Spend One Million Dollars...

Over and Out

2011-01-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

The stipulated deadline for this experiment has now passed. Unfortunately, I never put enough effort into promoting it. Or perhaps the experiment wasn't worthy of promotion? As promised, the little money raised (about Au$200), was donated to this charity. I can say I learned a lot from this project and I am glad to have seen it through. If you would like to have a look at my latest project, please visit Trace Perfect Simple Puzzle. Take care and take you for visiting.

Google Sites in Google Apps

2009-03-24T16:52:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of weeks I finally decided to implement an idea that I have had for a while. It's a community website for my suburb that serves as a notice board for the community and also promotion for the suburb itself.

My vague requirements:

- Easy set-up
- Easy Maintenance
- Domain integration
- Easy for user to submit content
- Discussion /Forum

I had been tossing whether to use a blog, or a cms, or a custom built website or a mix of these. I finally decided to go with Google Sites on Google Apps.

The place to start is http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new . This is for a free standard edition. You can already own a domain, or you can buy a new one through this process, which I did. This registration only took a few minutes.

Google Apps comes with its own control panel / dashboard where you manage your users and the apps available to them. The main app which I am going to use is Google Sites. GSites lets any of your domain users easily set-up and maintain their own "wiki-style" website. A Site can be private, or visible only to signed-in domain users, or public for everyone to see.

So what I needed was one main Google site that is available for everyone to see, and make it available at the www. of my domain. This was easily configured from the dashboard. Then I started building the site itself. On paper I already had a structure I wanted to give to my website. So now i just had to implement it as best as I could with Google Sites.

The layout can be customised slightly. It will always have a header and a footer and a navigation column either to the left or to the right. The width of the website can be changed and so can the width of the navigation column. The navigation column can contain configurable menu boxes with links to pages within the site. The fonts and colours of the various bits and pieces can also be customised.

So a google site is made up of pages arranged in a hierarchical fashion, which is also reflected in the user friendly urls. example:

http://www.nsw2759.net/
http://www.nsw2759.net/now/news
http://www.nsw2759.net/now/news/nsw2759netlaunches

Also, a page can be one of a handful of types:

web page - just a rich html page
dashboard - a page with panels where you can embed gadgets
announcements - where you can post announcements like news, or could be used like a blog
file cabinet - for file attachments
list - for a list of things

I used a mix of the first 3 types. Editing a webpage is simple. You use a rich wysiwyg editor. You can also insert various gadgets on the page. In my case I have an "announcements" gadget which displays announcements from my "news" page, and a google calendar gadget which displays the calendar I created in my same google apps domain.

The other feature that I used throughout the website is the ability to embed a google apps document within a google sites page. In my case I needed quite a number of input forms to gather information from the community. So I created Google Forms which post the collected data into Google Spreadsheets, all in my nsw2759.net google apps domain. It even notifies me by email when someone submits a form. Pretty neat.

Google sites also comes with an auto-generated sitemap, and of course an inbuilt search facility, not to mention versioning of pages wiki style and "recent activity" page.

However, they are still working on an RSS feature and it is still missing some basic customization features such as a custom favicon.

Also, for my discussion/forum requirement: Signed-in domain users have to possibility to comment on any page/article. However I am not going to give a domain user account to every citizen of my suburb (the free google apps is only limited to 50 users, and in any case it is way too heavy for what I need). So for now I settled for a facebook group, which allows users to participate in a discussion board.

So far, I found Google Sites on Google Apps to be very effective for what I wanted to do and certainly recommend it.

FeedBurner

2008-08-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

Today I checked out FeedBurner. It is a tool for blog publishers to better manage and promote their content. When you "burn your feed", it means you register it with FeedBurner. Then you will be able to access your feed through FeedBurner. In this blog's case, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpendOneMillionDollars

To get your best out of FeedBurner, you should serve all requests to your feed through FeedBurner. Luckily Blogger has an option to redirect any requests to your feed to FeedBurner. This is not surprising since Google very recently acquired FeedBurner. So now any requests to http://blog.spendonemilliondollars.com/feeds/posts/default will redirect to http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpendOneMillionDollars.

Then you can start watching subscription statistics, automatically promoting your feed through various services and even monetizing your feed by optionally embedding google ads. Among other things, it also offers email subscriptions.

Unfortunately, WordPress.com (which I'm using for my other blog) doesn't let you redirect feed requests to FeedBurner. I'm liking WordPress.com less and less.

WordPress and Google Apps

2008-08-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to start a new blog, about something completely different than this one, http://everydaytrainblog.com/. So I thought to myself why not try something different than blogger? Without any googling, for some reason, WordPress came to mind. So I gave it a go. I didn't know anything about it. I had only heard of it.

