Archive for March, 2007

I’m very disappointed with JPEGr‘s statistics since my dreamhost server went belly up. They’ve throttle JPEGr yet again after I told them to sort it out. Here’s the email i got:

“I’m writing to let you know that your site ( jpegr.com ) has had a lot of
traffic on it recently and has been causing our webservers to crash, In
the effort to make the server more reliable for other customers on it I
have set a connection limit on your site. This is the best solution for
allowing your site to continue to run and making the webserver more
stable. If you would like to have this throttle raised or removed please
go through your site and figure out what is causing the load and lower
it.”

The server crash has hurt me big time. It’s cut in half my traffic. People hate sites that are down all the time. Naturally enough they’ll search for alternatives and rightly so – i would.

But I can’t see what the problem is with the server. Back in January JPEGr got over 1500 unique hits day and there was no problem. I was well under my disk usage and bandwidth usage and still am. Now all of a sudden JPEGr is too big for it’s boots. Any more downtime on JPEGr and i’ll have to find another host. Simple as that.

I could sell it and cash in, however i feel it has more potential so i’m hanging on to it for as long as possible. If it starts to become trouble for me and i have to switch hosts and pay higher running costs, i’ll be forced to sell it.

We’re reasonably confident we’ll have a logo within the next few days. We’ll experiment with layouts/design ourselves and if we’re not happy, we’ll launch another contest for a homepage.

St Patrick’s Day is a perfect launch day and was always my target. Out of the 365 days in the year, this is the one day when Irish and Drink stand out, as the site is now 100% Irish (my partner lives here too), we’ll use that to our advantage.

Realistically, everything won’t be finished by St Patricks Day (only 13 days away!). But what we’ll probably do is launch a landing page, open an official blog and explain the concept behind BeerChief. Hopefully, we’ll get a few subscriptions and can then launch the service soon after with traffic ‘on tap’ so to speak.

We’re both very excited about BeerChief and fully believe in it. It’s vital we don’t rush it however for St Patricks Day, as we’re determined to carry out everything with military precision.

In the meantime, have a look at the entries we’re getting on our $100 design contest for a logo. About 40 entries and some very high quality. My heart tells me to go with a bright, busy, fun, logo however i know from experience it’s the simple one’s that work. Google, Flickr, Bebo, Myspace, Youtube etc… are all simple. In the real world, Pepsi, Ryanair, Dell, Acer, Sony etc.. are all simple – but effective.
My art teacher once told me all the great logo’s can be drawn in sand and it’s true. Cluttered, colourful, over the top logo’s look well but they don’t have the same impact as simple one’s. So despite the fact we’ve got some really brilliant works of art sumbitted to us, unfortunately we’ll have to turn a blind eye to them as we want BeerChief to be absolutely perfect in every regard.

giving feedback on logos, working on more plans, offering advice to random strangers, analyzing traffic.. it’s great.

the contest on sitepoint is going well, some quality entries in the first day, it’s very strange to see BeerChief coming to life, also very inspiring… If we get a really world class logo it can only give us more confidence and belief.

also, my official february revenue totalled at $74.43

New month, new project.

BeerChief has been in the pipeline for a long time. I’ve spent weeks planning/organizing/researching and now it’s time for phase 1.

I’ve launched a $100 logo contest over on sitepoint. A clear indication i mean business with BeerChief. Together with my new partner, we’ve discussed the site in detail and are now taking our first steps on a long road ahead.

So if you’re a designer, get over to sitepoint and show me what you got