September and already revenue is twice that for the whole of August and things look decidedly good.

Other search results will return information from plant databases. All created by ‘experts’, although in my opinion the real gardening experts are those that actually grow the plants: gardeners.

Whilst these expert sites have good plant information very few of them give gardeners the chance to give feedback on the plants. There’s one site which lets the users post comments. Good. That’s one step towards Web 2.0 and something that is already available on the plantality plant database and will be expanded even further later.

But what the world really needs is a plant wiki aimed at gardeners. Now, there’s another gardeners network which has a plant wiki. They even claim to have 70,000 entries. That sounds fairly conclusive. Except that, if you look at what is actually there, all the entries (or at least, all those I’ve looked at) are empty.

All they appear to have done is found a definitive list of garden plants, and created an empty record for each one.

So, plantality will aim to build a best of breed plant wiki.

But, my wiki will be more than that. Most plant databases are very difficult to search. You can search by name, if you know what you want before you’ve searched for it. But, what about finding a plant for a particular season, or soil type, or habit.

For the plantality wiki plants will be divided into over 200 categories. You will be able to search on one or more of these categories. So you could, for instance, find a shrub with blue flowers for a sunny site, or a perennial with yellow flowers which attracts bees. Or any one of thousands of other combinations.

The database is still fairly empty, but you can take a look at the plant finder now.

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 add a plant database. With the full roll out of Phase II this will be converted to a plant wiki.

One of the major aims of the database/wiki is to draw in long tail google search links,  something which is already happening and can only increase as I add more entries to the wiki.

One more stat to add:

Wiki entries: 81

I started by trying to use the official Twitter Facebook app, but whilst it was easy to get it to post updates to my personal feed, there was no way to get it to post to a ‘fan’ page.

The solution I found was as to add the twitter RSS feed to the Notes app within the Facebook page, as follows:

• Go to the fan page.
• On the left, just under the picture, click Edit page.
• Go down to Notes and click Edit.
• From the box middle-right click Import a blog.
• Follow through the process and enter your Twitter pages URL feed address when asked.

To find your twitter URL feed address go to your Twitter page (in my case http://twitter.com/plantality – not the default page you see when logged in). At the bottom of the right hand column you will see an RSS logo and RSS feed of <users> tweets link. Right click the link and select Copy link address (to clipboard). You can then paste the link into Facebook.

I’m slightly disappointed with the way Facebook displays the feed content (it shows the tweet as both title and text) but as far as I can tell it’s the best, if not only way to do this.

I’ve also seen complaints from others that if you do the above you can’t also add a feed from your own blog to your Facebook page – Facebook Notes will only allow one RSS feed, but someone suggested using Yahoo pipes to get around this, but I haven’t tested it personally.

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 a Terms of Use document for anyone interracting with your site. A terms of use document tells your users what they may and may not do on your site. It will say who can and can’t use your site (bear in mind there are extra legal ramifications for websites for children), what they can contribute (you probably want to ban illegal material and pornography) and what they can claim from you if they feel they have suffered a loss through your site.

If you search google for ‘website contract templates’ you will find many legal services selling template contracts for you to complete and upload. I bought mine from SEQ Legal. The contract supplied included many clauses which I could include, remove or edit depending on my particular circumstances, as well as advice on why I may want to include or exclude clauses. You can see my final contract at http://plantality.com/static/tos.

Next up you will need a privacy policy. This documents what data your site will be collecting, how you will be using that data and who you will be giving that data to. Again I used a template from SEQ Legal and you can view the finished document at http://plantality.com/static/privacy_policy.

If you’re in the UK like me, you will also need to register with the Information Commissioners Office. This is a government body charged with ensuring those who collect personal information comply with the Data Protection Act. The legislation is quite complex and whether you need to register or not will depend on exactly what information you are collecting. For instance you don’t need to register if you are just using information for payroll purposes or for marketing.

Registration consists of declaring under what categories you will be collecting data, about whom that data will be collected and how you will be using that data. Fortunately the ICO has a selection of templates for typical businesses. When you sign up you can select your business type and simply modify as you see fit. I registered as a ‘social networking website’ and the template they sent me was almost 100% what I needed. You can either register online at the ICO website or fax them a request for a template to be posted to you.

I couldn’t get the online submission process to work, so faxed them my request (they provide a form to print out and fill in), edited it for my needs and sent it back along with a cheque for the annual fee of £35. Note that your documents will include a registration number and password. Do not lose these as you will need them if you ever need to modify them. You should also put your registration number in your privacy policy.

Total earnings: £0.17 (about 25c)

The good news is that traffic has more than doubled from last month. The bad is that nobody signed up.

There where two blips in traffic, the first on the 1st June due to my press release via prweb of about 80 visits, the second from an unidentified source on the 20th which brought in 100 visitors .

My search terms listing for the months shows a lot of traffic coming in for one particular blog post, which reinforces my intention to pursue a long-tail marketing strategy for ‘version 2′.