Developing eWrite

Our content management system eWrite Lite allows a website owner to collect data on visitors to their site, the usual stuff such as browser agent, ip address, top pages, time on pages etc. Our email marketing software eWrite Messesenger allows the owner to collect data too such as what links the recipients clicked upon in the email, if they forwarded it to a friend etc.

This data isn’t anything new or exciting but I got to thinking recently about other data these programmes could give. I have been considering adding a facility to our products that a user could enable or disable which would send anonymous statistics to our server that we could make available to anyone that may have a use for it.

This combined data would contain information such as; number of pages on a site, how many new pages created per week, how many pages edited per week, how many combined visitors per week to the sites, what browser agents are visiting the sites, what IP addresses are visiting the sites, what countries are visiting the sites, the average time spent on a site by a visitor, do the sites have a blog, what’s the average number of recipients on a business mailing list, what is the average Google page rank, what’s the average position on Google SERP, what web robots are visiting the sites and much more.

This information would not betray the users privacy in any way. It would not give away any private information about the users or their mailing lists.

Is this information of use to any organisations? What would be a good format for this information?

On Monday the 13th, Tom Keane from Nitrosell gave a presentation to a packed Open Coffee in the National Software Center in Cork in association with SohoSolo and CorkBIC.

Regretfully Tom had to leave quickly after the presentation to catch a flight to the US so he wasn’t able to take many questions.

Like myself, I’m sure others at the presentation that day have since thought of a few questions that they would like to ask Tom.  I will be meeting with him when he returns to Cork so if you have any questions use the comments below and I’ll pass them on over coffee.

Tom Keane talks to Open Coffee

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In return for Damien’s selfless efforts in putting together the great Irish Web Awards I’ve started a little donation to fund a new iPhone after his last iPhone was mortally wounded in a high speed impact.

You can donate any amount you like using the Paypal donate button below. Its a new Paypal account created specifically for this purpose which Damien now has access to in case anyone thinks the money will be ‘resting’ in my account

Thanks to Iarfhlaith for creating the groovy Donate button.

Donate now if you enjoyed the awards and spread the word if you can.

(Update: Wordpress didn’t like the Paypal code, so made a separate page to hold the actual donate button)

• A method of tracking comments left by your favourite bloggers on other peoples blogs.
• In Firefox, one can open links in a new tab or a new window if needed. When using a form or a search it would be cool to be able to open the resulting screen in a new window or tab too in case one wants to continue on the same page too as well as performing a search.
• Might be cool to have a programme on your laptop or phone that could ‘listen’ to a TV programme or a film you are watching and display interesting facts or info about it. Such as the actors details, similar films,  or when the next episode is on for TV programmes.  Could even be a screen saver if on a computer.
• Ever use your mobile phone to light up an area? I do, all the time.  Might be cool to have a plastic enclosure to wrap around the phone with a mirror and a lens to focus the light more like a torch….either that or I could get one of those tiny torches for my set of keys.
• A Google search which uses (or prioritises) preffered web sites set by the user. When a user searches for something, their preferred set of websites appear first if they are relevant to the search.
• I use the search functionality in Thunderbird all the time.  I can search by subject, sender, to, content etc. When Im in my inbox I would love it this defaulted to search by ’sender’ and when im in my outbox I’d love it to default to search ‘to’. At the moment it stays with whatever it was searching last.

Image via Wikipedia

Over the past few months I have met with many businesses to demo eWrite Lite, our low cost and easy to use content management system. Though I am not a sales man I have managed a very high succes rate in demoing our software and getting paid businesses onboard and using eWrite Lite to allow them to manage their web site effectively.

In this time I was specifically targeting businesses which already had websites set up. It was easier for me to install eWrite and attach it to an existing website rather than going through a potentially longer process of developing a new website with each business.

I am not a graphic designer and so I rely on some new and existing contacts to work on graphics for the customer. Ideally, it would be great to have the resources to hire 2 or 3 graphic designers full time and have them all under one roof when needed. I don’t have the resources for this so I am considering a sort of mailing list for talented graphic designers.

When I meet with businesses which need graphics to be created such as logo designs, website designs or a newsletter template designs I would like to be able to contact a set of individuals to see who is available to work.

This would mean that I ask a customer what they need, what is their budget, what existing designs they like, what colours they would like to use etc. I would collect this information together in a specific format and send it to 5 or so designers by email to see which designer has the time to do the work for the required budget.

If a designer can do a job, I send on more details for them to get started. If a designer can’t do a job, no problem, there will be more to follow.

If you are designer, would you be interested in working in this manner? Please leave me a comment below or contact me by email or skype if you are interested.

This weeks Tuesday Push is Louder Voice.

