Recap - friendship, podcasts, idols

January 13th, 2006 Anthony

Well, its been a while since I’ve posted, so here’s a recap of the last couple of months.

• I had a blue with a mate, ending the friendship. (Over a girl, nuff said?)
• I’ve been working a lot.

Then over the Christmas period in which the office closed:

• I drank more than is good for me and watched a lot of movies.

And thats a pretty comprehensive list of all major events in my personal life. Scary, huh?

A good mate of mine has been over in Newman, WA for quite a while now working for a mining company. Sounds like he’s doing very well - his sister has been married and just had a child, making my mate an uncle! And his girl has graduated university and moved across the country to live with him. Congatulations on both counts, my friend!

Professionally…?

My professional life has been going well - I’m still loving life at Tailored, and have been there for almost 1 year exactly now. (I’m a week + change short right now). The company seems to have come along extremely well in this past year, which is good for all concerned.

We’re trying to reposition ourselves right now to be working less on our clients’ websites, and more on our own. You might think this means we’d be working on less projects, but all the same, we have enough work that we’re hoping to hire another person! I’ll introduce him in a moment - he’s the same person who was kind enough to put together an audio file for us to serve as the intro for the Tailored Podcast - Brendon Sinclair’s Business Mix. Its a good listen, if you’ve a mind for it.

Audio intro was put together by Michael Phipps, and the voice (I’m told) can be credited to Zoe Mcgrath! Michael is the man we’re hoping to hire, if he accepts - we’ll know next week. We’re currently outsourcing some design work to Zoe, who is doing an admirable job! (I get jealous when I see design skills like Zoe’s).

A matter of taste?

A couple of friends of mine are looking at starting their own business towards the end of the year (both graduating university, both very smart, one with quite a few years of business experience already), and seem to be very much in awe of Brendon. I’m a little nonplussed at times by this - Brendon is a very intelligent man, who is extremely successful in running his business. I’ve been told that human beings have something like 7 original ideas during the course of their lives - this seems to be the magic number. Brendon has that many each year.

All the same, I work with the man every day, and its impossible to be in awe of someone you’re that familar with. But I remember, before I started at Tailored - I was the same way. Brendon Sinclair, website guru. Brendon Sinclair, author of the Web Design Business Kit. Brendon Sinclair, author of a whole bunch of great articles. I’m not sure how my view changed exactly - I actually have more respect for him than I did before meeting him (which is always a good thing to say about someone!).

Podcasting

The Tailored Podcast - Brendon Sinclair’s Business Mix is something we’re especially optimistic about. We really need to get a better statistics package on there, as our current package isn’t correctly tracking usage from people subscribed via iTunes and so forth. However, we published a new podcast today. The podcast was uploaded right at midnight server time. Brendon wrote the blog (which is what gets picked up by RSS readers and iTunes) minutes after that.

I checked the stats maybe 10 minutes after the blog was published - 15 unique visitors in that time. I’ve just checked them again now, 7 hours after publishing, and we’ve got 186 unique visitors. Not bad for a friday night! So what I want to know, is how many people are slipping through the cracks? How many play the file out via the Flash player on the website (which doesn’t get recorded in stats either?) I don’t think I’d be too far of the mark if I said the actual visitor numbers were likely double the numbers I’ve just listed. But we need to know, with more confidence.

Stats, monitoring, reporting - all very important!

And not just for the podcast. I’ve been working on (albeit not as hard as I could have been) a bit of software which will contact the sites running our standard stats package, gather required information, and generate a detailed report for each site each month. We have this as a monthly service for some of our clients, whereby we record statistics, report on the statistics (complete with pretty graphs), and conduct a set amount of optimization work each month based on what the stats are showing us. However, these ‘monthlies’ (as we call them) would be more accurately named if we called them “yearlies” or something. As in, we don’t do them often enough!! Mostly because it takes a couple of hours of manpower per site, and we have quite a few sites on the list. So the job is a bit daunting.

Bring on automation to gather data and generate raw data reports! Save us an unbelievable amount of time every month, and make the job easier - which means it actually gets done! And thats always nice.

More later, I’ll try to post a bit more frequently from here on out.

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