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A new year, a new(ish) business model

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A new year, a new(ish) business model Wordpress SEO ExpertI spent much of last year trying to work out how myself as a freelance web designer and developer interacted with mahoneywebmarketing.co, my company.

Ultimately the mahoneywebmarketing.co team will consist of several people, so it doesn’t seem right to have it so much based around myself.

But conversely, because people were interacting so much with me via petermahoney.com, I found myself preparing products to sell here, rather than just my time.

It was all getting a bit mixed up.

Over the next few days I’ll be doing a complete overhaul of mahoneywebmarketing.co to make it less about me as a person, and focus more on the products we sell. Online branding, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Online community, etc. And this site, my personal brand, will be much more focused on me, my skills, my experience, my story, and of course, how to hire me for bespoke work.

Naturally the two sites will interact (in a very specific way) but all in all this is the culmination over my strategising and thinking for some time now.

A number of people have been asking for a solution to just this conundrum—”when you are your business, but also yourself, how do you best separate while integrating those two identities?”

I can’t wait to show you.

Issue with wifi caused by BT HomeHub update to software version 4.7.5.1.83.8.94.1.11 (Type A)

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I’ve been having major issues with wifi the past few days, and it turns out they’re all caused by an update to my router by BT. Now, this post is going to seem pretty nerdy, but this issue may affect more of you than you think!

I’ve spent the past three hours looking into this. You see, I’ve got a pretty complicated home network, fortunately I’m skilled in such things so it’s never been a problem. But it does mean when my wifi became unstable I had a lot of variables to consider and check.

A few days ago I noticed my internet connections started to drop-out every 40 seconds or so. Whether it was a local connection (one computer at home talking to another) or going out through the internet (searching Google, checking Facebook, downloading files, etc.).

I didn’t realise it was a wifi problem until I did some testing, after all every one of my devices connect wirelessly, so it seemed to be a problem affecting everything.

I ran some tests (pinging various machines and remote servers) and it confirmed what I’d noticed. After updating and checking everything I could that I’d set up myself (and extra repeater router, my server, desktop and laptop software) in desperation I checked to see if I could upgrade my BT HomeHub3’s firmware.

Oh. BT updated it automatically a few days ago. Precisely when the trouble began. A quick search shows a number of their customers complaining that their wifi has stopped working since the update, FYI it’s called 4.7.5.1.83.8.94.1.11 (Type A).

The update “fixes” something called Smart Wifi. The solution is to turn it off.

There is no setting for Smart Wifi on a HomeHub3. In fact it’s a background process, to turn it off you need to manually select a channel for your wifi to use, instead of the default “Automatic” setting.

Now, I already was using a manual channel: channel 6. Nonetheless I I thought perhaps I need to change a few things to fix the Smart Wifi issue, so I turned it back to automatic, then once again to channel 6. Still the issue.

A post on BT’s customer forums alluded that perhaps BT uses channel 6 as a default, so it might not turn off Smart Wifi if I stay on that channel. I can’t confirm if that’s true, but I do know when I changed to a different channel (in my case, 11) SUCCESS!

All my tests show an excellent, stable connection once more.

I should trust myself and my skills more–and assumed BT were likely responsible from the outset. They usually are.

Yuletide greetings!

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In my family we celebrate Yule just as much as Christmas, it’s a traditional festival that was absorbed into Christmas when the powers that be picked a date for the latter.

Even though it’s still two days away, I’m a sucker for a feelgood season, and wanted you to have this electronic card I sent to all my client’s this week. I really have had a wonderful year, and thank you all for your part in that.

Yuletide greetings (.pdf)

We find ourselves at the end of a year. I do hope 2012 has been fantastic for you; filled with success, joy, happiness—and that you’ve been left with high expectations for the year to come.

Whatever you’re doing to celebrate this Yuletide, I wish you the very best, and can’t wait to hear all about it in the new year.

How I work

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You’d be surprised how much of my working is done on the back of envelopes. A scribble here, a sentence there, even database structures usually start life on the back of a scrap piece of paper.

I suppose it’s how my mind works—for me the world that we create online is always an extension of the rest of our reality, so it makes sense in my mind that something starts as a physical entity before it becomes a system on a screen.

Case in point, the apparent game of dots and boxes above is actually the first draft of what became my annual Yuletide greeting card, and ended up like this:

The example I’ve given at least makes sense, you can see the transition from paper to screen. But so many of my scrawlings could only make sense to my mind…I’m reminded that we all have different ways of planning, structuring and beginning a new creative endeavour.

How do you work? Scribbles? Itemised lists? Walls of Post-it notes?

What does a “hit” to your website really mean?

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Hits are regularly touted as a good way to measure how well your website is doing.

The opposite is true—it’s generally a terrible metric to use in this regard!

Most people misunderstand what a “hit” in your website statistics really means. Quite simply, anytime a file is served up to a visitor, it’s a hit.

If you have a simple, one page website, here’s how the “hits” might be calculated by your webstats package. Let’s say it’s called “britney.html”, and contains a nice big header image, and six photos of Ms. Spears doing what she does best (whatever you imagine that to be).

The .html file itself is used, so that’s one hit. The header image is called up, that’s another. Add six photos and you’ve got eight hits right there. From one page loading.

Now let’s think of a slightly more realistic website, much like the one you’re looking at now. Even this single page you’re looking at references over 40 other files—think of that over the course of the entire website and a single person visiting my site would easily report hits in the hundreds.

There are web developers out there who try to “wow” their client’s by telling them they’ve had millions of hits, when really they might have had a few thousand users.

It’s also true that some people just misunderstand the terminology, they say, “hits” when they mean “visits”. And that’s generally the more useful metric.

Most of the time you’re going to want to know how many people looked at your site, or perhaps how many pages were looked at, rather than how many files were involved.

“Hit me baby one more time.” – Britney Spears

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