Writing on AI, software development, product strategy, marketplaces, entrepreneurship, and online business, collected in chronological order.
We’re at an interesting but confusing point in time. AI agents are good enough to be useful but setting them up can be frustratingly hard. And setting them up to be both useful and secure? Good luck with that. I’ve been trying to figure out how best to set up my own AI agents and […]
Cloudflare’s ‘Code Mode’ got some attention in the AI developer community recently, thanks to a popular blog post about it. It’s based on the ‘CodeACT‘ pattern for AI agents which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. These are my initial first-hand impressions of using it. What is CodeACT? Most LLM-based AI […]
Heard of ‘AI slop’? There’s something else I’m worried about these days and I’m calling it “AI splurge.” What is AI Splurge? AI splurge is the output of AI coding agents when they get overzealous and create more code than you need. It can take many forms, but here are a few I’ve seen a […]
I’ve heard a few people say that, since generative AI systems can hallucinate, we’re alway going to have to double-check their work in great detail if we want to be confident it’s correct. I disagree. Why? Because AI systems can do much of this checking themselves. And, when the cost/benefit tradeoff is right, I believe […]
Journalists sometimes get things wrong. Wouldn’t it be nice if AI could help us spot when they do? I recently prototyped an LLM-powered fact checker (using web search APIs) to see if it could do just that. It looked promising! In case you’re interested in learning more, I gave a talk to the MLOps London […]
It is now clear: AI is transforming how software is developed. Anyone leading software development teams needs to be keeping a close eye on this to understand the tools’ rapidly evolving capabilities as well as their limitations and risks. Here’s a snapshot (as of January 2025) of how I think AI tools currently fit into […]
What if AI could help you generate ideas for products and build them? That’s what happened when I used AI tools to create Flowdrafter—a writing app that solves a common problem for writers. (It even became Product Hunt’s #1 productivity tool of the week!) Can AI Coding Agents Help with Marketing? My wife is a […]
I heard about FastHTML a few months back and was immediately intrigued by its pitch: “Modern web applications in pure Python Built on solid web foundations, not the latest fads – with FastHTML you can get started on anything from simple dashboards to scalable web applications in minutes.” https://www.fastht.ml/ This sounded like something I could […]
Lots of people are starting to explore what can be done with agent-based AI systems. It feels like there’s huge potential in them. But getting an agentic system to work reliably enough to use in practice often turns out to be very hard. Here are a few techniques that can help with reliability. Technique 1: […]
As of 27th September 2023, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) has ended its strike with the big studios, having reached a tentative agreement with the big studios that will now be voted on by the WGA’s members. The deal has some key terms about AI and could be a sign of what will be […]
[Edit: I wrote this a while ago and I’d now recommend you look at the idea of ‘evals’ as a way to approach this.] A challenge when developing software that makes use of large language models is writing automated tests for it. With traditional software, you tend to know exactly what output you expect to […]
If you’re looking to name a new company or product, it can be tricky to know how to go about it. Arielle Jackson of First Round Capital shared a great process for coming up with a name on Lenny’s Podcast. 1. Figure Out Your Positioning Fill out the following positioning template: “For (target customer) who (statement of need […]
The idea of product-led growth is an appealing one to many company leaders. But is it really viable for your product? Elena Verna, an expert on product-led growth shared some great insights into this question in this episode of Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. Here’s a quick run-down of some of the main ideas. Product can contribute […]
How do you feel about your company’s product vision, product strategy and product roadmap? These are high-leverage areas where many companies could sharpen their thinking and ways of working to become more effective. One of my favourite product management experts, Marty Cagan (author of Inspired), was recently interviewed on the ‘This Is Product Management’ podcast about these topics and […]
One of the interesting things about online marketplaces is their inherent network effects. They’re hard to get going (not least because of the chicken-and-egg problem) but — if successful — can become very valuable as it’s hard for other businesses to compete. As a result of this defensibility, online marketplaces have been popular with VCs. […]
Solving the chicken-and-egg problem is a key one for any marketplace business. Here’s one hack that uses scarcity to help with solving it. What is the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem? When you’re starting a marketplace, you typically have no customers and no suppliers. With no customers, it’s hard to get suppliers on board. And, having no […]
