2009 January | Irish Internet Entrepreneur

31 Jan 2009

Google – This May Harm Your Computer

Tags: google, Google Search, Hacked, Search Engines
Posted in Work | 1 Comment

Big cock up at Google today. It’s either been hacked or all of a sudden every website has become a threat to your computer

At first i thought – just me… Google don’t do problems… then i started seeing messages on twitter. Google Hacked? Google Results Borked? Here’s a screenshot i took off google.com just now.

Underneath every result there is a message saying “This site may harm your computer”. It links to a Google support answer which currently gives an internal server error.

Let’s see how this pans out… google don’t usually make mistakes and this isn’t April 1st, so it can’t be an april fools

31 Jan 2009

keeping the pressure on myself

Tags: beerchief, business, development, launch, social network
Posted in Work | Leave a comment

Although BeerChief has been up since Tuesday, i haven’t stopped working on it or backed off any less. It’s a massive relief to have the site online as we’re now making real progress even if we’re doing nothing on the site – the community does the work for us. Or at least in theory that’s what can happen.

photo credit: edmittance

First though, i need a community! The site itself is improving daily. I’m getting loads of feedback, some bugs and some suggestions for the long term. That’s all good, it helps me build and perfect something that people want, not what i think they want.

Overall, i’m happy with BeerChief’s progress this week. A membership and traffic blitz hasn’t come but as i’ve said before, that’s down to us sneaking the site out on Tuesday, rather than shouting it from the rooftops.

I’m still confident that getting traffic and members on to BeerChief initially won’t be a problem. Keeping them active on the site will. However, that’s my job, that’s one of many challenges facing me & BeerChief.

But the site is looking good, it’s looking unique and more importantly it is unique – there’s nothing like this on the internet. It’s not just a change of template and off we go… it’s been a long hard battle to get the site in to it’s current state and the battle for perfection is far from over.

Sitting beside me right now is a list of 20 improvements i want made to the site. Tomorrow i’ll spend the day working on some and coming up with more. Sunday i’ll spend a few hours working on the site… it’s that committment which keeps things moving forward.

20 improvements doesn’t mean 20 and i’m happy – BeerChief is finished. It means i want 20 improvements to the existing site right now in the short term. If you gave me blank cheques, i’d completely transform the site yet again to take it up another few levels.

At the minute, it’s a case of working with what i’ve got and getting the most out of it. You’ll never hear me say i’m happy with the site – let’s stop working on it – that’s a cardinal sin in IT. One which too many people suffer from.

30 Jan 2009

Why BeerChief is where it is today

Tags: beerchief, investment, potential, promise
Posted in Work | Leave a comment

: Image by Drunken Monkey via Flickr

January has gotten off to a perfect start. Traffic and RSS subscribers on this blog are way above average. BeerChief has now been launched and is slowly taking shape… looking better by the day.

At college, things seem to be getting easier, not harder and i’m not sure whether that’s a case of me working harder or whether things are just actually getting easier – either way it doesn’t matter as i’m getting results in a results based business.

Driving force behind BeerChief v2

On the eve of my Christmas exams, i wasn’t up until the early hours of the morning studying, i was up until the early hours formulating a bullet proof plan to get BeerChief launched publicly ASAP.

My plan was simple; up my stake in BeerChief to 60% from 50% and in return, shoulder the last stage of development by myself – financially and management-wise. Delivery date i set myself was January 27th. That was back on December 14th.

So i was effectively ‘buying’ 10% extra in BeerChief. There were a few reasons for that…

First of all, an extra 10% gives me a 60% stake in BeerChief. Even though the site isn’t worth anything much at the minute, i’m confident enough in myself and in the site and idea to say that it was a wise move – it will be worth something in a couple of years time and my guess is that 10% will be worth a hell of a lot more than what i paid for it.
Secondly, BeerChief was going nowhere. It needed to be grabbed by the by throat and pulled forward. An added 10% incentive was enough for me – that’s what sparked me in to taking on a no-nonsense approach to development.
Thirdly, BeerChief is safe in my hands… i know in my mind that it will not be sold anytime soon or will not die so long as the majority of it is under my control. At 50-50 i might have been tempted to take a ‘well why should i do x, y and z if the rewards are being split down the middle’ attitude. With 60% – that attitude won’t surface as i stand to lose more if BeerChief fails. I don’t like losing anything
Fourthly, i knew i had a lot of time off over Christmas and the new year – about 4 or 5 weeks in total. In the end, that time off turned in to non-stop work from morning to night 5 days a week and then any spare time i had at weekends too. I set a deadline for myself for late January and the reason for that was because i knew i’d be back at college at that stage and strapped for time… i also knew that getting BeerChief up and running by the end of January would be a boost for myself – it would mean 2009 starts with a bang and leaves me with exactly 11 months to get members and traffic.
Fifthly, i knew that if i waited any longer, i could end up blowing what little cash i had on other things. A non-finished BeerChief isn’t worth anything. A finished BeerChief, even if it’s just let sit, is worth much more. With money scarce these days for everyone, it made sense to get rid of it now and put it towards something useful and something that could potentially turn itself in to a goldmine in the future.