Louder voice is developed by Cork-based business Argolon Solutions, spearheaded by Conor O’ Neill.

Loudervoice allows anyone to post reviews about anything via several sources including blogs, Twitter, Jaiku, SMS and more. I have written a couple of reviews in the past and I plan to continue.

In their own words :

LouderVoice is all about reviews but with a BIG difference. Instead of expecting you to spend time and effort writing reviews for us, we’re interested in your reviews wherever you write them

In the highly detailed words of 11850 :

You may try this website on Loudervoice; http://www.loudervoice.com/about/ Thank you.

(Click here if you’re wondering why I brought up 11850)

There is a great Help section on their site to teach you how to begin reviewing : http://www.loudervoice.com/help/

The Loudervoice homepage reminds me of Yahoo and Lycos a few years back. Im all for healthy white space on a website design but LV manages to get a lot of stuff into a page very very well. Review of the day, review of the week and latest review widgets on the homepage are great.

There are a lot of tick marks on the homepage, it would be great to see more profile images from those reviewers, maybe only those people with profile images should be able to make the homepage.

In my opinion it is detailed, quality services like Loudervoice, driven by its user base which will drive more and more customer purchases. Many people I know look for reviews or ratings when searching for a hotel or B&B to stay in, this will spread to more and more products and services.

Word of mouth is the most influential business referral technique. In the absence of people recommending items to you, reviews and ratings such as those provided by Loudervoice are the next best thing. In a similar manner, I find myself using Google Blog Search more and more when searching for items on the web rather than using the usual website search to get a more up to date and personal opinion on what ever I might be searching for.

Loudervoice is clearly aware of this trend as they have recently launched Loudervoice for Business – Connecting commerce and customers. Conor writes about the launch of Loudervoice for business in their blog.

I would be excited to see if I would be able to use Loudervoice in relation to our own eWrite software to allow users to review our products to make sure we’re kept on our toes.

Deservedly, Loudervoice has been short listed for the Moviestar.ie Irish web awards. Good Luck Loudervoice!

Loudervoice…. 5 Stars!

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

Todays Tuesday Push is ‘DownloadMusic.ie‘ from John Beirne.

Download Music is a site run by Johnny Beirne allowing legal music downloads using the website or a mobile phone. This site has been around for a while based on what I’ve read, though this is my first time taking a look at the service.

The first cool thing that cought my attention about this service was that if you don’t have a credit card to buy music, no problem! You can pay with your mobile phone by texting ‘music’, a space and the track ID to 57501 where you can log in and download the track. Pretty Cool.

There are currently 888 artists to choose from. Songs cost only €1 which is split among the phone operators and the artist, DownloadMusic.ie doesn’t take any money, leaving more for the artist.

DownloadMusic.ie recently released a USB album. This is an album on a USB 1GB USB key with 15 tracks for €12.99. Damien Mulley reviewed this USB album a couple of weeks ago. A great idea, an empty USB stick could cost more than this.

As well as being able to purchase music, the site has other cool features including an RSS feed of upcoming gigs. The site has a blog too which allows you to keep up to date with any music or site related news.

The only thing I could find to give out about was when loading the homepage. I would make thumbnails of the album images, the existing 1023*1023 images took that extras couple of seconds to load.

Maybe bands that have their tracks on the site could put up large QR codes on the stage somewhere when playing a gig so members of the audience could take a picture of with their mobile phones and get directed to the site and track ID to download.

I’ve subbed to the RSS feed and I’ll be visiting this site more in the future. I’ll pass this link on to a few friends too, it would be ideal for them to showcase their music.

As always, if you’d like your web app or service mentioned in the bi-weekly Tuesday push, fill out the form on Damien Mulleys site.

Almost 2 weeks ago on the 9^th, eWrite was the focus of the Tuesday Push. I was really looking forward to this push in the days leading up to it. I spent the time improving our site, removing unwanted pages, setting up a new forum, getting new images created for the site and setting up an online store where users can now buy eWrite Lite and eWrite Messenger.

The Tuesday push works on several levels. A dealine is always useful to focus on whats important and in what order. I worked that bit harder to get a few things in place, mainly the online store to sell our apps complete with an easy to follow set up proceedure.

The morning of the Tueday Push I was excited and looking forward to seeing what people would write about eWrite. At the same time I was worried about the content of our site, I know it still isn’t up to scratch to explain our apps very well. In this case, I looked on it as a way to improve, if bloggers commented on the content of the the site, I’d be able to learn from it and change it.

Damien Mulley wrote the first blog post that morning and for a lot of the rest of the day my heart was in my mouth, no other blog posts about eWrite were appearing. I began to worry that no one else would bother writing about us, I doubt I’ve ever used the Google Blog search as much as I did that day

As the day went on though I was very happy to see a few more blogs participate in the Tuesday Push. Google Alerts began to tell me about new blog posts by email. The traffic to the site more than doubled that day and continues even now at a higher average per day.