How do you find and hire a CTO for your business? As a business owner you might be looking to find a CTO for a number of reasons: You have an established business and are looking for someone with the experience to help you use technology more effectively and strategically. You’re looking to raise money […]
If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and has raised over $70 million in funding. […]
What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental differences between the industries they chose to play in or their precise business […]
How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs. So how did Thumbtack get where they are? What tactics are behind their apparent success? The founder of […]
What churn rate can you expect for your subscription box business? What’s a good churn rate? What’s a bad churn rate? If you haven’t yet launched, what number should you put in your business plan? I wrote in a previous post about typical subscription e-commerce retention rates and how, when considering launching a subscription box businesses, your assumptions about retention […]
You have a WordPress blog or website. You want some changes made to it, so you need to find someone who can help. But who? One effective way to find a WordPress developer is through a freelancing website like oDesk or Elance. But finding the right person can be very time-consuming and error-prone. How do […]
I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll up your sleeves up and […]
PandoDaily have been running a series of articles lately on ‘ecommerce 2.0’, featuring video clips from a dinner with the CEOs of some of the top ecommerce startups: Birchbox, Warby Parker, One Kings Lane and Jack Threads. I’ve rounded up the clips from the series here as they’re worth a watch if you’re interested in […]
iPad Share of Visits Up 23% In the month before Christmas, 13.2% of our unique visits came from iPads. In the seven days since Christmas, that has leapt to 16.2%. That’s a whopping 23% increase in a matter of weeks. I guess plenty of our customers received iPads for Christmas! Is It Just Technophiles? Who […]
Screen Pages, a UK ecommerce agency, publish some great data on their blog. Their latest post is about Magento e-commerce checkout conversion rates. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons: It gives some useful benchmark conversion rate numbers. It shows how conversion rates can and do vary significantly between sites with checkouts that are functionally […]
This is a great TED talk: Rory Sutherland makes an entertaining case for thinking more about psychology in the way we design and enhance things (and less about technology). One example: one of the best improvements to the London Underground in ROI terms did nothing to change the trains or how they ran. Instead, it […]
According to an email I’ve just received from Google, they are today rolling out Google +1 Recommendations to all users. When you hover over a +1 button, you may now see a popup showing other pages on the site that your friends have recommended via +1. My account has been in the beta test for […]
What’s a typical retention rate for a subscription commerce business? If you’re trying to model a potential new subscription box business, or just wondering how profitable an existing business is, retention rate is a key variable. What retention rate should you assume? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” But you need something to plug […]
The latest Grovo ‘Expert Series’ video is an interesting one. Tom Critchlow is an SEO expert and talks through what you need to know about video SEO. (And he’s a Brit, too, which makes a nice change!) Here’s the video series. There are 13 snippets to go through, so it takes a while to watch. If […]
Working out how to accept payments online is a pain. What do you need, exactly? Which payment gateway should you choose? How much will it cost? I’ve set up a few online businesses now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of it all, but I remember how confusing all this payments stuff […]
It’s 11.38pm as I’m starting to write this, so I’ll keep it brief. The latest startup interview from Grovo came out today. It’s with David Tisch who runs the TechStars incubator in New York. David sees lots of startups from an early stage, so has an interesting vantage point on things. Here’s a quick rundown […]
I told you about an interesting interview with the Bonobos founder last week on a site called Grovo. Well, Grovo’s next interview with a founder of a successful Internet company is now available and it’s another good one. This week’s interview is with Ben Lerer, the co-founder and CEO of Thrillist, a daily email city […]
Google AdWords has revenues of $30 billion or so a year. With that sort of money involved, you might think the AdWords ad review system would be pretty good. It seems it could still do with a bit of work. One group of scammers has been fooling Google for at least 6 weeks now. I […]
I came across an online education website called Grovo this evening. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already? Grovo has lined up a series of what promise to be interesting interviews with successful figures in the world of online business. Their first interview (and only one for now) is with Andy Dunn, one of the co-founders […]