One important disambiguation is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.org is the WordPress software itself which you can download/modify and install on your own server. On the other hand, WordPress.com is a free managed hosting for WordPress blogs. WordPress.com limits functionality, mostly for security/scalability purposes. I had already registered and created a blog with WP.com before I even knew about this difference. In any case I needed hosting and something with zero management overhead. So I had made the right decision without knowing.

Registration and blog creation was very easy. The interface is very web2.0-ish but not very ajax-ish, yet still usable. It didn't take me too long to figure out the basics of the dashboard, postings and pages. And I was up and running very quickly. For comparison between WordPress and Blogger there are plenty of artciles around. And there is many other great blogging software/eware out there.

Next thing I needed to do was to get my own domain name running with my wordpress blog. I bought the domain name through WordPress itself. It costs $15/year to do this. $5 for domain registration and $10 for them to map the domain to your blog. You pay through paypal. You actually buy wordpress credits and then with them you buy the domain/mapping. Pretty straight forward and not many forms to fill in. My wordpress blog was running on my domain name in minutes.

Since I wasn't happy enough with this, I wanted to set up my own email address at my new domain. i.e. patrick@my-new-domain-name.com. It turns out that to do this, you need to use Google Apps. Google Apps allows companies (anyone really) to use set up google applications on the company's domain, for employees of the company to use for free. So for example, my company can use the online GMail software for its email infrastructure. My employees will have their email address on the companies domain, eg. employee1@mycompany.com, but they will use the GMail online client to manage their email (I wish we had this where I work, instead of Outlook!). Similarly, my employees can manage/maintain my company's documents using Google Docs, on my company's domain. It's a bit like a hosted intranet. Note: it is still all hosted on google's reliable infrastructure. Not many companies are willing to host their services and even moreso their data on a 3rd party infrastructure.

So anyways I had to register and validate my-new-domain-name with Google Apps, which was also very quick and simple. And then tell WordPress to link the two. It's all explained here.

So now I got a new mail address at my new domain that I bought through and use for WordPress, and for which I use Gmail/Google Apps to manage the email. Rather confusing to put it like that! But it works :)

GMail goes down, how well did it recover?

2008-08-13T23:06:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, Google's gmail service was down for some time. I was actually using it from my mobile phone, and my fiancée was using its embedded gtalk chatting to a friend when it started playing up. Now I'm not really amazed that Gmail had problems, after all it only happens very rarely and they did recover relatively quickly. The interesting bit to my story is the following:

A gtalk message that was sent to my fiancée while the service was playing up was delivered a day later! It wasn't delivered as soon as the service was back up again, but about a day later. This says a couple of things:

When things went wrong, Google made sure that the first priority was to get some level of service back up and running
Most importantly, after the storm passed, they made sure they cleaned up and that every transaction, including insignificant gtalk messages that might have been stuck somewhere in limbo, were recovered and completed.

And it's good that they did. Because it happened to be quite an important message, and although it was received a bit late, it saved quite a bit of trouble.

We tend to rely on web services way too much, even a simple instant message. The loss of an instant message might not be life threatening, but sometimes we rely on it as if it was a life saver.

Where are you? Fire Eagle

2008-08-12T22:53:00.000-07:00

Everyone and everything want to know where you are these days. Why? for everyone's benefit, including your own, hopefully. But would you like everyone and everything to know where you are?

Today I came across Yahoo's Fire Eagle. It's basically a location service. You tell the eagle where you are. And you don;t have to tell the fox or the cat where you are. They can ask the eagle where you are. But the eagle is trustworthy. It only tells others your location if you allow it to do so. So you can tell the eagle "Allow the fox to know my exact location" and/or "Allow the cat to know my approximate location". And then the fox asks the eagle for your location, and the fox can offer you better search results, and better targeted ads too!

So how do you tell the eagle where you are? First of all you need a yahoo account. (The eagle will never give out your yahoo account name or details to anyone; it talks with cats and foxes using cryptic keys. It's actually very secure and conforms to OAuth).

And then you can simply type in your address/location on the eagle's website pinpoint form, as often as you like. But you would not want to keep updating that all the time wouldn't you? So there are applications that do that for you, like one that you can download on a GPS enabled phone, that will keep the eagle updated automatically with your location.

So now, I, Mr. Nobody Developer can create a web application and if you, Mr. User, trust me, you can tell the eagle to let me know your location. Here's how it works:

I simply send you to the eagle with a request to let me see your location
You confirm with the eagle that you want to let me see your location
The eagle sends you back to me with an authorisation
I ask the eagle where you are, using that authorization you brought with you
The eagle tells me where you are (after triple checking that I am allowed to know!)

Pretty simple isn't it? And I can store that authorisation so that I can try using it straight away next time you visit me (or whenever I just feel like knowing where you are). As long as that authorisation is still valid (i.e. you haven't told the eagle otherwise), the eagle will tell me your location.

