It’s probably obvious if you think about it, but adaptive learning is really what I’m implementing here, as well as the ability for the user to see how they perform with each section and even each question. I’ll be able to show a user a graph of their performance with each question, section over time no matter whether they are simply doing practice test after practice test, or are systematically reviewing the question pools with the review tools.

This will generate a new study tool as well, because I will be able to generate tests in real-time that give them exposure to questions they haven’t seen before, or questions that they have had problems answering. It should be another fairly useful way for people to prepare for the amateur radio tests. It will also give me a chance to play with more featurs in jpgraph and to finally dig into the generation of sparklines.

In addition I’ve been working on a couple of other features that aren’t related to the above that should get hamtesting.com a lot of exposure in a very short amount of time. I’ll be announcing these new tools/features soon and at that time I’ll try to map out for you my strategy for how this is going to work. Although sometimes it’s hard to map out a business strategy when my main primary intention is to provide these tools for free to the amateur radio community.

I setup google analytics, google webmaster tools, and setup the google sitemap generator and have been tweaking the content structure of the individual pages, adding in meta tags, as well as making the content, and site structure, a little more friendly to search engines. All of this has been positively wonderful for getting some decent traffic numbers for my first couple of weeks at getting started with this.

The other thing that I’ve done is modified the home page to be an better explanation of how to utilize the site to prepare for your ham radio test. I’ve also given users the ability to simply browse the question pool without having to utilize the test preparation system or the review system to see the questions in the pool for the question they are interested in. There are some other user experience things that I want to focus on over the next couple of weeks that might significantly help with user retention. Here’s the numbers for the last two weeks ( please note : this information is from google analytics, my base numbers from the original post were from adsense, I’m not sure how closely these systems agree on any given data point . )

186 visitors
2,088 page views

So given that the totals for nov2007-jan2008 were 230 page views. I think I’ve hit my originally stated goals for traffic, so now it’s time to come up with some new goals. I’d like to work towards getting the trend to increase and figure out how to crack the first page on google’s results for some of the search terms I’ve identified as being good terms to focus on.

I finished the basic functionality of hamtesting.com in July 2007. I wrote the whole thing in Ruby/Rails in a week and then spent some time trying to deploy it, dealing with a bunch of issues related to inefficient xml processing etc, making it play nicely with apache and whatnot. While sitting at a Super Happy Dev House I finally had enough with trying to deploy Rails when I already knew all of the issues with PHP, so I sat down and rewrote it in PHP.   I launched the basic testing module of the site about a week later after I made it a little bit prettier( all css based ). I then wrote the review module and released that about 2 months later.

Getting The Word Out

I made a couple of lame attempts at getting some visitors to the site. I made some posts to some of the enthusiast groups and told people that I met about it, hoping to generate some interest. However, I naively thought that it would get itself found by the internet since it was vastly superior to most of the free testing sites, and even superior to most of the pay software/sites. Unfortunately it never seemed to generate much interest, I have some guesses at number of visitors in a given month and it’s VERY VERY OBVIOUS that the word ISN’T getting out.

 Using the Brain

Highly underrated, I used my brain to think about why people weren’t using the site. Then I typed in “ham testing” and “amateur radio testing” and “arrl testing” into google and started clicking back through the pages. I never did find my website. So how are others supposed to find it?

The Plan and The Goal

They say you need a goal and a plan to get there. So I have a goal. Hamtesting.com showing up on the first page of results when some keywords I’ve identified as being the most relevant are searched on. The plan is all laid out, I’d like to get triple the traffic of my biggest month thus far by the end of April, and then I’ll set some more goals.

The Baseline

In an effort to measure progress I’m going to put up some very unscientific numbers for the last two months :

january 2008 : 102 page impressions

december 2007 : 65 page impressions

november 2007 :  63 page impressions

So with those numbers as a basis perhaps we can see how effective my efforts are at generating some users for the site. I really believe the product is top notch and can improve people’s chances at passing their tests and learning what they have problems with quickly. It’s top notch, just gotta get the users!

There are a few things that need to be tweaked, but this was the last major piece that needed to be done so that people had a useful tool for preparing for their tests. I’m sure that there is going to be some tweaks, feature enhancements, that will be done, but none of the other features are going to require as much work as the review system needed.

What happened was that I wrote the practice tests without using a database, everything was done using XML. When I started working on the test review system I realized that I needed all of the data in the database, which meant that most of the classes that I had used for the practice tests weren’t really usable for the review system. In the end, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it was certainly more work than it should have been.

I looked around on the net and saw a few places that had free tests, but none that simulated the actual test conditions accurately. The actual tests have the answers scrambled so that you can’t just memorize the answers, this website presents the questions in the same way.

In addition, this website will also have the question pool review tools that I wrote, this will allow the user to go through the entire question pool, and save out the questions that they have problems with from the ones that they don’t so that they can focus the study on their problem areas.

I will try to make regular updates here about the progress over at hamtesting.com, if you’re really bored at work, you could even study for your ham radio license. It won’t hurt you any to have one

I bought a variac a few weeks ago to help me in experimenting with cutting foam wings for the r/c flying thing. While we were waiting for the test results from the extra test, dad got to talking to a guy about bringing old equipment back online and this guy recommended using the variac to slowly ( over the course of an hour or so ) bring the equipment back up to full voltage.

So yesterday, we pulled the Hammarlund receiver out of the attic, cleaned it up a bit, and hooked it up to the variac, and started applying power. Before long, we were pulling in some random signals off of a random wire antenna about 4 feet long. Very very cool. Now I just need to get a longer piece of wire.

We stopped by frys to pick up a book and while we were there I picked up a training cd for assissting you in learning cw ( morse code ) yesterday we started listening to that a bit.  Amy was sitting there with us while we were bringing up the receiver and listening to the cd, and when they started sending out random code bits she started to copy. She seemed to take to it pretty easily, so who knows, she may have her ticket before this is all over with.

I wasn’t looking for another hobby, but i was looking for a space for me to learn more about electronics and have interesting things to fiddle with in the electronics world. I think this might be a good place for me to play.

The whole draw for me towards amateur radio was to get involved in electronics in a meaningful way, the talking to people parts of amateur radio didn’t hold a draw then, but the idea that you could build something out of parts, learn something in the process, and the have a great way to see if you had done it right ( by being able to talk to someone ) had a LOT of appeal for me. So when I heard that “people didn’t build their own gear anymore” i lost interest.

As i’ve gotten older I realized that I should have asked another ham radio guy if you could get kits, and NOT a businessman that made his money by selling manufactured radios. Oh well.

My parents came into town last month and were looking to get their licenses so that they would have emergency communications equipment in the event they were camping somewhere that had poor cell reception. I ordered the books for them and thought i may as well get my technician license since they were doing it and because there is no morse code requirements anymore. When i ordered the books I also ordered the 2007 Arrl Radio Handbook as I was paging through the book I saw all of these radio designs for building your own gear! People still do it, all the time. Hot diggity damn!

So after we passed the technician test, i went down to Fry’s and picked up the General Test Prep guide, and went through that, in fact, my mom and my dad decided to take that test too. Yesterday we all passed that test, so after the test I happened to be in Fry’s again, and decided to pick up the Amateur Extra Test Prep guide. Dad and I are currently fervidly studying for this test trying to get it done by the beginning of June. Good challenge! With the Extra license I will have the highest amateur radio license you can obtain in the US. I’ll have rights to use all amateur frequencies in all modes granted to the amateur service by the fcc.

More on this later..