I want to like Google. They have all those free services: search, Gmail, Analytics… what’s not to like with those? And I’ve been a customer of Google’s for a long time, too – spending money on their AdWords ads since February 2007. Google does a lot of good things and I’m sure most people who work […]
There’s been a lot of interest in the subscription e-commerce business model lately. It’s a model that I think is particularly powerful. Getting Someone to Buy is Hard Anyone who has run an e-commerce website will tell you that getting a website visitor to buy something is hard. Think about what’s involved: First, you have […]
You’ve started your business, but money’s tight. You haven’t got much cash to play with. Here are 23 tactics you can use to be frugal and save money: 1. Use Lean Startup Methodology Credit: quinet under Creative Commons license Make sure you’re building something people want and will pay for. Don’t spend time and money building it […]
People sometimes ask me if I’ve found having an MBA helpful in starting businesses. So is it? If you’re thinking of starting a business, here are seven reasons why you might not want to do an MBA first: MBA Costs are Potential Startup Capital: Doing an MBA is expensive. If you’ll be putting your own money […]
If you’re setting up a web-based business in London, there are lots of resources that can come in handy once you know about them. I thought I’d share some of my favourites here in case there a few you don’t yet know about. This is a selection of everything from interesting events to attend and […]
I’ve recently launched a new subscription e-commerce business and it turns out we’re in a hot space again (as we were with DealBunch and the daily deal phenomenon last year)… Boudoir Privé is all about meeting the desire that a lot of women have for beauty products. Each month, we send out luxury ‘beauty boxes’ with […]
Are you thinking of setting up a two-sided marketplace business? It’s a hard thing to do, so you’re going to need all the help you can get. Why not learn from how other people have managed it successfully in the past? One challenge of creating this kind of marketplace is that you’re going to have to […]
What will local advertising look like a few years from now? BIA/Kelsey recently released slides about the local ad marketplace in the US. A few interesting points they make: It’s Big – The local ad market brings in $133 billion annually It’s Fairly Traditional – 92% of local ad spending still goes to traditional media […]
Google today announced ‘Boost’ a new, simplified self-service ad offering. It’s in beta for the time-being and only available in a few cities in the US, but it could be an interesting step in helping small businesses get started with online advertising. Google have, for some time now, been encouraging small, local businesses to set […]
Patrick over at Micro ISV on a Shoestring has a fantastic post summarising lessons learnt at the recent Business of Software 2010 Conference. He goes through highlights of a number of talks and it’s good reading for anyone in the business of selling software. Here’s one nugget I found particularly interesting that’s potentially handy for […]
I was just making a payment via PayPal and discovered that PayPal have a new checkout page. Here it is with the payment via PayPal option showing (this is the default for people who already have a PayPal account): As before, those who don’t have a PayPal account are instead prompted for credit card details: […]
I spend a lot of time with people who know a lot about the web. They’re either building online businesses or they’re 30-something friends who live in London and who use the internet frequently in their day-to-day lives. That’s why I found it interesting recently to work with someone who’s outside of that circle, to […]
Could you be saving yourself time and money with a PSD to HTML service? PSD to HTML services allow you to send in the design for a web page as a PSD file (the kind of thing your web designer will create in Photoshop) and give you back a set of HTML and CSS files […]
Very soon, together with my co-founders, I’m going to be launching a new venture. Like VouChaCha, it’s going to offer local deals. And like MenuLover, it’s food-related. This time, though, there’s a new twist: group buying. The group buying bit works like this: When you sign up for our service, we use the bargaining power […]
130 assorted programmers, designers and business folk; 6 eager teams; one crazily ambitious goal. Launch48 was back. The goal? Launch a web startup in under 48 hours. I attended the first Launch48 event back in February. It was great fun and a fantastic way to meet people with entrepreneurial flair. That time, the local voucher […]
I recently spent some time comparing current e-commerce platforms (a.k.a. shopping carts). It’s a complicated area, so I thought I’d share my findings here in case they can be useful to others. These are my opinions and analysis based on my own research and experimentation and are biased towards sites targeting a UK market. First […]
