Writing by Matt Collins in Projects & Experiments, collected in chronological order.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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!
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.
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 […]
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 […]