Leonard Austin

Diary of a Startup: I’ve Just Applied to Seedcamp

Leonard Austin — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 06:18:34 PST

Date: 2012-01-13
Seedcamp is basically the UK answer to Y Combinator or TechStars. In a nutshell these programs can provide seed funding, monitoring and network events for tech startups, an awesome idea! I’ve known about Seedcamp for a while however never felt the need to apply as when setting up my last company Welford Media Ltd (2006 prior to Seedcamp) there was no need to go after funding, I bootstrapped the whole thing and it worked out ok.

This is different. Recensus is a web app that requires as much help as it can get, that includes mentoring from people who’ve done it before, very experienced developers who can build something scaleable and cutting edge, and as much press as possible. I’ve been following Seedcamp for a while and from what I’ve seen, out of any program in the UK, they will help us the most and give us the best chance of success.

Anyway, I’ve submitted my application (with 4 hours to spare) and can only cross my fingers and hope for the best. Last time I spoke to my key developer and soon to be co-founder was before Christmas so I emailed over the applications to him and this was his response “Looks good, I read it through and am excited about the product again! I want to build it now ”. Hopefully that’s what the judges at Seedcamp will think too.

Diary of a Startup: Create a startup for £14

Diary of a Startup: Create a startup for £14

Leonard Austin — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:31:51 PST

Date: 2012-01-07
This post is the first in a series discussing my new startup, proudly named recensus.com (latin for review). So after spending about 24 hours trying to find a .com domain name I was happy with here were my steps.

1. Domain Registration
Registered the domain name with 123-reg.co.uk. I choose them because they are reasonably priced and you get control over the DNS records which they don’t charge you extra for and they haven’t gone down in. (Cost: £12)

2. Setup Cloudflare
Cloudflare.com is an amazing service that give you a DNS server which blocks spam, protects against security attacks, caches content using a CDN and a lot of other features. Well worth the free price tag, takes about 10 minutes to setup, I only wish they gave you the nameservers at the beginning of the setup and they had Google App’s DNS settings as a one click button. (Cost: free)

3. Setup Google Apps
Just in case you don’t know Google App’s give you Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites and Google Docs all under your own domain (free for up to 10 users). Again well worth the free price tag (although you have to look hire for the free version), just don’t forget to setup the subdomains. (Cost: free)

4. Setup Webspace and Upload Holding Page
I’ve got my own server (well Welford Media Ltd has) and I’ve just created a new domain and uploaded my holding page. If you haven’t got hosting you could go to Hostpapa.co.uk and click install wordpress, then download a coming soon template (see http://www.net-kit.com/12-free-attractive-themes-templates-for-coming-soon-pages/ or http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/coming-soon-templates-tutorials/). (Cost: £2 per month)

5. Signup to MailChimp
Mailchimp enables you to send out tracked email newsletters to subscribers and they have a free account which give you 2000 subscribers! After signing up put the signup form on your website. (Cost: free)

That’s the easy bit done, now i’ve just got build the app, do the sales and marketing, convert leads and make money. Also if possible get funding, find mentors and hire staff.

Diary of a Startup: I’ve Just Applied to Seedcamp

Sendmail on Ubuntu

Leonard Austin — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:11:06 PST

Install Sendmail on Ubuntu

I also need my php applications to be able to send our email using the mail function. Therefore I need to install sendmail and enable it in my php.ini file.
Install Sendmail

apt-get install sendmail

Check its working

ps -aux | grep sendmail

Change php.ini

replace
;sendmail_path =
with
sendmail_path =  /usr/sbin/sendmail

Config Sendmail

sudo sendmailconfig

Change your host files

homename
/etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost myhostname

Adobe Air with Netbeans

Leonard Austin — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 08:37:37 PST

I love Netbeans, it’s by far my favourite IDE for developing PHP applications. Recently, I’ve needed to create an Adobe Air application and from what I remember the best free IDE on windows for this was Aptana, which is ok however I found it a little slow (and I already know all the Netbeans shortcuts). So what I really wanted to do was developed Adobe Air with Netbeans, and you can…

The video below shows you step by step however it’s 5 minutes long and I can explain in 5 lines.

Download the Adobe Air SDK, unzip.
Open Netbenas, Create a new PHP Project
On the 3rd page of creating a new project (Run Configuration) choose Run As: Script (run in command line)
Then choose AdobeAIRSDK\bin\adle.exe as the PHP Interpreter
The final step which isn’t in the video, (after creating the index.html file and application.xml file) click the Run Project button and it will ask you for Run Configuration, makes sure you choose application.xml as the Index File NOT index.html.