It took me a couple of hours to get my head around the concept. I hope it took you much shorter by reading this post.

Google Docs Forms

2008-08-11T23:27:00.001-07:00

I have been using google docs for a while now. Mostly the spreadsheets, especially useful for co-authoring stuff with my fiancee like budgets, wedding plans, house stuff etc.

But somehow I never came across Google Docs Forms. Today while reading some http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ I came across a new site they are testing in beta http://stackoverflow.com/ and their beta signup form is a Google Docs Form.

So of course I decided to give it a try. All you need to do is open your google docs (for which you need a google account) and then start a new Form. It is very self explaining how to set up. And you can put as many questions as you like. The questions can be one of 5 types: text, paragraph text, multiple choice, checkboxes, choose from a list or scale 1-n. Once you are happy with your form set-up, you click on a save button. On the bottom of the form editor there is a link that you can give out to people. When anyone submits the form, the entry is saved into an automatically created Google Doc Spreadsheet in your account, ready for you to anlayse, or even program against.

One cool feature is that you can embed the form you create into your own page. Just click on the "More Actions >> Embed" button and it will give you a piece of html to embed into your page. Here below is one that I created myself. Give it a go!

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Squidoo - quick, nice and easy webpage

2008-08-11T03:26:00.000-07:00

Today I came across Squidoo while reading about Seth Godin. Squidoo is basically an online webpage creation tool. So I gave it a go to create a page about SOMD. It was super easy to set up a page and start adding content to it. Well I actually had to remove most of the content boxes that came with the template I chose, since all I wanted was some introduction text, and a feed reader to feed from this blog. In squidoo terminology, a 'lense' is one page about somone or something. The editing interface is very simple. You can add many different modules and widgets to your page and even sell stuff or accept donations. You can earn money from ads that are displayed on your page and you can decide to take it cash or to donate it to charity. You don't need any technical knowledge whatsoever to use squidoo. All you need is something great to write about. And then of course you can see statistics, rate pages, tag, and what-not. But what strikes me is the minimal steps it takes you to get started. So here is the squidoo spend one million dollars page.

You don't have to wait any longer!

2008-08-07T21:45:00.001-07:00

Participants do not have to wait anymore until the million donations are made. They are now sent an email with a link to their personalised voting form. Here is a sample of the voting form.

Also, there is a page that publishes the most recent entries. This includes the participant's choice of display name together with a few words and an optional link.

How it works: Everyday or so I download the transactions from paypal in a comma separated file. Then I use app engine's bulk uploader to create Donation entities in my datastore. An email is automatically sent to every participant with a link to his voting page. Also, once the vote is submitted, the participant receives an email ready to forward to family and friends, promoting the website. So it's mostly automated. All I do is download the paypal transaction history through paypal's management console, and upload it to my datastore via a command line. It was pretty easy. But it did take me roughly a total of 7 hours work to implement. I needed to learn more about app engine datastore api, email api and of course more Python basics.

So now I can finally start promoting the website a bit better. More about that in the coming posts.

Google Maps Street View Down Under

2008-08-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

I did some more work on the feature I would like to add before continuing to promote the website. It should be ready by the end of this week and then hopefully it will be all good to go.

Meanwhile on a side note, google maps launched street view in australia today. And it's pretty impressive and exhaustive. Considering Australia is a huge land with sparse population density, they still covered plenty of remote towns. And I actually found my car parked at the Pendle Hill train station. Supposedly number plates are blurred out but I could still recognise mine. It's the blue car on the right. Can anyone tell me what my number plates are?

Multi-tasking Emotions

2008-07-31T16:12:00.000-07:00

I wonder how the internet affects our emotions and feelings, whether it's messing with our brains.

The simplest example that I always think of is parallel conversation. Especially in my late teens I used to spend long hours online chatting with many people at the same time. I'd be chatting about something funny with a friend at the same time I'd be chatting about some sad event with another friend at the same time I'd be chatting with someone I'm trying to get a date with at the same time I'd be trying to get rid of someone who can't stop bugging me.

This multi-tasking of emotions is something that communication over the internet brought with it and surely affects the way we react emotionally to situations. In the pre-internet age we would only have one conversation at a time, and between one conversation and the next you would usually have a gap in time, especially if the conversations were unrelated.

On the net, you might be laughing your head off at a joke while crying at the news of the loss of a loved one. Now I am no psychologist or have no such qualifications, but I would think that this multi-tasking of emotions might have diluted our feelings and changed the way our brain reacts to situations. Is there any research about this? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think or if you have any links to studies about the matter.

The Spend One Million Dollars experiment looks at the interaction of people with technology and money.

