Developing eWrite

Last week, I decided to start writing down some of the ideas I have that might make useful additions to programmes or even apps of their own. I don’t expect that they are world changing ideas or anything I just think they are better served out there rather than in my head.

• An image search engine, that allows you to upload an image and it will search for related images or perhaps show you where the image you uploaded originated if its not your own.
• Theres blogging and then theres micro blogging with Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce. Is there a gap in the market for something in between?
• An extension for Thunderbird that monitors sending/receiving email trends. It would be cool to feed this info into some web app and see stats like who emails you the most, who do you email the most, most popular time to receive an email, busiest email hour of the day, bussiest day of the week etc.
• Have there ever been any temporary domain names? A domain extension like *.temp might be good idea for events, films or causes that only have a limited life span. A domain like this could be bought for a fee for shorter periods such as 2,3,6 and 9 months instead of yearly increments.

Thats all for this week. Read last weeks ideas.

Damien Mulley hosted a half day training session called ‘Media Training for Tech Companies’ yesterday in the Airport hotel in Cork.

It was an excellent morning. Diving straight in, Damien gave a great talk full of practical information and techniques on how to approach the media. Damien was able to back up these techniques from his own first hand experience over the years.

I took plenty of notes and learned quite a lot on how to approach Journalists. More importantly we learned how not to piss any journalists off which is always good.

My only complaint is that it was a half day and not a full day, I suspect there is plenty more I could learn.

Afterwards, it was great to be able to talk with the others that attended that day in the bar of the Airport hotel. Overall, a great day of training, I highly recommend it for anyone that would like to learn how to approach the media to promote their business.

Also attending yesterday was Anthony Galvin, check out his post on his blog at antgalvin.com

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

Crewger is new to me so I took a look around the site to see whats available.

Watching movies is a favorite pastime of mine, its great to have a site like this with news and updates, especially for the Irish scene, I’ve bookmarked the site alongside long time favorite imdb.com.

The site has a newsfeed which serves up all the latest news, reviews, interviews and more from the world of online film, well worth a look.

In their own words:

Crewger is an organisation dedicated to the production, promotion and exhibition of original content by film-makers of all ages and backgrounds working in Ireland today.

They have a Crewger survey on their site aimed at film makers of any level in Ireland and they’d love if you filled it out. They’re also taking registrations for their upcoming beta features.

A few friends of mine are involved in film making, they’ve often created short films of their own. I’ve passed the site link on to them. They’ll interact with this site a lot more than I will, they’ll be able to sign up and use items like the Cast & Crew finder where as I’ll just read all the news on the site and do little else.

Signed up to the beta features, looking forward to seeing whats under the hood.

Follow Crewger on Twitter.

Bummer. Received an email from Seedcamp yesterday thanking me for applying and unfortunately I didn’t make the short list this year. I was pleased enough to get the email at all, last year I applied without any preparation and received no response. You get back what you put in i suppose. This year I put some work into the application, I didn’t make it but thats OK, I have plenty to learn to help me to promote the work we do with the eWrite software.

Earlier in the month my hopes were raised when I saw that someone involved in Seedcamp signed up to try our eWrite Lite free demo. To use the demo you supply a name and website address. I checked the address and found it to be a site involved with Seedcamp. I was very happy to see they had taken a look and begun to get a little twinge of hope that we might make it through.

It would be amazing to get some feedback from the judges, I imagine this wouldn’t be very practical though, I suspect they’ve had a lot of entires to look though. 100 more entries this year than last year according to their email. Im pleased they looked at the demo at all and I’ll take it as a complimet and continue working hard.

Maybe next year

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I often have ideas that would might make useful web apps, I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rather than write them down somewhere and loose them I’m going to write them on this blog. Perhaps there would be someone else that could run with some of them.

I’ll keep this going each Friday for the next 4 weeks or so, to see if I can consistently come up with ideas. If anyone would like to take any of these ideas and run with them go ahead, a comment on the blog would be cool too though. Also, if I happen to have an idea that’s already out there, feel free to give out to me

Some loose ideas this week, mostly related to Google Reader:

• It would be handy to have the ability to post comments on a users blog while still inside Google Reader, rather than having to go to the users site to post comments.
• The ability to read blog comments within Google Reader too rather than heading to the site to read them.
• I comment on other blogs and other item such as Forums. It would be cool to have some method of storing all the messages I’ve posted in various places.
• Google Reader should be able to filter out the same story if it appears in multiple feeds, it can be annoying seeing the same iPhone story again and again.