Here’s a great slide deck from Dave McClure on startup metrics. If you’re doing a web startup, these slides are a great summary of a lot of the stuff you should be thinking about (IMHO). Check out slides 9 and 12 in particular. The appendix at the end has some further details on some of […]
I’ve been working on a new service lately, called ReceiptFarm. The idea of it is to take the pain out of doing expenses. It works like this: You send us your expense receipts once a month. We scan and input them. You get a report about your spending and a digital archive of your receipts. […]
I’ve been researching some new business ideas lately and it struck me how rarely people seem to discuss quick and cheap ways of testing the critical assumptions upon which business models are based. Often we’re keen to play with Excel, but less keen to check that the numbers we’re typing in are grounded in reality. […]
Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event. This time, it was Launch48, organised by a couple of friends of mine, Ian Broom and Adil Mohammed. Thanks to lots of great work from Ian and Adil, some generous sponsors who […]
John Buckman, founder and CEO of Magnatune.com (and founder of BookMooch), gave a really interesting talk on how to be successful as an Internet entrepreneur at Loic Le Meur’s recent LeWeb08 conference in Paris. He had a lot of good, practical tips about what he sees as the ‘right’ approach to entrepreneurship. His presentation is […]
This weekend I was lucky enough to be part of the second Social Innovation Camp. Like the first SI Camp back in April, the idea was to get geeks and social innovators together for an intense couple of days to work in small teams to prototype some socially-beneficial web tools. It was a huge amount […]
This is a great slideshow (with audio) on how to use metrics to drive the development of your web app. Designing and Optimizing the DNA of a Killer App by Dan Olsen – Startonomics View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: software consumer)
Greg Sterling over on Search Engine Land shared some interesting findings the other day from a Yahoo study into consumers’ behaviour when choosing local services and providers. The numbers regarding consumers’ choice of research tools (generic search engine vs. vertical search engine vs. internet yellow pages) are particularly interesting as there’s quite a lot of […]
One of the more successful UK hyperlocal sites so far, UpMyStreet, has had a makeover. It has a new homepage and, according to the site themselves, improved local business search and rating functionality. Do the updates to their local review system mean they’re keen to get into the space that the likes of Qype and […]
Can Sales of Desktop Apps Predict Successful Web Apps? Attending FOWA a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about web apps in general. With the move from desktop to web-hosted software, I’m wondering if what’s selling now in desktop versions will be a good predictor for what people will pay for in web app […]
photo credit: Mr. Siegal According to Journalism.co.uk today, hyperlocal news site Outside.in has confirmed that it will be launching a UK version. They report that the UK site is currently in beta. Outside.in currently powers ‘buzz maps‘ for the Washington Post that show which places are currently being mentioned most by local bloggers. No doubt […]
photo credit: Peter Ito The Guardian’s Oliver Luft reported on Wednesday that the Trinity Mirror-owned Liverpool Echo has launched a map-based news service where they are geotagging news stories and allowing for postcode-based searches. According to the article, Trinity Mirror have plans to roll this out more widely. Trinity Mirror also have other experiments with […]
Greg Sterling has an interesting post on his Screenwerk blog on the challenges of selling SEM to small local businesses. He argues that most small businesses don’t understand enough about SEM and all the metrics involved to evaluate an SEM service except by trying it. When they do, often the ROI is not great because […]
This data has been out for a few months now, but for anyone whose business depends on advertising, it’s worth a second look. It’s from the World Advertising Research Center’s Advertising Statistics Yearbook 2008. UK Advertising Expenditure at current prices, 2007 Advertising Medium Total advertising expenditure £ millions Year-on-year % change Press 7,716 -1.6% Television […]
MapQuest recently launched a new local service called MapQuest Local that more or less follows the Localmouth pattern. Like Localmouth, they’re aggregating content from a number of local information providers to provide guides to individual places. Currently, the information they’re aggregating includes business listings from City’sBest and CityGuide, news from Topix, weather from WeatherBug, events […]
According to their own press release, HelloMetro has been awarded a trademark from the US patent office for use of the term ‘Hyperlocal’. In a comment on Search Engine Watch, their CEO explains that their use describes their service of “advertising/providing information on the goods and services of others that are of local interest”. Astonishing! […]
photo credit: wit Here’s a nice article on selling expensive, niche software.