Where too now?

BeerChief is by no means perfect. But what we’ve done now is given ourselves a solid base to work from. There’ll be more features coming over the next few weeks and once they’re all in place, the site should start to promote itself and attract beer lovers. Although we’ve just launched BeerChief v2, there is a 3rd already in development and that shows that (a) we’re thinking positively (b) we’re trying to improve all the time.

Although it may take a while, we’re determined to build BeerChief in to a large global community of alcoholics alcholol lovers. THE largest in fact. It’s an ambitious target, but now is the time to do it – when we’re young, broke and enthusiastic…

28 Jan 2009

the BeerChief journey begins

Tags: beer, BeerChief launch
Posted in Work | 4 Comments

BeerChief was quietly launched yesterday. Why quietly? We ran in to several problems at the last minute and had to pull out our big features.

The past few days really have just been problem solving – up until then the site had been running smoothly – no major problems but as we added more complex features and started testing and tweaking them, they started interfering with each other.

So we went ahead anyway with the launch although we’ve deliberately held off from a promotional blitz until the site has all it’s main features up and running. That shouldn’t take too much longer.

I’ve called in some help and we should be firing on all cylinders by Friday.

Anyway, we’re now up and running at long last and from here on in my job switches more to management rather than development. Once we have all our features working, the site still won’t be perfect but it’ll be heading in the right direction.

It’s taken 2 years to get to this stage and although it’s been slow progress, building traffic and membership will be a much more exciting, faster process.

Where will BeerChief go on to from now? Well on the development side of things it needs to have a more minimalist design and it also needs more consistency throughout. Colour harmonies need to be looked at and although there’s tonnes of AJAX scattered throughout the site, we need more

But we’ll save all that for version 3 At the minute, this is the most important version of BeerChief because it’ll put us on the map and lay the foundations for future versions.

Critics will be out in force once we start to push the site out further over the next few weeks, but so long as i’m continuing to work like i have been doing the past while, there’ll be no problems in my eyes. I’ll be happy as i’ll know the bigger picture is getting filled in bit by bit.

So there you have it… BeerChief goes lives to the world and after more than 2 years of waiting, i’ll sleep sounder for the next while… that is until i put myself under more pressure and give myself more deadlines to hit

27 Jan 2009

11th hour problems

Tags: beerchief, january 27th, launch, problems
Posted in Work | 1 Comment

With BeerChief due to launch tomorrow, it was typical that we’d run in to some problems. And run in to some problems we did. I’d planned on spending the day testing and tweaking more but in the end i spent most of it looking for a mysterious problem that arose – seemingly from thin air.

We got it in the end but it’s destroyed my plans for the day (well yesterday) and all of a sudden we’re under real pressure now to roll out the site on time and with as few bugs as possible. I could do with another week really but a deadline is a deadline and i’ll not back out of it now.

If i weren’t so busy with BeerChief i’d be sticking the knife in to DKIT once again as i’ve got 5 hours between classes tomorrow but all of a sudden those 5 hours become very important. Provided DKIT wireless doesn’t let me down like it’s being doing recently, things should stay on schedule for an 8pm BeerChief launch tomorrow.

Whilst i’ve done some work in college on BeerChief, the college equipment and wireless network are too unstable for me to ‘trust’ so the vast majority of BeerChief work has been completed at home where i’ve got my own set up. No downtime, no network problems, no mice with no scroll wheels, no CRT monitors or firewall, no dodgy chairs….

Anyway, tomorrow, 8pm, BeerChief.com – our dedicated server won’t know what hit it – having sat in a hammock sipping martini’s for the past few months

Also, i do realize there’s a lack of depth in my last few blog posts – don’t worry, i haven’t changed my style of writing, i’ve just been too busy to sit down and think like i normally would. Once the dust settles on BeerChief and hopefully it won’t i’ll be sure to fill you guys in on exactly what’s been happening at BeerChief, what i’ve been doing and what i’m thinking.

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