2009 | Irish Internet Entrepreneur - Smemon

01 Nov 2009

October 2009 Review

Tags: 2009, october, review
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Today is the first of November, so there’s no better time to review October. Recently i’ve forgotten about these monthly reviews, but thanks to doit.im there was no way i was forgetting about it this month

photo credit: beautifulcataya

October didn’t get off to a great start for me and i was immediately on the backfoot with work & college work which is never a nice situation to be in. All you can do is keep doing *something* and eventually work gets complete so it’s that sort of attitude which prevents me from going insane or getting lost or fed up with everything. In all my years working online & in college with projects and assignments, i’ve yet to reach ‘breaking’ point and i don’t think i ever will. No matter how much work i have on i always seem to convince myself it could be worse.

Anyway, in October i bought a new hard drive, windows 7 and a new digital camera, so i was good to myself… windows 7 was the big one last month. I’m already loving it’s simplicity and speed and believe it or not i haven’t actually logged on to Vista since i installed 7, despite still having it on my second hard drive!

I’m still working on fine tuning my own style of work, but i have put a lot of time in to that already and gotten immediate results. Expect more handy tools and applications to get my approval this month…

November is already looking like a busy month. In college, i have about half a dozen projects and assignments that have to be completed, including a couple of presentations. Outside of college and online, i hope to get 1 client site online and another on the way to completion.

Having watched us hold the world champions to a draw in Croke Park, i’ll also be watching us take on the French in both Croke Park and the Stade De France in Paris. It will actually be my first time in France, so expect plenty of pictures with my new camera which will hopefully capture an historic footballing event

20 Jul 2009

back from london

Tags: 2009, holidays, london
Posted in Work | 7 Comments

I arrived back in Dublin this evening about 5pm. I had parked at the airport and planned on driving home (guts of 2 hours).

About half an hour from home, i noticed the brake pedal acting wierd… the brakes were still working, but i noticed the sensitivity had changed. I pulled in to a sideroad to see what was up but couldn’t see anything wrong… after testing the brakes further i decided to carry on – after all, they were still working and the car was driving as normal, plus i was in familiar territory as i drive the same road up and down to college every day during the year.

A few minutes later, the car started to slide and one of my rear wheels locked. Luckily i was just on a 100km/hr wide stretch which was fairly quiet (after spending most of the trip on a 120km/hr motorway)… i had anticipated something going wrong though so i managed to crawl in to a nearby factory entrance where the AA eventually came to my rescue (first time i’ve needed them).

Apparently, the rear left brake pad had somehow broken off, become lodged and as a result completely locked the rear left wheel. The car literally couldn’t go anywhere and barely made it up and down on the tow truck – it was as if the handbrake was on on the left rear wheel.

Anyway, my weekend in london flew by. Check out my flickr account for pics. We could have done with an extra day or two. London is such a huge city that there’s ALWAYS something on or something new to see. We stayed in two hilton hotels. Canary Wharf for two nights and Tower Bridge for one night.

Although tripadvisor ratings disagree, i think the hilton canary wharf has the edge, even though it’s cheaper. On Friday night, we went to see ‘Grease’ – the musical. It always amazes me that these shows sell out every night. They go on for months and months…. sometimes years, yet there’s always more people wanting to go. It is a really polished production though and it’s hard to top live performances, with a live band and audience.

Saturday was spent chilling out at Buckingham Palace, Picadilly Circus, Leicester Square and the o2.

We were supposed to be seeing Michael Jackson in concert and outside the o2, there was a memorial wall with messages from fans. It was quite literally covered from top to bottom.

On Sunday, we just chilled out around the London Bridge area (where our hotel was). I also met up with Ciaran of weeno.ie & skimbit which was cool. On Sunday evening then we headed to big ben, london eye and london bridge, just to see them all lit up at night.

I’m wrecked tonight, but forced myself in to blogging… after all i don’t want to break this record i’m on As usual when i go away for any amount of time, there’s a backlog of work and emails waiting for me which is one of the reasons why i don’t go away often. It will take me a full day or two just to catch up and get back in to the swing of things.

01 Jun 2009

May 2009 Review

Tags: 2009, may, review
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May was really all about my summer exams – pass and i had the entire summer free, no worries, no distractions… That’s exactly what i did. I haven’t gotten the results back yet (i’ll get them next week), but i know i’ve passed everything. 3rd year here i come…

Portfolio

Early in the month i added a new logo page to smemon.com which will hold all of my logo design work. I also jazzed up my entire portolio section with some new funky images. I’m not a designer, but i do design logos for my sites and for other people too so i thought why not put them all up for the world to see…

BeerChief

Earlier in the month i also got met up with a potential new partner for BeerChief. Still nothing solid yet, but it’s just a case of finding the time to sit down and meet up face to face (with 2 it’s easy, with 3 it’s tougher… 3 lives, 3 different workloads/schedules etc… we will be meeting up shortly though (as in this week or possibly next).

