Reality check, impatience, opportunity.
April 28th, 2013 by TheEditor
It’s Sunday night and I’ve called the programming quits for the night as I sit here and watch Doctor Who and regroup.
My original plan was to be able to remove the “beta” tag from Monkeypulse tonight. That will not be happening. I finally sat back and looked at what I had and what it was I want to accomplish and saw just how far apart those two things were. This isn’t a bad thing, just a reality check.
As it stands now Monkepulse is up and running, it works. That in itself makes me very proud and very happy. Even in the very early state it’s in right now I know that it will be something. What needs to be done is a lot of rewriting, a lot of visual fixes and a whole ton of additions.
I spent today fixing css issues. I develop on 2 24 inch monitors and always forget about smaller screens and of course mobile devices. There are plans to do a mobile version of the site but I’m just not there yet. As I was doing that it became obvious that I need to make far reaching changes with what I already have. I need to modularize everything. I’m wasting a ton of time now making the same changes on multiple pages.
I’ve done 0 SEO work. I looked and realized that I hadn’t even set a title tag on most of my pages. If you search Google for Monkeypulse the only real hits you will get are to posts I’ve made here. That’s not good.
Lastly, but not leastly, is the fact that Monkeypulse did not melt a server on it’s first week live. Unfortunately I’ll have to keep going to work for the foreseeable future. That is not to say it won’t become what I want it to, it will just take some patience, and a ton of work. I’m ok with both.
Things are changing at work and hopefully that will make that situation more tolerable for a longer period of time. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
Finally and on a more personal note. There is this rift in my life it seems lately. If you look at things in my life based on career, finances, and all things of that nature it is all steadily rising. Things are great really. On the other hand I’m finding my life very lonely lately.
The thing about good things happening is that if you don’t have anyone to share them with they lost a lot of their luster. This isn’t a complaint just a simple observation. I’m finding it difficult to find harmony between my job, working on Monkeypulse and still having any sort of time left over to do anything else.
That is where we stand today. A very very full plate and a lot of opportunity.
The Editor
Posted in Bio, Geek, Monkeypulse, Random thought | Comments (0)
The site is up in beta! Monkeypulse lives.
April 21st, 2013 by TheEditor
Just a quickie blurb for this evening saying that finally after a long weekend Monkeypulse is up and live. This will be beta week I know I’ll be getting lots of “this doesn’t work” emails. Hopefully not, I think it’s pretty solid.
No more computer for me today. I’m going to unplug everything and read a book. My poor eyes didn’t see sun for the whole weekend.
The Editor
Posted in Bio, Daily musings, Monkeypulse | Comments (0)
It’s almost time to launch Monkeypulse.com! I can’t believe it’s done.
April 17th, 2013 by TheEditor
Finally after I don’t even know how many hours, I think it’s finally time to launch Monkeypulse.com to the general public. I’m sitting here going over my list of “stuff to fix” and I realize that I’ll have all of it done this weekend. All the big things on that list are going to be saved for the first revision and for the pay portion of the site, but the actual working site is done!
That being said, I’ve decided that May 1st is going to be release day. I can finally see if anyone else, hopefully lots of anyone else’s, thinks this is a good idea. I’m hoping for the best. The best being me being able to stop going to my day job and just work on MP.
If you don’t know, Monkeypulse is sort of an aggregator site but with a twist. All the other sites give you links ranked by popularity, we do it by intelligence. Every link is run through an engine and ranked accordingly. So that article on string theory is going to be very far ahead of whatever the new celebrity gossip story is. Seperating the wheat from the chaff if you will. Plus its a fun an snarky site with a lot of tongue in cheek humor. Plus there are monkeys.
That is the extent of my pitch which will be read by maybe a few people on twitter. Thank god I have somone handling the twitter account, the FB account and all the rest of that stuff.
Other than that things are pretty boring, due mostly to the fact that between my real job and MP I’m working like 80 hours a week lately. I can say that the new apartment is working out very well, it was a really good decision to move no matter how many steps were involved.
Time to get ready for work.
The Editor
Posted in Bio, Daily musings, Monkeypulse | Comments (0)
A million stairs to new.
