Developing eWrite

The Corbally Suite of Oriel House Hotel has been booked on August 7th for the day for an informal brainstorming session for applications for Seedcamp.

Last week, Conor O’Neill created a poll to see if there was any interest in a meet up like this. There seems to be enough to warrant a group to get together and help each other out in filling in the application form.I have a PDF version of the online form so I’ll have print outs on the day.

If you’re interested in attending, wander in on the day, especially if you have any experience in apply for Seedcorn last year that could help someone else.

Tea or coffee is available in the lobby or the bar and free wifi available too. To find the Corbally suite, come in the main door, reception is to your left. To the left of the reception is a doorway leading down corridors to the old section of the building (in the picture above). The Corbally suite is one of the first couple of rooms and is labelled.

Hopefully I’ll see you there. Email me if theres anything I can help with.

Below is the layout of the invoices eWrite Cork use to bill customers for setting up eWrite Lite on existing websites. The costs include a set up fee for 150 Euro and an annual fee for 200 Euro for support and updates.

It doesn’t include VAT at the moment as eWrite Cork doesn’t earn the amount required.

I had the logo in colour but it was recommended that it should just be black and white for an invoice.

Any suggestions for its layout? Do you think I should add or remove anything?

Ironically, the broadband went down as I was writing this post so I have to post using Dial-up.

Almost every day I need to FTP files up to remote servers. For as long as I can remember, files and folders almost always fail to upload correctly. Whats worse is that it can sometimes LOOK like a folder has uploaded correctly but a couple of the files will have swapped titles (or content depending on how you want to look at it). This has gotten me into trouble a couple of times and led to needless reworking.

A few months back, my father and I wired CAT 5e cable around the house from the attic where the connection enteres the house to the office where I work. Before this I was using a wireless connection on my desktop PC. Using a wired connection improved things, but didn’t fully fix it.

My broad band is provided by Airwave Internet. They provide me with a 1 MB upload/download for €60 Euro per month compared to around €45 per month for a 3 MB line from Eircom while living in Cork.

I wasn’t going to mention the broadband providers name, but as a result of these tests I can see they’re not the problem at all despite their service going offline all afternoon today.

I ran the Blacknight speed test in a couple of different scenarios on my LAN between 5pm and 6pm today. (Just before the broadband went down, coincidence??)

From my desktop, using a CAT 5e wired 100 MBPs connection through a Linksys BEFSR41 V3.1 router:

Speed test results:

Advanced Statistics:

Connection Summary:

From my desktop, using a CAT 5e wired 100 MBPs connection through a Linksys WRT54G V4 wireless router (latest firmware)

Speed test results:

(Messed up the Statistics screenshot for this test)

Connection Summary:

From my Dell Vostro 1500 Laptop using 54MBPs G Wireless through a Linksys WRT54G V4 wireless router (latest firmware)

Speed Test Results

Advanced Statistics:

Connection Summary:

From my Dell Vostro 1500 Laptop, directly connected to the connection provided by Airwave Internet

Speed Test Results

Advanced Statistics:

Connection Summary:

So it seems my routers are at fault, both of em. Since I can’t bring my desktop machine up into the attic to work every day, I must go get a new router. I’ve thinking of getting the Netgear wireless router with multiple internal ariels for stonger signal strenth. Anyone out there use one with good results?

For some time now I’ve had the luxury of having many of the websites using eWrite CMS on the same servers. This has allowed me to develop the eWrite CMS in the model of software as a service (SAAS).

The eWrite content manager was located on our own website. Clients could visit our site, log in and view their own pages for editing. In the background eWrite would update the ‘remote’ database with the updated content.

With the newer eWrite Lite, I continued this approach as long as possible to allow for easier development and maintenance on my part.

For various security and connectivity issues I will be moving eWrite Lite away from this approach and following the approach used by Wordpress. eWrite Lite will be a set of files a user can upload to their site, run a setup wizard which will create a basic website and log the user into eWrite Lite to begin creating their first pages and managing their files.

It will mean a little more work for me deploying new files or updates for eWrite Lite to users websites, but Im looking forward to to the change in approach.

Until now, eWrite was quite limited in getting users to be on servers we could control. With this new approach I will be making it as easy as I can for a user to pay for eWrite Lite, download a copy and install on their site quickly and easily.

Wish me luck!

The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.

This week, the Tuesday push is Pix.ie by Marcus Mac Innes.

A few months ago I asked a few contacts on Twitter if they could recommend a good web app for storing photos, several recommended pix.ie.

When using pix.ie, there are plenty of small features that I really like, making it far less clucky than similar apps I’ve used before.

• When I go to upload a few photos, I can upload several at once using only 1 browse window instead of 1 browse window per image. It uploads them all in an instant.
• When browsing through albums, there’s a cool little effect. When hovering the mouse over an album, the images in the album slide out and surround the album so you can get a glimpse of what’s inside.
• On the social side, You can allow your albums and images to be visible to the public. People can comment on your images and you can build up a list of friends and view their albums too.
• Pix.ie provides an RSS feed of albums and has many popular methods of bookmarking such as Digg, Redd, Google and Yahoo and several more I’ve never heard of.

Im not a photographer, nor am I the type of person to have pictures of friends and family all over the place. I use pix.ie mostly to put up an image of something, such as a screenshot of a page and give someone a short url to view it.

Its fast to load, enjoyable to use and im looking forward to checking out a few more of its features that I have yet to use.

Sign up to pix.ie now!

On Tuesday July 15^th I created my first ad for eWrite Lite on Facebook. I started this after reading Damien Mulleys post ‘Facebook Ad Competition - Best Irish Facebook Ad Campaign‘ and decided I’d give it a go.

