Hooking into the network

An NHS day job means that I’m completely out of with other entrepeneurs, would-be entrepeneurs and gamers. I’m making an effort this year to meet more people through London Girl Geek Dinners, Girl Geek Coffee, I went to GameCamp two weekends ago and I have BarCamp London 4 coming up at the end of May.

I have no freaking idea what to talk about at BarCamp. The abysmal portrayal of women in games? The crushing lack of IT literacy in the NHS? How Bully: Scholarship Edition is so much more fun than GTA4? Everything seems either too wide or too narrow.

Where Did The Month Go?

OMG, it’s time for another monthly post on my food site already. Feels like I haven’t made any progress at all, even though I’ve found a plugin to overcome my biggest barrier to user participation, got the author to fix an ugly bug in it and posted a bunch of fruit. I’ll post a run of nut photos this week and then do the monthly update at the weekend.

Happy Traffic

This graph makes me happy :)

None of those Friday visitors are me and one person is responsible for 27 of the pageloads. It’s nice to know that some one finds the site useful.

(Or, y’know, they’re showing it to their friends going “OMG, I can’t believe someone would make such an ugly site. Look at this. Look at this!” )

I’m choosing to believe the former ;)

User Participation, and Lack Thereof

Way back in October, I mentioned that I wanted OneServing to be a place where people could post their own food tips - just little tricks you pick up with experience, like how to peel tomatoes quickly.

For the past few months, I’ve all but abandoned that idea because there was no way to prevent users from posting in the categories that I’ve reserved for the food info posts. All the common plugins cited around the net date from the pre-WordPress 2.3 era - i.e. before they moved to the “taxonomy” system. I spent days searching for one that works with WordPress 2.3+ but there was nothing out there. Eventually, I decided that user participation would have to wait until I could pay someone to do it for me. This would destroy the only sticky aspect of the site in the first place, but I don’t have the time to teach myself about the inner workings of WordPress and php AND do all the research for the food.

(Come to think of it, lack of time is a common theme in these posts, isn’t it?)

Yesterday, I got very excited because I fiiiinally found a plugin to do the job - Level2Categories 2. It allows you to set a minimum user level to access each category. As the admin, I can allow myself and future Editors to post into the Site News and various food categories. Any authors who self-register will be limited to Tips, Articles and Recipes and subject to moderation. Perfect!

No.

After spending ages setting the plugin up for my 50+ categories, I ran into the fatal flaw. The plugin links some WordPress tables on the wrong ID, so it doesn’t always correctly identify the categories. Several of my categories were being identified as tags and a few of my tags were showing up in the category list. Shit! I can understand how the author might have missed it, because the problem only shows up if you add categories AFTER adding native WordPress tags.

Never mind. I might spend some time rewriting the whole thing later this month if I get the chance. Would probably be easy if I was any good at php but with my limited experience, I spend more time fiddling with syntax errors than actually achieving things. It’s like my MUDding days, all over again.

[For those in the know, he's linking wp_terms_taxonomy to wp_terms on terms_taxonomy_id = terms_id and copying them into his own table. That's fine if you only use categories or use fixed categories that won't change after you start adding tags or other taxonomy types. Doesn't work with my constantly-expanding list of tags and categories.]

The author has seen a few comments I left on the plugin page before I figured out the real problem, so I’ve asked him to email me to explain it properly. With any luck he’ll fix it for me.

Update: March 08

As I said in the last post, OneServing got a bit of traffic coming through from WordPress.org. Most of those visitors did have a quick browse round the rest of the site so there’s a little bit of interest.

Looking through my visitor patterns showed that one poor soul had been searching repeatedly to find out just what one serving of fruit was. Unfortunately for them, I wasn’t completely happy with the post explaining how I chose the amounts I did, so it wasn’t available. With any luck, they had a look through a few fruit pages and realised that one serving of fruit is always 80 grams or 2.8 ounces. Still, I’ve posted the explanation for the fruit and veg and nuts and seeds categories. I’m sure future visitors will want to know the same thing. Better to have visitors leave the site happy and successful than frustrated and unfavourable.

Posted another 5-odd fruit and vegetables, bringing us up to 21 in total. I’ve also given in and plundered my savings to buy a couple of proper studio lights. My current equipment so far has been:

• 80cm photo cube/light tent from eBay (£14.50)
• Table lamp with 100W equivalent CF light bulb from ASDA (£12)
• Boyfriend’s halogen bulb table lamp (free)

Yeah, not the greatest of macro lighting setups. OTOH, £26.50 is pretty good for a low-cost startup. Problem is, I spend way too much time processing the shadows out of photos and fiddling with contrast. Even devoting an entire day to the task only gets me about 6 usable pictures. The photo on One Serving of Whole Peeled Banana is pretty borderline.

The new lights cost me just under £85 so I shall expect a four-fold increase in productivity ;) They arrived yesterday and I have an exciting hour of almond, grapefruit and sunflower seed photography planned before my Pilates class tonight. Hope the lights will prove their worth!

I wonder if I can claim them as a business expense, since I’m now registered as self-employed…

February 2008 Update

Dum dee dum… Startup diary is going very badly, no? Havent posted in a while. TBH, if I have spare time at home, I tend to spend it either playing games or working on OneServing, so take the silence as a good sign.

As far as the Startup itself, OneServing is going reasonably well. It was neglected for a while but a couple of weeks ago I publically released the very simple plugin I wrote for it, hosted on WordPress.org. This meant it was listed in the Newest Plugins section of the Plugins Home for a few days, resulting in a trickle of traffic. In turn, this has scared me into spending more time on the content, rather than fucking about with the theme and so progress is being made. Also, the OneServing feed subscribers has TRIPLED to a whole 6 subscribers so there is at least a tiny amount of interest there. It’s encouraging. Especially considering that the first two subscribers were me and my sister.