March 23rd, 2013 by TheEditor
It’s been a little bit since I updated here. I’ve been busy.
I spent the day today moving and right now is really the first time since 4am I’ve sat down and relaxed. I’m sitting in what is my new OFFICE! Yes, I now have a second bedroom that is specifically going to be a office / server room.
The way this whole thing happened is so, serendipitous, that it really boggles my mind. All the things that had to happen at the times they did for me to move here is a little crazy. A man had to get evicted, a neighbor had to decide to not move, I had to find out about this place on THE night that I not only received my lease renewal form but also found out the downstairs people were not moving. It’s all very complicated but in the end I just think I’m supposed to live here.
It was a long day. Down two flights of stairs up three, reverse , repeat. All day. My neighbor helped me with the big stuff that I just couldn’t do alone but for the most part I did it myself. I find that lately I’m trying to stay away from any sort of help from others if at all possible. Just a personal thing.
At the end of the day I love this place. It’s still a wreck of boxes and stuff that needs to be put away but oh well. The rack is up and running, the site is up, my bed is made and I’m about to go lay in it and read.
This move now leaves me with one single thing in my life that needs to change. Just one. As always, the job. On the bright side though, www.monkeypulse.com is coming. It is almost finished, at least enough for a beta run. ( Just a personal note here, I cannot believe it’s up and running. I really can’t. And it works!) I’m also going to start developing an Android and an IOS app for it. Once that is all done, I start to code V2 of the site. So much to do! I have a goal, and that goal is 2k users. Two thousand users that will pay $24 a year for whatever I finally decide is some sort of “gold” access. That pays me enough to live and pay for hosting. I do not see that as a hard to reach goal. It’s a small number when you think about it.
So. 9 months, 2k users, 1 dream fulfilled. That is the current plan. I’ll let you know how that is going. For now, bed is calling me, I cannot ignore.
The Editor
Posted in Bio, Daily musings, Monkeypulse, The weekend | Comments (0)
What a weekend. New digs and the monkey breaths.
March 3rd, 2013 by TheEditor
What I had thought was going to be a quiet uneventful weekend has instead seen some rather exciting events. In lieu of that I thought I’d take a minute and do a quick update.
Firstly. When I got home Friday I had waiting for me in my mailbox my lease renewal form. Less than 30 minutes later there was a knock at my door and my neighbor Brian was there. He wanted to tell me not only are the downstairs neighbors not moving at the end of March, they were supposed to, but they are staying for another year. If you’ve never read anything I’ve written about them suffice to say they are just loud disgusting people. That coupled with the fact that my landlord talks about fixing things a lot but just never seems to get around to it had been making me think about getting out of here.
In addition to that information Brian also informed me that 2 houses down there is an apartment coming up for rent. There was a guy living there that basically was a shut in and trashed the place, he has since been kicked out. The short list of pluses are, 2 bedrooms, washer and dryer, ceiling fans, all new carpet, all new paint, and new appliances. I have none of that. The huge plus is the 2 bedrooms, I’ve said before that I need an office badly. The longer list of pluses include, rent that is $155 cheaper a month, no security deposit, quiet neighbors, and no year lease. Lastly there is a good chance I can finally have cats.
Long story short as long as it’s cleaned up and finished the way he says it’s going to be, I’m moving.
Secondly. As of about 8am this morning my little venture, Monkeypulse, is up and running. No it’s not public yet nor will it be for a few weeks. When I say working I mean that I finally have all the modules written and working. It’s actively assigning an “iq” to all incoming articles. It really works. Now I just have to make it pretty and finish all the features I want.
Let me say that again. It works!
What needs to happen now though is a huge project. I now have to “teach” the system what is smart and what is not. That means spending a ton of time with the tool I built entering data. The more I enter the smarter the system gets. It’s only going to get better.
That about sums up the weekend. Plus there is chance we’re getting a snow storm this week AND I have a 4 day weekend coming up to work on Monkeypulse. It’s like an early Christmas.
That’s all for now.
The Editor
Posted in Bio, Daily musings, Monkeypulse, Site information, The weekend | Comments (0)