Developing eWrite

The Tuesday Push is an initiative started by Damien Mulley to encourage the blogging community to point a spotlight on new or useful services in Ireland.

The Tuesday Push happens every second Tuesday. This particular Tuesday isn’t one of them but I wanted to promote on of my own projects and how it relates to another of Damien’s ideas, the SEO competition.

In short, the SEO competition aims to find out who is the best at search engine optimisation in Ireland. I think the competition is an excellent idea and several sites and blogs are already appearing to compete.

Im interested in the tools and techniques of SEO but I’m not participating myself, I don’t know enough. Im going to be watching the participants and their sites so that I might learn a thing or two to benefit our clients. Hopefully, when this competition ends in December, one or more people will blog about the techniques they used so we might all learn from it.

My own project that I wanted to talk about is ‘Yell if it changes‘. This site was originally started so that I could be notified automatically if some of our customers sites had changed. For a long time I planned to add the ability to monitor the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for changes in the results for specific keywords and URLs, This is now in place.

For the SEO competition, enter the magic words ‘Geansai Gorm‘ and the URL you would like to monitor. You will be notified of the current position(s) in the results page of Google and you will also be notified via email whenever the URL changes position(s). The history of changes in positions are recorded too so it should make for some very interesting data in time.

It isn’t limited to the SEO competition though, anyone can use it to monitor the positions of their own sites for their chosen keywords. Go on, its free and you can use it for as many sites or search terms as you like.

Yell if it changes is a small project I work on in my spare time. There are many many things I plan to add to it in the future to make it more useful to myself and the 200+ users so far. If you have any ideas or comments on Yell, I’d love to hear them.

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)

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!

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

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!

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.