Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

There’s a programmer party down in the valley that I’ve been attending at somewhat regular intervals for the last couple of years called Super Happy Dev House. Mike and I were invited to the party by the elusive Nathan the Kraut ( this is Mike the Quaker’s nickname for him ), it is always interesting because you see a lot of different things and get to talk to the people doing them. There are teams there doing all sorts of things at various times I have met the Dojo Toolkit guys, the Meebo guys, the Flock people, Redswoosh ( in fact I think they bought their domain at one of the first SHDH’s that I attended but it was well into a night of perl hackery and free flowing redbulls so I could be wrong ) and a bunch of other interesting people.

Anyways, Mike the Quaker and I attend these things together and are normally at a loss to have anything interesting to work on, so we actually came up with a project to work on specifically for when we go to SHDH. We called it cackl because cackl is a very web 2.0a sounding name so we wouldn’t stand out, and because we wanted to do a sort of joke database of epic proportions.

The odd thing was that since we had the idea we have only attended one more SHDH and left early so we could go somewhere quiet and work. GO figure.

So…after a couple of restarts, a lot of caffeinated beverages, much pizza, and several nights of questioning whether we really know what we are doing we have launched cackl.

What is cackl?! : cackl is a joke database of massive proportions. It supports tagging/searching/etc. All wrapped in an easy to navigate interface so that you can be sure you are learning new jokes to bore your friends with within 2 seconds of hitting the site. It is social in nature, so if you have a good joke that you’d like to add, just create an account and add the joke.

So if you need a joke, or have a joke you want to share, please go over to cackl and take a look around.

History  

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!

I’ve been busy with school and other things that I’m not going to talk about at the moment *cough* cackl *cough*, however I finally got the question pool review system built for hamtesting.com. With this release, we now offer more functionality for your dollar than any other ham test prep site on the internet.

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 drove down to Santa Barbara today, and checked into the local Holiday Inn for a few days to do some work for a client down here. Unfortunately, I was a bit behind on a proposal I needed to get out so I walked over to the grocery store picked up some food and went back to the hotel room to spend the night working on the proposal and then trying to get to the bottom of a javascript bug that i’m having problems with.

I need to figure out a way to do proposals better/faster I have a helluva time getting them done in a brief enough period of time. ( well brief enough for my tastes ). I want them to be accurate and well thought out, but it’s hard sometimes to spend a lot of time on something that you know is going to be shopped around and end up being used to get some other guy to go cheaper.

It was kinda nice to spend some time just driving along looking at the sites, heading south looking at the ocean stopping to look at the water for a bit, having a leisurely lunch, getting into town towards the end of the workday and spending a couple of hours getting some work done.

Hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to say tomorrow..but don’t hold your breath

Along with going back to school, training for a double century, and a few other odds ‘n ends, I’ve come up with another way to challenge myself. I have gone back to being a contractor/consultant, shed the shackles of fulltime employment and jumped in with both feet.

It is going rather well, much better than the last time around, then again, the last time I tried this was in the middle of the “pop” sound being made by the .com bubble bursting. Things were falling down left and right as soon as I got a client they’d go out of business. etc.

The really great thing about all of this is that I am able to maintain my extravagant lifestyle ( ha ) yet free up some time for working on some of these other ideas that I have. I’m slowly putting together the final pieces of release 1 of Simply Alerts, and I’ve almost got the core logic done for a project I started this weekend that will eventually end up being a Ruby On Rails application.

I’m always on the lookout for more work so if you have any, know anyone who needs anything done, I can do it all, have them give me a call.