Hopefully this will work for you as well!

No related posts.

Best Firefox Plugins for SEO aka Addons

Leonard Austin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:45:23 PST

Probably the best browser for SEO and Web Development (although prefer Chrome for surfing the net). This is mainly because of the wide variety of addons/plugins available.

Recommended Addons for SEO:

Firebug
Page Speed
SEOQuake
SEO For Firefox
Google Toolbar (for page rank – doesn’t work on FF7+)
Search Status
SEOMoz Toolbar
User Agent Switcher

If you have any other suggestions and I’ll add them to the list.

Setup Ubuntu as a Web Server

Leonard Austin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 10:04:15 PST

So these are the general steps for setting up a web server (Apache, MySQL and PHP) on a Ubuntu server. If you are not sure on how to use unix command line see: http://www.leonardaustin.com/technical/ssh-commands

Install Apache MySQL and PHP

sudo tasksel install lamp-server
sudo /usr/sbin/apache2ctl restart

Install mod_rewrite

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /usr/sbin/apache2ctl restart

You also need to find this file:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

and change “AllowOverride None” to “AllowOverride All” it appears a couple of times.

Install PHPMyAdmin

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

“In /etc/apache2/apache2.conf” Add “Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf”
The restart apache

sudo /usr/sbin/apache2ctl restart

Install XBedug – Optional for DEV only

sudo apt-get install php5-dev php-pear
sudo pecl install xdebug

# Make a note of the location of the xedebug.so then create a xdebug.ini with the below info and put it into “/etc/php5/conf.d”

; xdebug debugger
zend_extension="/usr/lib/php5/20060613/xdebug.so"
# IN php.ini file make sure html_errors = true
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

PHP Important Folder and Files

# /etc/php5
# /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Apache Important Folder and Files

# /etc/apache2/
# /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
# /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Web Folder

# /var/www

Other Steps

Change php.ini errors to show all

Changing Plesk Fast CGI to Apache PHP with ZF

Leonard Austin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 01:43:19 PST

So recently I’ve had to change the php mode from Fast CGI to Apache Module in plesk due to the http authenticate functions in php not working. This caused my Zend Framework website to produce a 500 error, in my case it was something to do with:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Session_Exception' with message 'session has already been started by session.auto-start or session_start()

The reason for the error is that the session already existed from my first visit and CGI was the owner, when I changed it to Apache module apache did not have permission to change the session data. The solution, shut down your browser (or start a privacy mode) and then try and view your website. Everything should work fine afterwards.

How to Access PUT data in Zend Framework

Leonard Austin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:47:37 PST

So I have followed a few tutorials online on how to build a RESTful API in Zend Framework (http://mwop.net/blog/228-Building-RESTful-Services-with-Zend-Framework) and everything seemed to go swimmingly except when it came to retrieveing the PUT request data. Took me a while to find this however there is a controller plugin pre-built in Zend Framework that you have to enable (Zend_Controller_Plugin_PutHandler). Basically it add the PUT data into the standard request object so you can access the data via getParams() or getParam(‘var’).

For more information see:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.plugins.html#zend.controller.plugins.standard.puthandler

The Perfect PHP Framework

30 minutes until 30!

Leonard Austin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:59:28 PST

So 30 minutes until 30!

A list of things that I am appreciative of:

Surviving surgery, when the odds where against me
11.21s for 100m
Seeing the sun never set in Iceland
My Friends
Buying and renovating a house
Winning a gold medal in an international Jiu-Jitsu competition
The Power House
My 1st class degree in physics
Setting up a business
Seeing and experiencing the awesome things in the world, for 10 months

A list of things that I haven’t done, yet:

Got my motorbike licence
Got my pilots licence
Learnt to play the piano
Make at least £1 million
A black belt in any martial art
Own an AC Cobra
Acted or directed in a film
Experienced fame
Seeing the remaining awesome things in the world
Changed to World

30 minutes well spent, Happy Birthday me!

No related posts.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter July 2011

Leonard Austin — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:11:49 PST

Just clearing through my inbox and found Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. This is exceptionally useful for most of my clients.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter
2011, Volume 1, July 2011

1. Introduction

Welcome to the first volume of the Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter!