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Yesterday I used OnlineMeetingRooms.com for the first time as part of James Corbetts Coffee Cooler. Online Meeting Rooms is run by Joe Garde and when I logged in, Joe himself was logged in so we had a quick chat.

I assumed it would be a little clunky especially considering my ongoing LAN/Broadband reliability issues but it all ran very smoothly. My 1MB connection didn’t quite meet Joe’s recommended connection speeds for using Online Meeting Rooms but there were no problems at all, the video and audio never went out of sync.

I got to see some very useful features such as being able to share a browser window where the host could append notes or drawings. The quality of the video could also be  put up or down to allow it to better suit the different connection speeds of a user. Users windows could be moved around too and resized to facilitate a main talker if there were plenty of people taking part.

I’d love to use it again with a few more people joining in to see how it holds up. I might also suggest using this to a few customers in Dublin that we visit from time to time to save on travelling up and down. It would be a handy way to show a user how to perform certain actions in the eWrite software for example without the need for them to install any new software.

A few months back I wanted to get a separate phone number for the home office so that I wouldn’t have to use the home phone for calls.

At the time I checked Skype to see if I could get a phone number for Cork. For whatever reason it wasn’t available at the time. The other day it popped back into my mind so I checked Skype, they were available again!

I’d love to be able to set up a number that would spell out ‘ewrite’ but it wasn’t meant to be. All the Cork (021) numbers available started with 2348***.

The number I ended up buying is 021 2348553. It cost €57.50 including VAT for one year. 3 months is also available for €17 or so.

To try it out I phoned the new number from the house phone, it worked just fine except for a little echo of my own voice.  Later in the day I received a couple of calls using the number and it all work flawlessly, grand sound quality.

Caller ID isn’t available for these Irish numbers from Skype however.  If I call someone now from Skype it will show my mobile number as the caller ID, which is fine with me. It takes 24 hours for this caller ID to kick in.

So now with my new number and my trusty Binatone cordless phone / internet phone (€44.99 from Argos) I can make and receive calls from Skype without clocking up the home phone bill.

A good friend and fellow developer Matt Hart has created a handy tool for helping developers find unclosed HTML tags on their sites.

HTML Tag Checker can check the HTML tags of online web pages. It will tell you how many errors there are, and highlight them within the structure of the HTML.

To date it has checked a total of 141 web pages and found 1923 errors.

Matt recently gave me a hand to get the eWrite Lite Demo online to allow users to try out the content manager using some of their own pages.

Matt is one of those frustratingly intelligent guys that if left alone for 5 minutes with a computer and an idea will create something great. Recently he has also created a couple of fun games, Battleships-Online and Boondog.

Inspired by Matts interest in Parkour (free running) Boondog has received some great attention in a short time. Written in FreeBasic, it has been downloaded nearly 700 times and was recently reviewed on bytejacker.com.

Battleships-Online is my favourite though, in between jobs I often nip off to the site and take a couple of turns when I should be working.

Looking forward the next app out of Matt..

eWrite has been around for a number of years, operating comfortably providing software and support to a number of businesses in Ireland.

Earlier this year I started something which I’ve wanted to do for some time, I begun to make smaller versions of the various tools we have created along the way focusing on content management, email marketing and protecting web forms from spam.

A new site was created at http://www.ewritecork.com to promote these new products. I want this site to accurately reflect the work and features we have put into the applications we have developed. To me, creating a bullet point list of the features and benefits for an application is a a good way to explain the useful points of a programme, though this isn’t going to impress anyone.

When explaining or ’selling’ a programme, are there recommended titles to use, such as introduction, features, testimonials, price?

Are there any sites out there that are great at explaining and promoting their software?

To help spread the word for the Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards 2008, eWrite have put an ad on facebook to run for 14 days.

We’ve spent only a small amount on it, $73 (50 Euro). The ad will run from Tuesday August 19th to Monday September 1^st. The parameters for the Facebook ad are : $1 will be paid for every click and a maximum of $5 will be spent each day.

Hopefully this will bring some well deserved attention to the awards. Thank you to Damien Mulley for all the work he has put into this.  Check out the blog for day by day details.

Don’t forget to nominate your site, its free!