Archive for May, 2006

Is my future in application development?

Saturday, May 27th, 2006 | Life

It’s the middle of the afternoon and I am about the make my 4th blog post. Although to be fair I probably won’t make many more today, if any as I will be out all this evening and so won’t get a chance until after midnight. Unless I got to DEC-10 in which case I will probably end up blogging. But what is ironic is that yesterday I thought, right, I’m not going to blog tomorrow. Yet by the time I had gone to bed I had already blogged twice!

Anyway, so yeah, getting down to the post content. I’ve been thinking recently, that perhaps the way forward at least for the foreseeable future is application development with Particle Soft. In recent years, while I’ve worked on it, my main focus has always been running sites and communities and attempting to generate revenue that way.

While being in content has generated me some revenue, I have put a lot of effort in and the return given that amount of effort has not been great. Also maintaining content sites is more of a long haul, do a little everyday type thing. While I have managed this with things like daily celeb news sites, with application development it is something you can just not do for weeks and then attack like crazy for a week when you are really fired up about it which suites me well.

So perhaps I would be better focusing a lot more attention on Particle Soft rather than focusing on my content sites and see where that leads. I do have a business model for it which while it hasn’t really been implemented, has been somewhat developed (I half half a customer system written on the site, it still needs a lot more work but the foundations are there). Although I wasn’t planning in implementing the business model until the scripts were more popular which I think is the next step, bringing more attention to the scripts.

I think given I already have four products out there, one almost ready to release and many others in various stages of development it is something I am going to have to give serious thought to.

Particle Blogger 1.2.0 is out

Saturday, May 27th, 2006 | Life

I really like the new version of Particle Blogger! So I thought I would post two screenshots. The first is the edit post page of the previous version. The second is the edit post page of the new version. The new admin panel is just soooo much better.

Particle Blogger 1.1.2 Particle Blogger 1.2.0

Particle Blogger 1.2.0

Saturday, May 27th, 2006 | Life

I’ve been talking about the new version of Particle Blogger over on the Particle Soft blog over the course of about a week now although I haven’t really made much in the way of a statement of progress beyond it is going fairly well and could be available fairly soon.

Well, I still don’t want to make any official announcements but I think on my personal blog I can go into more detail without worrying about that.

It’s basically finished. Tomorrow we’re going to upgrade our official blog and do some final testing and if everything works fine it will be released very soon. And it’s going to be a good release too. The admin panel has been major changed to be almost unrecognisable from the old one, save maybe a faint hint of the same colour scheme but it is massively better! Things like error messages, general look and layout, navigation just blow the old system away.

Why flat screens are the way forward

Saturday, May 27th, 2006 | Life

I accidentally made a call of my mobile by sitting on it (I think it was locked though as it said SOS call). Have I become one of those idiots who costs lives because they accidentally call the emergency services? Hmm, don’t think I’ve gone that far given I did lock my phone. But it does show that it’s a bad idea for them to allow emergency calls to be made while a phone is locked.

But yeah I heard my monitor go wierd as the phone signal passed through it and so I pulled my phone out of my pocket in preparation to answer the incoming call to find it was actually an outgoing call which I quickly cancelled.

Girl with a one-track mind

Friday, May 26th, 2006 | Life

Kieran pointed me in the direction of a few interesting blogs, one of which was Girl with a one-track mind which has a lot on about sex and relationships and such. I’ve been reading through it today and it provides quite an interesting read.

Warning signs

Friday, May 26th, 2006 | Life

Here is something I thought up a few weeks back but never got round to writing. It’s a guide to how to spot when something is wrong…

  • I haven’t posted on a forum in 72 hours
  • I haven’t updated one of my websites in 60 hours
  • I haven’t messaged you back on Facebook in 48 hours
  • I haven’t responded to your email in 36 hours
  • I haven’t blogged in 24 hours

Can’t beat a good 11 hour sleep part 2

Friday, May 26th, 2006 | Life

So yeah, we were drinking in the Quilted Lama from 2 until 8. They weren’t serving food as the chef was off as were the two guys that could cover for him but given the situation they let us bring our own food in so I had a chicken tikka wrap about 3. We then headed off to Sarann’s via DEC-10 (to check emails and write blog posts) and arrived sometime before 9.

It took us a while in DEC-10 as we got into a debate about whether it was the moral thing to do to steal thousands of pounds. Matt seemed to think it was.

Anyway, we had a whole pizza night at Sarann’s involving lots of pizza and more drinking too. Michelle got nicely drunk as was B. B actually came to the Quilted Lama later and left there before the rest of us because she was wasted. Which shows quite an impressive performance on Kieran and Matt’s part as they had been drinking gin all day and were still relatively sober at the end of the day (they got through a bottle when we got back to Sarann’s also).

So yeah (a phrase I probably overuse) that was last night then this afternoon I went to see X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which was a pretty kick ass movie. And now I’m in for a night of finally trying to sort my e-mails out. How am I so busy when I don’t have anything to do (as in, for uni, I obviously do have things to do)?

Can’t beat a good 11 hour sleep

Friday, May 26th, 2006 | Life

Ok, it’s 2 so I probably should be up by now but I didn’t get to bed till 3 am. Anyway this blog post needs to be put on hold as I’ve just had a phone call from Claire inviting me to see X-Men 3. So I said yeah that sounds good, when? 2:30! I can be on a bus if I rush at 2:10 but it’s still not going to get me there on time. So yeah, to be continued.

Another afternoon at the Quilted Lama

Thursday, May 25th, 2006 | Life

Had my maths exam this morning which went pretty well, I passed (I’m pretty sure, I obviously can’t be 100%) then after a quick trip back to Bod I headed to the Quilted Lama and have been drinking via 2. Next plan, to head off to Sarann’s and drink more. What can I say, it’s the student life. Seriously, that place is being kept alive by us, today is was really, really busy compared to normal and that is because there were two other groups of about 4-6 people in there and at one point there was another guy as well. Although most of the time we were the only ones in there.

Blogging via email

Thursday, May 25th, 2006 | Life

Hmm, this didn’t work too well…

Content-Disposition: inline

I’m emailing this, to see if the blogging by email thing works. Interesting=
to see if it does. If you are reading this then it probably has worked, if=
I’m reading this in my sent box it probably hasn’t ;).

Need to sort those formatting and random headers out.