This month, we are replacing the standard “benchmarking” report in your Google Analytics account with data shared in this newsletter. We are using this newsletter as an experiment to surface more useful or interesting data to Analytics users. Data contained here comes from all websites which have opted-in anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics. Only those website administrators which have enabled this anonymous data sharing will receive this “benchmarking” newsletter.

You may be wondering, how many websites are in this “anonymous data sharing” pool? Currently, hundreds of thousands, and we’ve endeavored to make all of the metrics here statistically significant.

The date range of comparison for this newsletter is from November 1, 2010 – February 1, 2011. Comparison is done with data from November 1, 2009 – February 1, 2010. Absolute metrics such as total # visits, pageviews, or conversions for all opted-in websites are not reported.

To simplify the prose, the phrase “websites” will represent “websites which have opted into anonymous data sharing with Google Analytics” for the rest of this newsletter.

2. Site Metrics

Compared to a year ago, websites have seen reduced pages / visit, average time on site, as well as bounce rate.

	11/1/09 – 2/1/10	11/1/10 – 2/1/11	Difference
Pages/Visit	4.9	4.5	-0.4
Bounce Rate	48.2%	47.0%	-1.2%
Avg Time on Site	5:49	5:23	-0:26

2.1 Breakdown by Geography

Our anonymous database has aggregated geographic breakdown at the country level. Here are a few representative countries and their respective aggregate metrics. The first number in each cell represents the metric for the date range 11/1/10-2/1/11. The parenthesized number is the Year over Year delta compared to a year ago.

Country	Pages / Visit	Bounce Rate	Avg Time on Site
United States	4.7 (-0.1)	42.5% (-6.1%)	6:06 (-0:10)
United Kingdom	4.9 (-0.3)	41.5% (+0.2%)	5:38 (-0.27)
France	4.4 (-0.4)	49.7% (+1.4%)	4:40 (-0:08)
Brazil	4.1 (-0.1)	47.8% (-2.9%)	5:20 (+0:03)
China	4.1 (-0.1)	58.2% (+1.0%)	3:46 (+0:37)
Japan	3.9 (-0.1)	48.6% (-9.0%)	3:47 (-2:59)

For bounce rate, the distribution by country is plotted below:

The distribution above is annotated with some countries — which seem to indicate a story of leisure and stage of economic development. For a related metric: average time on site, the distribution by country is plotted below:

The type of countries annotated in the average time on site graph above seem to be in reverse order as those in the bounce rate distribution.

2.2 Breakdown by Traffic Sources

Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium”"” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.

Traffic Sources	Pages / Visit	Bounce Rate	Avg Time on Site
Direct	4.0 (-0.5)	47.2% (-4.0%)	5:21 (-0:07)
Referral	5.0 (+0.1)	43.1% (-1.1%)	6:36 (-1:48)
Organic Search	4.9 (-0.1)	47.9% (-1.1%)	4:43 (+0:06)
CPC Search	5.6 (+0.0)	41.4 (-1.7%)	3:57(+0:07)

2.4 Conversion Rate Distribution

Many marketers’ favorite metric is conversion rate. Here is the worldwide distribution of Google Analytics “goal conversion rate” by country.

Would anyone have guessed that states which are known for conversions are also high for their citizens’ goal conversion rate? Note that for some states with few population, the statistical significance of the conversion metric comes into doubt.

3. Traffic Sources

Traffic sources below are identified by how the “source” and “medium” parameters are received by the Google Analytics collecting servers. Here is an article describing what these designations refer to.

% Visits from Sources	11/1/09 – 2/1/10	11/1/10 – 2/1/11	Difference
Direct	36.5%	36.8%	+0.3%
Referral	21.0%	19.4%	-1.6%
Search Engines	27.0%	28.0%	+1.0%
Other	15.5%	15.8%	+0.3%

4. Operating Systems

Browsers and Operation Systems (OS) are identified by the “referrer” string sent by users’ browsers.

% Visits from OS	11/1/09 – 2/1/10	11/1/10 – 2/1/11	Difference
Windows	89.9%	84.8%	-5.1%
Macintosh	4.5%	5.2%	+0.7%
Linux	0.6%	0.7%	+0.1%
Other	5%	9.3%	+4.3%

5. Comments

This is the first volume of our Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter. We hope that it provides useful insights. If you have specific comments or suggestions on how to improve this newsletter, please send your feedback to: analytics-benchmarking@google.com.

Happy analyzing,
Google Analytics Team