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?

A few days ago this blog turned 6 months old. A very short life for a blog though I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to keep this blog going for so long with hopefully interesting content. My intention for this blog was to write about the ongoing development of eWrite, the software and the business, warts and all. This is still my intention. Its easy to write about the good things, it can be hard to write about the bad things such as missed opportunities and even harder to ask for help.

Luckily there have been little or no bad things to write about. When asking for help, no matter how big or small the request some other blog authors are happy to help or point the way. Of course I would like if we had more customers for our products but thats not a bad thing, thats what ‘work’ is. I will continue to develop the software, meet with new and existing users and try to learn from them to make the software even better.

More than anything, this blog along with other social apps such as Twitter has introduced me to many fantastic people. Through blog comments and Twitter conversations I have met and continue to form relations ships with great minds here in Ireland such as Iarfhlaith Kelly, Damien Mulley, Conor O’Neill, John Peavoy, Michele Neylon, John Keyes, Robin Blandford, Alan O Rourke, Peter Donegan, Derek Organ, Chris B. Kerndter, Dave Kelly, Donncha O’Caoimh, Roger Galligan, Leon Quinn, Aedan Ryan, Frank Prendergast, Calvin Jones the list goes on and on…

I’ve met many great people too in the ‘real’ world through Open Coffee and business organizations such as BNI.

The Feedburner widget showing the modest number of subscribers to this blog is a huge boost for me. The number fluctuates from time to time and I’m sure there is more to that number than I know about, its a great motivation to know that there are a people out there reading what I write. I hope the content has been interesting so far and that it continues to be.

I enjoy writing about our developments at ewrite, getting feedback from fellow developers so that Im not just developing for the sake of developing and creating something useful to businesses. I also enjoy testing out services such as my earlier posts on The Logo Company, advertising on Facebook and posting up any data I get for others to use, hopefully these posts are useful and encourage other businesses to try them out. In the near future I will try to review some tech products out there that I think could be very useful, such as the Sony eBook reader. I think this is a great product with great potential. I had the opportunity to play with the new version in the US recently.

Thank you to all the readers! Keep those comments coming.

Website Design Cork are running a short survey on blogging and social website usage. I took the survey just now, some very good questions and I’d love to see the results of this.

If you have a blog and have 30 seconds to spare, take the Website Design Cork blogging survey. Spread the word about it too if you can.

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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I’ve recently read a few blog posts talking about how Google will soon be offering RSS feeds for basic search results.  I thought this was very cool. As I began thinking of the various uses for this I decided I couldn’t wait for Google to bring it out so I created a basic facility using PHP to provide Google search results in RSS form.

Try it out:

Google.ie search results in RSS form

Check it out, see what you think. At the moment I’ve limited it to 50 results. In the coming days I’ll add to it, get the feeds to automatically update every 24 hours or so. I’d like to add some sort of indicators to show if a website URL has moved up or down and to keep track of some of my own URLs. If anyone wants the PHP code for this, let me know.

Some related articles :

• Finally! Google to Offer RSS Feeds for Web Search Results
• Google Confirms RSS For Web Search Results
• Google adding RSS feeds for web search results: mixed emotions

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This is a small but effective addition to our eWrite products added this morning.

We often create small applications for our customers, items such as order forms or any other interactivity a user wants to put on their website. These items need an interface to allow the owner to manage them.

Ewrite can now detect any applications we have created and puts a new menu button into the top of the main interface. This new menu item called ‘Apps’ shows any applications we have created for the user and automatically links to any relevant sections of the application.

This allows an eWrite user to access any apps we create for them from within eWrite so that they don’t have to note or remember several URLs, usernames or passwords.

This also allows the applications we create to inherit the style, security and resources already available within eWrite which reduces the amount of code and files needed in these applications.

The applications are also stored in such a way that when eWrite is updated from SpringLoops and it won’t negatively effect the installed applications.

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.

As a developer Im quite aware that I should have begun to use version control a long long time ago to develop our apps.

More than once I read about and tried to use CVS or SVN. The learning curve to set these systems up on a server is probably not too steep but I was continually dissatisfied and turned away from it.

I wrote my own version control system at one point using PHP to monitor changes in the files and collect any comments in the changed files. The PHP code could also upload the changed files to the users servers. This worked quite well for a time but I was worried about security and I had a tendency to get bogged down in the development of the system itself instead of what it was supposed to do to help me in my daily work.

Earliy in September I came across SpringLoops and found they offer a free version of their source code management tools. Their free version allowed me to create 1 repository so I signed up and created a repository for eWrite Lite.

I installed TortoiseSVN on my desktop machine and on my laptop and got used to downloading and updating the code from both locations and getting familiar with the terminology.

I’ve read plenty of tutorials and blogs where developers encourage the use of version control. More than once a developer would write “Use version control, you can thank me later”. The smug feckers were right. I’ve been using SpringLoops and TortoiseSVN for a few weeks and its allowed me a freedom to concentrate on the development of the software rather than fiddling around with my own bad habits.

I used to have HP servers in the attic running Ubuntu Server with Apache, PHP and mySQL to host, develop and backup everything I was developing. I sold off all the servers, replaced a dodgy router and ran CAT5e 100MBPs cable through the building rather than using a wireless connection.

On my desktop machine I use WampServer to deploy a development environment of Apache, PHP and mySQL in Windows XP. I can write and test the code on my local machine and use TortoiseSVN to commit the changes to SpringLoops and deploy the stable versions to customers sites.

Im still learning my way around SpringLoops and version control abilities in general. I’ve upgraded to the ‘Field’ package on SpringLoops to allow for more repositories and servers to deploy to.

The packages that are available are more than enough for my needs in some cases but lack a little in others. For example the ‘Field’ package Im using now has 10GB of space, 100 protects and 20 servers per project. The space and projects are way more than I need, but the servers per project are important to me, I need more.

The next package up allows for only 30 servers. I emailed SpringLoops to ask if there were customized packages available. They seemed helpful at first asking what I would need. I asked for at least 50 servers per project and far less space and projects. I’d be more than happy with 10-15 projects and 2-5 GB of space. I didn’t get any reply to that, they probably think Im joking. I’ll contact them again shortly to see if they’ll allow it.

Developing with SpringLoops for the past few weeks has been great. I’ve been able to develop the eWrite products much faster, commit changes to the server and deploy these changes to clients sites with just a couple of clicks, It is far far faster than FTP. I wish I had joined the version control party sooner, the eWrite software and my time are all the better for it.