Traffic to the site was flowing in. Nearly 20 people used the demo of the eWrite Lite CMS on our site that day. I wish I had the demo of the eWrite Messenger email marking software ready in time. I think this might have impressed a couple of people. Every day since, an average of 5 people try out the demo on our site compared to 1 or 2 per week before.

I received a couple of emails from other web developers and graphic designers asking questions about eWrite Lite and how it works with a website. I was especially happy with these emails as Im hoping to work with more and more developers to see if I can encourage them to use eWrite Lite to manage the content of their sites. I want to learn what I can to make it a more useful tool for developers and designers in their own work.

The blogs that wrote about eWrite in the Tuesday Push

http://www.mulley.net/2008/09/09/tuesday-push-9th-september-2008-ewrite-lite/

http://www.keyes.ie/johnnyk/2008/09/18/ewrite-lite/

http://www.niall-larkin.com/blog/2008/09/09/get-yourself-on-techcrunch-or-digg-rewrite-the-web-with-ewrite/

http://www.web2ireland.org/2008/09/09/the-tuesday-push-is-ewrite-lite/

http://www.iarfhlaith.com/2008/09/09/tuesday-push-ewrite-lite/

http://bohanna.typepad.com/pureplay/2008/09/ewrite—2-days.html

http://joedrumgoole.com/blog/2008/09/09/the-tuesday-push-ewrite-lite/

http://www.davidkelly.ie/blog/2008/09/10/ewritehaving-a-tuesday-push/

http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/2008/09/09/pushing-ewrite-lite-pushing-ireland/

http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2008/09/a-day-late-but.html

(I haven’t missed anyone have I ? )

Thank you very very much to all, Thank for you for taking the time to look at eWrite and writing about it. I’ve learned a lot from the posts and comments and taking on board all the advise and suggestions.

Getting your application or service mentioned in the Tuesday Push is definitely worthwhile, do it!

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.

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

This week the focus is on Toddle, Beautifully Simple Email Marketing. I haven’t used Toddle before so I took this opportunity to try it out.

I added my email address and got started. The first screen presented an existing layout to customise.

Without reading any of the instructions on the screen the first thing I saw was ‘edit the header’ so I pressed it. This expanded and allowed me to remove the existing header image and upload my own. I continued to edit the rest of the articles and pasted in some Lorem ipsum to fill up some space. My main interest was in sending the newsletter.

I had assumed that Toddle would allow me to send the newsletter out to many recipients and I was curious how it managed it. A message that told me the finished newsletter would be sent to my own email address where I could forward it to anyone I want.

I pressed the ‘Send Newsletter’ button, nothing appeared to happen so I pressed it a few more times. I eventually realised it was showing an animation of ( the Twitter bird?? ) the email sending and was returning to normal very quickly.

I checked my email and received 5 copies from my multiple clicking. Luckily sending this email didn’t cost me any of the free credits.

Amused by my own impatience I returned to Toddle and began to look around in more detail. The interface is really very good and quite intuitive. I was able to edit any article in the email by clicking the tab on the left to update the heading, content or images. Adding a link to a page on my site placed a nice ‘Read More’ link to the end of the article. Adding address information to the email creates a great footer for the email which includes a vCard of your contact details, very handy.

Included in the footer of the sent newsletter are links to any previous newsletters I had created and an RSS feed of the current newsletter. I love RSS feeds so I thought this was pretty cool.

I was interested to see other layouts available. Changing the layout of the email is very easy, clicking on ‘Change Design’ provided me with 3 other layouts to choose from. I chose one of the others layouts and my email updated to the new layout keeping my xsiting text. I sent it to myself to see how it looked. I wasn’t paying attention and it cost me a credit to send out. More credits are available using Paypal and cost only €6 per credit.

I’m glad I took the time to check out Toddle. The interface is clean, clear and great to use. I know a few businesses that have asked for email templates, I’ll be recommending they sign up to Toddle now!

Some comments

When I update an article, it might be helpful to change the ‘edit article 01′ to the title that I write in myself so it becomes ‘edit article whats new…’ assuming I add a title.

The number of articles is quite rigid, it might be usful to allow more articles to be added or removed though this would be harder to implement with some of the templates.

When I sent the newsletter, the animation was very fast, I didn’t realise at first that it had sent at all.

When I was choosing a different template, it would be good to add the credit cost underneath the template or when I hover over it like the template thats free to send.

Advanced sending options wasn’t available after I used up my credits.

The Advanced sending options allowed me to see a text version of the newsletter I had created. Could there be a link to this text only version within the HTML version of the email ?