New Sites

wifimapper.com was launched in May and i began work on a new .ie project and an idea website – both of which are *almost* complete and should be launching in June (early June).

Skydive

Finally, i got the wheels moving again on my charity skydive last week. I’m creating free logos as part of a special offer and it hasn’t been a bad first week at all – netting me roughly $150 in total. It means i’ve raised a total of $350 (roughly) online so far for the skydive. So i’m over a third of the way towards my goal of $1000

But the offer still stands… sites for $99, logos for free – if you’re interested of know of anyone who may be, make sure they hear about this offer

Overall

So all in all, May was a good month – progress, hard work, new sites, loads of creative designs and thinking outside the box….. all positive stuff bar the champions league final. Oh yeah, and i got my pagerank back in May too

04 May 2009

April 2009 Review

Tags: 2009, april, charitybypass, review
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April started off with a nice 16 day break from college (for easter). It was my 22nd birthday on April 7th and a nice low profile one too, just the way i like it.

Charity Bypass

I bought the domain name charitybypass.com and decided to push ahead with the idea i originally came up with as part of my ’18 random ideas’ post.

CharityBypass.com was just completed last week and i think it’s looking pretty sweet. Designed and put together by me using joomla as the CMS so it makes a change from another wordpress based site.

Trying to figure out how google works

I also set up ischocolatedangeroustodogs.com which now ranks on the first page for those terms but so far, only a handful of visitors have come from google. I’ll try to get it to no.1 spot and then analyze it more. It was set up purely based on the fact that google’s keyword tool told me the question ‘is chocolate dangerous to dogs?’ is a very popular question. So i’m trying to compile my own stats to guage the accuracy of google’s figures. Don’t worry, i’d never register a domain like that under normal circumstances

Hotel Get Away

In Mid-April, i spent a night in Jury’s Corke Park hotel. Very nice, very fancy. No complaints apart from the weather

Back to College

It was back to college after that for me and just a case of getting over the finish line before my summer exams. My summer exams start this day next week (11th May) so i’ll now have to knuckle down and put in that one last bit of work which is required to see me through to 3rd year.

To infinity and beyond

The past few days i’ve also started a new portfolio section on this blog, showcasing my artistic flair, entreneurial mind and my ever growing empire of .coms The portfolio section is still under construction, but getting there slowly. As i’ve said before, i see it as a very important step to help progress both myself and the blog.

Other Stuff

I also crammed in a lot more work in to April than the post above would lead you to believe. I’m working and getting started on several other projects but until i’m happy they’re all official and moving in the right direction, i’ll not be blogging much about them.

18 Apr 2009

Traffic up 1400% against 2007

Tags: 2007, 2009, google analytics, growth, traffic
Posted in Work | 2 Comments

I was bored today, so i decided to look at some stats for this blog and compare 2009 with previous years. It made for impressive reading 2009 is already on course for a 186% rise in traffic over 2008.

traffic

2008 seen an increase of 524% over 2007 (i’m measuring unique visits only). I’ve compared the first 3 and half months of each year from ’07 to ’09 and the growth is pretty clear

2007 Jan 1st – April 18th

3,355 visits
6,839 pageviews
2.04 pages/visit
180 seconds average time on site

2008 Jan 1st – April 18th

17,587 visits
28, 375 pageviews
1.61 pages/visit
94 seconds average time on site

2009 Jan 1st – April 18th

48,592 visits
58,036 pageviews
1.19 pages/visit
37 seconds average time on site

Total Traffic 2007

24,517 visits
41,784 pageviews

Total Traffic 2008

80,243 visits
127,843 pageviews

Total Projected Traffic 2009

150,000+ visits
175,000+ pageviews

You could argue though, that although traffic has increased, the quality of it may have decreased. The average time spent on the site has shrunk by almost 500% since 2007 and the number of pages per visit has also shrunk by 170%.

There’s a few reasons for that though;

In 2007, most of those visits were probably from myself, hence the extremely high average time on site

The site has been revamped several times since 2007 – some changes were made deliberately to reduce pageloads.
RSS subscriber numbers were also much smaller in 2007
The blog has a lot of backlinks from not very targetted places like bebo, twitter, youtube etc…

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Posts Tagged ‘2009’