Paying for it popped to mind, that was sorted quickly enough by adding the VISA Business network Application. Thanks to a link from Damiens blog to Alexia’s blog describing how to get 100 Dollars free to advertise in Facebook.

I logged into Facebook and added the VISA application on the 13^th. The next day I received a nice email from Facbook Ads Team telling me I have received a coupon code and directed me to enter this into the Billing section of the Ads Manager.

I went through the steps of creating an ad for eWrite Lite. Damien also had this covered with a ‘How to advertise on Facebook‘ guide.

I specified that I would pay 1 dollar for a click, I wanted to spend a maximum for 10 dollars a day and run the ad for 10 days to users 18 years and older in Ireland.

So heres the eWrite Lite advert I created:

This was actually my second attempt. I didn’t like my first one, so I created another, shorter and more to the point.

That day, I also moved my site over to Blacknight.ie hosting so I could use a Linux based server. Quite stupid timing on my part, many of the first clicks from the Facebook ad would probably have received a blank site. Didn’t last long though.

So enough background, heres the graph of clicks from Facebook to eWritelite.com over the 10 day period:

Visits to ewritelite.com according to Facebook ad manager

July 15th : 10 Clicks

July 16th : 9 Clicks

July 17th : 4 Clicks

July 18th : 6 Clicks

July 19th : 4 Clicks

July 20th : 3 Clicks

July 21st : 4 Clicks

July 22nd : 6 Clicks

July 23rd : 10 Clicks

July 24th : 3 Clicks

July 25th : 3 Clicks

Heres the graph of impressions for the same period. The peak on the 23^rd is 37,327 impressions.

The spike in impressions and resulting clicks on the 23^rd is most likey due to Facebooks new interface design opened to the public that week which now shows 2 ads on a page rather than 1.

Heres an image of Facebook.com referrals from Google analytics for the same period. They don’t quite match up wth the clicks that Facebook show to the site.

Visits to ewritelite.com according to Google Analytics

July 15th : 5 Visits

July 16th : 7 Visits

July 17th : 2 Visits

July 18th : 5 Visits

July 19th : 4 Visits

July 20th : 3 Visits

July 21st : 2 Visits

July 22nd : 3 Visits

July 23rd : 9 Visits

July 24th : 2 Visits

July 25th : 3 Visits

—

July 26th : 1 Visits

July 27th : 1 Visits

I don’t get the difference in the Clicks from Facebook and the visits recorded by Google. I certainly don’t get why there are visits to the site from facebook after the ad campaign finished. Not complaining though.

Facebook billing reports 10 dollars taken from my accound each day of the ad. Shouldn’t it only take 10 dollars if I’ve had 10 clicks that day? It also shows I have 20 Dollars left in my account a few days after the campaign ended.

Lessons learned

Don’t move the website to another server at the start of an ad campaign.

As a result of all the clicks from the Facebook ad, I recevied no enquiries from interested people. This is a sharp reminder for me to really focus on the website content and get the eWrite Lite Demo back up and running for users to experience the content manager.

Advertising on Facebook works, just make sure there is something on the receiving end for visitors to consume or interact with.

Conclusions

I’m going to advertise on Facebook again as soon as I’ve made some improvements to ewritelite.com

Conor O Neill recently wrote a post on web2ireland.org regarding Seedcamp and putting in an application before the deadline.

In the comments, we talked about gathering a few people together from Cork with the aim of helping each other fill out the forms a little better than we might do on our own. I imagine I’d be quite embarrassed to read what I wrote in the forms last year, and I’d certainly benefit from any input or feedback that anyone can offer.

Open Coffee would be ideal for this, though with holidays and the deadline of Seedcamp, ad ah-hoc session is needed.

Anyone interested in meeting in Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig to help polish their form filling talents?

Conor has put up a poll at web2ireland to gauge interest in this meet-up.

I’ve been thinking about putting a little box on this blog showing a counter of the number of users of eWrite products, would this fit with being open or is it vain or pointless?

Some of the products have low numbers, so I don’t think its going to be too vain.

Discuss..

I recently wrote about moving to greener pastures, virtually speaking. This blog is now hosted with Blacknight.

The reason for the move is that my previous hosting was on Microsoft Windows servers and simply put, it didn’t work.

Any Wordpress version above version 2.3.1 resulted in plenty of errors, blank screens upon logging in, not being able to use pretty permalinks, categories not loading etc. And not just on my blog.

The site is now hosted on a linux server and its running beautifully. I’ve been able to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version without problems and I’ve enabled pretty permalinks.

I changed over the hosting on Tuesday, which I stupidly timed with creating my first advert on Facebook for eWrite Lite. The ad created plenty of clicks and plenty of them might have received a blank site thanks to my own fantastic timing as the site changed over to BN DNS name servers. But thats for a later blog post

For now, Thank you Blacknight! I’m recommending customers using eWrite Lite CMS to use Blacknight hosting.

Very impressed with Damien Mulleys recent idea called the Tuesday Push in which every other Tuesday a spotlight is pointed at a growing Irish tech company.

Its a great way to see what others are working on and also a great way to get feedback from several sources about a product you may consider using or buying.

It might be interesting to tie in the Tuesday Push with James Corbetts Coffee Cooler SkypeCast. A representative from the company in focus could make themselves available the day of the Tuesday Push to field some questions to anyone who’d like to drop in for virtual chat on Skype.

This week the spotlight is on 1Time : http://1timetracking.com

1Time

“1time is a web-based time and expense tracking application that allows you to easily keep track of real time project costs. “

I haven’t used 1Time though I’ll soon be signing up as I start into a new project that I’d like to keep track of.

You can keep up to date with the latest news over at the 1Time blog.

If you’re looking to get mentioned in the Tuesday Push, there is a Tuesday Push form you can fill out on Damien’s site.