InVisible

The last few months have been furious. Not only have we moved to the new offices, but Keith Bingman has joined us as on a regular basis, and Andrea Szabo is our intern for the next 18 months, while she’s becoming an application developer. Quite a few projects have been made, a new website is on it’s way. We’ve had a lot of client work and more is yet to come, but we thought, it might be fun to do something for ourselves for a change. ...

We have been moving our clients websites to our own co-located server over the last few weeks and have had mostly good experiences doing so. Yesterday however, there was trouble in InVisible hosting land, and we had a couple of hours downtime on one of the websites (of course the one with the most traffic…) So - here’s a short post-mortem and the things we did to keep this from happening in the future… ...

It took a long time, but the publisher of my book and my company finally agreed on a method of selling the PDF of my Rails book not only on CD (and only to people in germany) but - as it should be - as a downloadable version. I have setup a small shop at https://rails-praxis.myshopify.com/ with a standard Shopify template and using Fetch.app to handle the digital downloads. This is a temporay solution until the publisher can handle digital downloads (which means, that it will be in place for quite some time I guess)… ...

On Halloween Friday was the Somesso conference on social media in Rüschlikon. After last weeks Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, this was a fresh and new conference put on by Arjen Strijker. There were quite a few bloggers covering the confernce, the usual slew of pictures taken and of course a lot of chatter on twitter. I was invited by Arjen to do a short pitch on Headshift. As others have noticed: Es waren einige Agenturen darunter und einige davon waren bereits über 5 Jahre alt. Ob man sich dann noch als Startup bezeichnen darfn? (ricdes) ...

Following up on my piece ‘the private net’ from last week, some further thoughts on secure communications and a call to action: One secure way of communication, supposedly, is Skype. I have heard law enforcement people in Switzerland talk about their problems with Skype: They can’t monitor and eavesdrop on the encrypted communication. But is it really true? Some people I have talked to suggest that the price EBay paid for Skype a few years ago was way way more, than the business was worth. Might it be, these people speculated, that US agencies had an interest to get Skype under US control? ...

This article has been gestating in my mind for quite some time. It was pushed closer to being written by an incident a couple of weeks ago. I run a number of different websites (in this context namely iphone-essentials.ch). Also, since a couple of years, I had a Google AdSense account and ran ads, not to cover my costs (the payouts were too low anyway) but as matter of getting a feel for this method of monetization on the web. To make a long story short: It doesn’t work! A reasonable successful website (500 - 1000 unique users per day, on iphone-essentials.ch) brings in 1 to 3 USD in AdSense commisions per day. In my experience AdSense earnings scale very linearly with number of visitors, so I could have made maybe 20 USD if I had 10'000 uniques per day. ...