Monthly Rewind : August 2009

Like most geeks, I guess, I have numerous domain names and websites, and during a two week holiday taken at the end of July, I spent time reflecting on the direction I wanted to take all these sites. Two of the sites have not grown much in the last twelve months, this is due mainly to me not having time to post new articles, and the designs have become cluttered over time. The sites, one about dog training and one about running, receive between six and seven thousand readers per month, and my goal is to double this number over the next twelve months.

It was becoming difficult and time consuming to maintain both sites, so I decided to shut them both down and re-direct the traffic with a 301 redirect, to this newly acquired domain Paul Bradley.org, and host the best articles here under the one site using a single central content management system. This goes against the advice of ProBloggers like Darran Rowse and David Risley, who say you should just focus on one niche topic per site, but I'll see how it goes over the coming months, it will take a while to migrate all the content here anyway. My feeling is that as the content and articles are evergreen, in so much as they will still be useful to readers over the next 10 to 20 years, and as I plan to hold the domain for the long term, that it's better to have all the articles hosted and managed through one site.

The domain was purchased from NameCheap my usual supplier, and I have built the content management system using PHP and MySQL. The sites sparse design is based on Philip Greenspun's home page, as I have liked his layout for a long time as it focuses on the content, and allows the user to easily print out the pages to read offline.

I wrote a short step-by-step guide titled “Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the Acer Aspire One” after going through the process this month. It's very easy, although it did take around 40 minutes to install and another 15 mins or so to install over 100 updates that where waiting. My initial impressions are positive, I like it, even though it is perhaps a little slower than the original Linpus Linux that came with the machine.

I am also starting to plan a new cottage directory site which will complement k9direcory. The plan is to have the site ready for public use by Jan 2010. During this planning stage I have been re-reading the best practices for speeding up a web site to ensure I build a fast responsive site from the outset. The section on optimising images using jpegtran and pngcrush was a bit of an eye opener for me. All my images are cropped using the Gimp, and I wrongly assumed that they where saved in an optimal format. Running jpegtran on the photograph of me which can be found on the home page reduced it's size by a further nine per cent. In additional tests that I have done, the space savings are consistently between seven and ten per cent, which when your hosting a lot of photographs and thumbnails on a popular site like k9directory, will give you savings of several Gigabytes a month in the bandwidth bill. Needless to say I will be changing my publishing processes, so that all images are past through these conversion utilities before being made live on any public web site.

Helped a friend who re-sells holiday villas to get their first website on-line, provided advice on how to get the site hosted and how to set-up mail accounts. If your looking for a Luxury VIP Villa in the Dominican Republic then take a look.

It's been a good month for k9directory with three new properties signing up to be listed. The first Puck's Lodge is a self catering chalet situated at Lamont Lodges Park six miles north of Dunoon the resort town situated on the Cowal Peninsula in Argyll, Scotland. The second Torran Bed & Breakfast is a former gamekeeper's cottage, recently modernized and extended, set on a mountain 250m above mysterious Loch Ness in the Highlands of Scotland. The third The Castle Inn is a traditional family-run 16th Century thatched free house pub and hotel near the beautiful Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door of the Jurassic Coastline and surrounded by the Isle of Purbeck countryside.

The site has produced £28,182 worth of actual bookings so far this year that I can verify, the actual figure is probably much higher than this, as many hotels and cottages take their bookings directly. I am hoping to break the £35k barrier before the end of the year.

My wife and I went to watch U2 in concert at the Hampden Park stadium in Glasgow. It was awesome, the play list was a random selection of old and new songs. Fantastic.

We also moved into our new house this month, a very busy and exciting time, looks like we will be unpacking till Christmas.