photo credit: mattbuck4950 Out-Law had an interesting article yesterday about how Ryanair is taking a Dutch fare comparison website to court in Ireland for screenscraping. If I understand rightly, Ryanair’s case hinges on whether or not the terms of use of their website count as a contract; they say they do whereas the scrapers argue […]
photo credit: alexliivet It’s time to put your thinking cap on. The UK government’s Power of Information Taskforce last week launched a £20,000 competition for good ideas about how to use a raft of public information. Alongside the launch, the government is making available a number of new sets of data and APIs, including a […]
I just came across these guys: http://www.brownbook.net/ They’re a sort of open yellow pages where anyone can add, edit or review businesses. This is very similar to what sites like WeLoveLocal and Yelp are already doing, but in a world where many small business owners have yet to really get to grips with online marketing, […]
photo credit: Urbankudos “Nine out of 10 say rules should govern social sites” According to Bobby Johnson in yesterday’s Guardian (Facebook Information Should be Regulated, Survey Says), “89% of those surveyed by the Press Complaints Commission said there should be a set of widely accepted rules to help prevent personal information – such as private […]
photo credit: Ed Yourdon Newspapers as we know them are dying. Offline readership numbers are dwindling as more and more people find what they need on the Web. Owners and editors everywhere have been grappling for some time now with how to stay relevant in today’s increasingly online world. Some think the answer is to […]
photo credit: Tony the Misfit TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors. Meetro’s idea was to let users download an application onto their wifi-enabled mobile phones that would then allow them to find other Meetro users nearby to chat with. […]
I’ve just been catching up with TechCrunch, and read that FatDoor, a social network for neighbours, has closed down. At one point it sounded promising (and had a fancy-looking neighbour-mapping feature), but I guess things didn’t look good in their beta testing. The founders have changed direction, launching a new site called Center’d, with an […]
photo credit: sowri Here’s a neat idea… these guys are selling words from a dictionary.
photo credit: alexanderdrachmann I was recently helping a friend out with his Rails project and we were trying to figure out the best way to handle queries in a RESTful Rails app, i.e. returning a subset of items meeting certain conditions. After a bit of poking around, here’s what looks like the most promising convention […]
Credit: Robert Scoble So you’ve got a great idea for a killer Web startup but you’re not a techie yourself? You’re looking for a technical business partner or CTO; someone who understands business but can pull the technical side of things together and make your ideas real? This kind of person can be hard to […]
I had the pleasure of attending Social Innovation Camp this weekend. It was a chance to meet some great people, all with an interest in making the world a better place by using web technology as the basis for social ventures of one sort or another. A little like Startup Weekend, the idea was to […]
photo credit: Seth Thomas Rasmussen Do you collect tips and tricks? Do you want to know how to do almost anything better? And do you like to share what you know? Then Tipfo is for you. The alpha version of the site is ready to try out now. Expect broken links, amateurish logos and all […]
HireGuru is a new site I’ve been working on. It is a directory of UK hire companies with details of companies hiring out things from sumo suits to helicopters.
I’ve just revamped mulogy.com and finally moved this blog to a private WordPress installation. Let me know if you have any problems with any of it.
I’ve been working away on a new site designed to help people connect with other local people. It is inspired mainly by Peuplade, a site that has done very well in France. An initial version is now live, so if you have a few minutes, do give it a go. I’d love to know what […]
Here’s a post about Outside.in recently switching from PHP to Rails. Interestingly, they cite access to GIS functionality as one reason for the switch. After the switch, their hosting costs were roughly the same as before and their codebase was down to just 20% of its former size!
Here’s another little problem I was just hitting and the solution in case it happens to help someone else out there. If you’re trying to use a plugin (in this case the restful_authentication plugin) and you’re hitting an error like this when you use ./script/generate: “Couldn’t find ‘authenticated’ generator” Check to make sure that you […]
Today I decided to get my head around REST and, more specifically, whether and how I should use it in my Rails development projects. REST (or REpresentational State Transfer – see Wikipedia), is all about resources. As I understand it, in a perfectly RESTful application, every object is resource with a unique identifier (in this […]
I spent this last weekend with a group of 30 or so web developers, designers and entrepreneurs that I’d never met before as part of something called London Startup Weekend. The idea was something that had already been tried out in the US, but was a first for the UK: to get a bunch of […]
Half way through discussing my online takeaway idea with a friend, what should show up on Dragons’ Den, but two guys with a different online menu idea! We couldn’t believe it! hungryhouse.co.uk are similar to just-eat.co.uk and succeeding in getting £100,000 of funding from the Dragons in exchange for 50% of their company (although with […]
Is it just me, or is PayPal’s European customer service laughably bad? I wrote to them on 10th October about a problem I’d been having. Thankfully, I didn’t really need a reply from them as my issue was resolved. I say thankfully, because it took them until just now (16th November) to send me a […]
Alright, it’s time to talk about a new idea I’ve been looking at and have been putting through some initial market testing. It’s quite simple, really: put takeaway menus online. I’m planning to scan as many menus as possible and put them all on a website so that whenever you’re hungry you can find the […]
Yes, it was time for another round of CSS fun and some delving into istockphoto. I’ve been a bit freer with the colours with this version which I think makes the site look a bit more inviting. I’ve also added some graphical buttons to make the site look a bit more professional and hopefully encourage […]
OK, I’m a bit late with this post, but for completeness, here are the short-list and winners of the Localmouth Best Local Limericks Awards 2007: 50 Top Limericks Winning Limericks Enjoy!