Reporting progress

2008-07-29T04:55:00.000-07:00

My python is improving slowly and so is my app-engine knowledge. I would say I am almost half way implementing the feature I have in mind. Right now I can barely afford to spend an hour a day on it. Hopefully by the end of next week it will be done. So watch this space... in the meanwhile, have a look at how we break the routine at work in this youtube video.

It takes time...

2008-07-23T03:05:00.000-07:00

It's been over a week since the SOMD website went live. And I have taken more feedback and given more thought to the idea. So there are a few more changes I would like to make before I start actively marketing the website. These changes require me to learn a little more app engine api and python programming. I learning through the app engine documentation and through the 'Dive Into Python' website and book. And it looks pretty easy. It just takes a bit of time.

Currently I happen to be organising my wedding, getting our new house ready to move in and preparing for the guests coming from overseas for the wedding. Of course my full time job takes most of the day. So that leaves me with 2 hours of reading time everyday on the train and perhaps an hour in the evening to actually implement stuff. The changes that I plan to implement need a good half day of work. So hopefully they will be done in about a week or two. Stay tuned, or better, subscribed.

Until then, have a good day.

Technology - Google App Engine

2008-07-18T02:59:00.000-07:00

This experiment involves technology. I happen to be a web developer. However the platforms I am using for this experiment are relatively new to me. In this technology post I'll give an brief overview of how I am using Google's App Engine platform.

Google App Engine is the new web application platform from google. In fact it is still called "preview" or beta. It is all about scalable systems. My web application is running on the same scalable systems that power google applications. So when I get every web entrepreneur's dream come true, a link from some high traffic website, my web application will not fall over. And best of all it's free! Well there are quotas for everything, but to start with they are more than what I need. And I only have a couple of mostly static pages for now, the front page and the thank you page. They are still going through the simplest of python controllers but other than that they do nothing else.

Of course App Engine comes complete with a presentation framework and integration api's for managing data, user accounts, sending emails and manipulating images among others. And of course it's extensible because after all it's just a python program. I'm not using any of this yet, but when this experiment moves to a more interesting phase I will have to make use of these features.

Getting my web application up and running was pretty trivial. I followed the super easy getting started tutorial and that was way more than I needed for the Spend One Million Dollars website.

All that was left was to buy the domain through google apps and configure it to point to my SOMD App Engine web application. And it comes with automated version management of major/minor releases.

Fine Tuning

2008-07-16T02:35:00.000-07:00

So the SOMD website has been online for almost two days. I haven't started actively promoting it yet, and this is for a couple of reasons:

Idling: Just like starting your car in the morning when it's still a bit cold, and you let it warm up a little bit before you floor the gas pedal and make your way to work. I don't want the website to (somehow) get rush hour traffic in its first couple of days. First I wanted to observe my friends trying it out and hear what they had to say.

Fine-tuning: And I received very valuable feedback. I answered all the new questions they asked me in the FAQ section. Some did not bother reading the FAQ section. A click is a very expensive user action. So because I consider the FAQ section, especially the first 2 questions to be extremely important, I decided to move this section to the main page. No one in a right state of mind will donate me a dollar before at least asking the first two questions (my mum doesn't count). So the user should now see these important questions written in front of him before he even thinks about asking them. This way I dont just spare the user from having to click, I even spare the user from thinking (or i hope so anyways).

Incentive: The one and only incentive for a user to donate a dollar is to be able to have a say in how to spend one real million dollars. Just a bit of fun really. However, people want to be recognised. So I decided to give participants the opportunity to have their name, a few words and a link of their choice listed forever on the website. Participants will have the option to remain anonymous. The listing will be in order of time donated. Participants will submit their choice of words and links during voting time.

Impatience and lonelyness: So everyone wants to know how many donations have been made so far, and anyone would want to be sure that they're not the only person participating. So the counter sounds like a good idea. Hence I put a manually updated counter on the front page, hoping that it does not scare people away because we have only just started the experiment.

So you ask, what next? I'll start pushing the gas pedal a little bit, but I will leave the car on nuetral for a few more days. I would like to get a bit more feedback and feel, and have some time to think what else I can improve before I start marketing the website a bit more seriously.

have a good day

Welcome

2008-07-14T03:52:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the Spend One Million Dollars (SOMD) blog.

By now you should have seen the Spend One Million Dollars (SOMD) website. In this blog I will keep you posted with the progress and most importantly share feedback and lessons being learned from this experience.

There are many sides to this experiment, starting with human behavior towards money and technology, the technical and usability aspects of the website and the effectiveness of marketing through various social channels.

If you haven't made your one dollar donation yet, please visit http://www.spendonemilliondollars.com

If you have any questions, please visit the Frequently-Asked-Questions page.

Of course feel free to leave a comment or ask a question through this blog.

Have a good day.

Patrick