And how am I? I’m good now. I had a tiny bit of a breakdown a couple of weeks ago, resulting in some crying and being sent home from work but that’s all over. Here’s the backstory:

I haven’t been happy in my job for a long time. I think it’s down to the fact that I do NOT fit our company culture. I like computers, for a start. Working on my web projects is a thousand times more fulfilling but isn’t going to pay my bills for a long time yet. Anyway, I was recommended to this new NHS information organisation and from what they say, it’s far more proactive and tech-friendly (god, I miss people who aren’t afraid of technology) and generally sounds like a good and exciting place to be. Unfortunately, I am… how can we put this? Oh yes, truly appalling at interviews.

So, I had an interview and chat with the team and I turned out to be a “Hmm.. there’s something there, BUT.” They actually told me this. Repeatedly. Along with “low score in client empathy”. No matter, they decided to give me another chance in the form of a 5 minute presentation. A week later I get the actual presentation title:

And it’s 10 minutes, not 5. And they said “You can contact to research, which I took to mean “You MUST contact for research”, as if I’m drowning in unused holiday entitlements in my job. BTW, the Acute Services Contract is a 127 page contract between two NHS parties. Truly, exciting stuff to read, especially when you’re juggling a job you hate, a one-person web startup, a video games blog, a boyfriend and attempting to build some kind of online presence. Finally, if there’s anything that scares me more than interviews, it’s presentations.

So basically, on top of worrying about all of the above, I barely slept for the entire week leading up to the presentation, which meant that the day before it, I went a bit mad.

I’m okay now. And I got the job. w00t! It’s slightly more money which means I can save a bit more to get some decent photos for OneServing, once it properly launches and the traffic turns up.

Lessons learned:

1. A glass of port before bed can shut the voices up
2. A total ban on email and internet checking after 10pm will prevent that all-too-common accidentally staying up ’til 1am

New Year, New Focus

I have lost my way. Again.

So far there are 8 items of food published on OneServing. I have about 5 decent photos sitting on my laptop, which makes 13 when I post them. My launch target is 50, so there’s quite a way to go.

I have set myself some milestones. I can’t be bothered with full-on project planning at this stage, so they’re on Ta-Da Lists. One Serving: Getting the First 50 Items

Why I am so far behind

1. Laziness - It’s easier to just hang out at my boyfriend’s or play games than do work.
2. Inexperience - I’m not an experience graphics manipulator by means, so taking and processing the photos is incredibly hard work for me.
3. Lack of info - I buy whatever fruit, vegetables or seeds I see in the supermarket that appeal to me. Then I find out that there doesn’t seem to be an official Glycaemic Index for them. Not too sure what to do about that. Will probably use substitutes (disclosed, of course) and wait for someone to correct me.

Weekly Update - Weeks 5 and 6

I was bad. I missed my weekly update for the past couple of weeks. Here’s what’s been happening:

1. Took a bunch of food photos
2. Posted 6 fruit and veg posts
3. Added Glycaemic Load
4. Added Calories
5. Dropped foodquote
6. Changed the style of the food info box based on feedback - apparently it was “threatening”
7. Talked to a graphic designer mate about getting a proper logo
8. Added a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England and Wales licence
9. Worried needlessly about a replacement for Gravatar

So lots of little things. Add them up and I now have a fully operational almost-stylish food info site! :) Pity Google seems to indexing everything BUT the individual food info pages. Must look into that.

I was originally going for a very simple approach to nutrition - eat the right portion sizes from the right food groups and you should be reasonably healthy. My sister convinced me to add calories and glycaemic index. I think she’s probably right that people are used to calories - may as well give them all the info at once. Glycaemic index is another matter. It seemed a bit faddish but is supposed to be very sound advice. I’m keeping it for now. Must do more background reading to make sure it’s ethically okay. It certainly seems to be.

Foodquote - whe I first designed everything, the food info boxes looked a little empty. I had planned to find interesting, amusing or informative quotes for every food. Turns out it’s a lot harder than you’d think to find short literary passages on the subject of cherry tomatoes. Not only that, the information section is now rather full with the addition of calories and GL. For the moment, I have deemed the foodquote unneccessary.

Automattic Avatars

Remeber those issues I had with Gravatar and unreliability? Automattic, owners of WordPress.com have acquired Gravatar.

Looks like I won’t need to search for some other solution after all. Freaking sweet! :)

Seems that Automattic are aligning the planets for my startup these past 6 months. I needed tags for One Serving - hey presto, tags were available in the next version of WordPress. I needed simple, reliable, hosted avatars - ta-daa! Here they are. I need millions of pounds to be waiting for me when I get home tonight…

More Focus for OneServing

I’ve been thinking about the social-networking side of OneServing for the past couple of weeks. As you may know, the drive for the site is twofold: 1) To provide basic portion sizes and nutritional info in an easy-to-follow layout. 2) To provide a space for users to share their food tips without the hassle of managing and promoting their own blog.

For a while I thought that contributors would want a more developed social side. People seem to like all that friend-linking, author-tracking, customised profile, personal messaging functionality. After talking to the guys from KickApps and OneSite at FOWA London, I’m beginning to think that it would just add needless complexity. (Sorry, Michael and Dax! Not the effect you were hoping for, I’m sure.)

I don’t want to run a social-media empire. I just want to spread the word about food portions, and let other people do the same. WordPress provides author RSS feeds that I can link in the template. Users can communicate through comments and provide whatever contact info they want on their author pages. They can link to their own blogs. I don’t need or want to manage all that stuff. I’m sticking with my core concept and the KISS philosophy.