It’s really very simple, but this one took me a while to figure out, so I thought I’d post it in case it helps someone else. If you want to add a rel='nofollow' attribute to a link generated with a Rails helper, you just need to specify it in the html_options hash argument to link_to […]
Fancy a bit of fun? Here’s your chance… In a blaze of publicity (well, sort of), the localmouth Best Local Limerick Awards 2007 were launched last week.
Localmouth was feeling a bit empty. To help counter that problem I’ve hooked up a number of information feeds from other websites. Localmouth now pulls in listings for local news, events, property, jobs and personal ads. I’ve also added a Google map of the local area. Here’s how the new local homepage looks.
The localmouth site now has an updated look, incorporating the new logo. I think it looks a bit more professional, but could be a bit more lively. Maybe the photos should make a return…?
localmouth now has a new logo! Thanks to everyone who helped choose it.
Right, 67 minutes after I reported that I’d fixed the problem, my sites were back online.In total my sites were down for 5 hours. Here’s a rough breakdown of where the time went: 2.5 hours before I saw email telling me my site had been taken down 1 hour to be allowed access to server […]
As I write, my web hosting account has been suspended for “abuse” for a little over 3 hours and counting. It’s the first time this has happened to me, and as I don’t have any real traffic to speak of, it’s an interesting fire drill. I am particularly keen to see how my web hosting […]
Listier is not the only new creation here. Localmouth is a new site I’ve set up over the last week which provides a local community homepage for every village, town and suburb in the UK. The residents of each place can use it to share local information such as details of local clubs and things […]
A new site has recently joined the mulogy stable. Listier is a bit of a toy thing for the moment, but it does already do something useful. You can create online lists that are visible to everyone. Other people can then contribute to your lists. This could be useful for collaboration between friends or to […]
It’s been a few weeks since my last post, so there’s a fair bit to catch up on. I’ll start with what’s been going on with VillageRatings. I spent a while grappling with adding a large database of UK placenames and locations to VillageRatings. This turned out to be quite involved, mainly because the dataset […]
Taking the usability tips I received yesterday, I’ve spent most of the day updating the VillageRatings site, applying the “low-hanging-fruit” changes. Here’s the new-look version.
At Internet World, the affable and knowledgeable Simon and Alex (I hope I have the names right) from Nomensa and a very nice chap from Cyber-Duck gave me some great advice for VillageRatings (much of which will be generally applicable) that I hope to put to good use in the months to come. Here’s the […]
I spent today at the Internet World show at Earls Court. Apart from being a good excuse to escape from my trusty laptop for a day, there were a number of interesting talks and even some web usability experts on hand offering some free advice. Out of the presentations I attended, the most interesting tidbits […]
I’ve just finished adding mapping features to the VillageRatings site. It turns out that displaying maps is relatively easy, thanks to the wonderful Google Maps API. What is tricky (in the UK at least) is computing the right longitude and latitude values for the things you want to display on the map (in this case […]
How long could I live in Peckham without creating a Peckham-centric web site? Not very long. OK, so PeckhamLive is never going to be big. And it’s not the prettiest site to see the light of day. But it could be useful if you happen to live in Peckham and are looking for local information. […]
I’ve just re-implemented the VillageRatings site in Rails. The site allows people to read about UK villages and leave their own feedback on them. You can now list villages in order of their ratings for any attribute or overall average rating which wasn’t possible before. And, thanks to Rails, the homepage has been completely overhauled. […]
LondonTwenty is designed as a starting page for Londoners. The idea is to provide categorised links to the top twenty (or so) sites for Londoners of which people might not otherwise be aware or of which they might not remember the names. It also has a London-specific search engine. The next time you’re looking for […]
This is some code I wrote to send data from a javascript object (on a browser) to a Rails application on a server. [My aim was to use the Google AJAX search API and a Google local search controller to search for and select business locations that I then wanted to store away in a […]