FabulousEntertainment

There’s an interesting post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog which is 14 common mistakes made by web applications which slow down adoption.

I pretty strongly disagree with 11. which is that you should be able to add comments without registering - I love the idea but everytime I’ve ran any sort of web system with open comments it has been hit with a deluge of spam. Take a look a look at an unmoderated Yahoo! group and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m very much with him on 2. unreadable URL’s - I usually spend time thinking about the URL design before doing any coding. It makes the site so much easier to navigate. I’d also add that every URL should be bookmarkable.

His first point is to avoid immediate registration, this is something that I think I need to look at. Possibly we push members to sign up a bit too early in the process.

FabSwingers.com members have just voted for the celebrity couple they would most like to meet at a sex party. Topping the list was Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes with 32% of the vote followed by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with 27%.

Jordan and Peter Andre at 17% were just ahead of David and Victoria Beckham who scored 15%.

Richard and Judy did surprisingly well at 5% beating Madonna and Guy Ritchie (2%) and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones (2%). Bottom of the table was Chris Evans and Billie Piper.

Finally, six people claimed that they were celebrity couples.

The poll was conducted of 2235 members of FabSwingers.com in January 2007

Results in full were (rounded to nearest percentage point):

32% Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes
27% Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie
17% Jordan & Peter Andre
15% David & Victoria Beckham
5% Richard & Judy
2% Madonna & Guy Ritchie
2% Michael Douglas & Catherine Zeta-Jones
0% Chris Evans & Billie Piper

About FabSwingers.com

Fab Swingers is a completely free website for fabulous swingers everywhere but most of the members are from the UK. The site puts thousands of swingers in touch with new friends every month and has been responsible for several hundred sexual encounters since the site started in October 2006.

Fab Swingers is unique in not charging members a subscription and is already profitable thanks to its generous advertisers.

More Information and Comment:
press@fabswingers.com

According to the Google Toolbar we now have a PageRank of 3! I’m delighted! Maybe someone at Google read my previous post?

We’ve got Google Backlinks at last! See all two of them!

I’m slightly disappointed that the PageRank on the Google Toolbar is still sitting at 0 after the last update a few days ago, I had really been hoping for a PR of 3 or maybe even 2. I guess the next update will be due in April sometime so I’m certainly hoping for a PR of 3 then.

When I started off I was expecting it to take 6 months to appear in any remotely competitive search terms, we’ve now been going for 4 months so I’ve probably got another 2 months to go before I see much search engine traffic.

Winston Churchill would often sign-off his diary entries with ‘KBO’ for Keep Buggering On. I thnk that’s a great motto for anyone doing search engine marketing.

KBO.

Just when I finally thought that I’d resolved the chat room it turns out that Flash Chat won’t scale. The standard Flash Chat relies on calling an XML method via HTTP every 3 seconds (you can change this value but 3 seconds seems a reasonable compromise between server load and responsiveness of the chatroom). This means that if you have 90 users chatting there will be 30 hits per second on your server. Unfortunately the query also seems to be fairly heavy and the consensus from the forums seems to be that Flash Chat will only run with a maximum of about 20 users.

There are two socket servers available - one written in Java and one in PHP. However, again the consensus seems to be that these sockets servers are very unreliable and that’s certainly been my experience.

I briefly considered writing my own socket server in Twisted but it looks like far too much work considering the relatively low cost of scalable products.

The new plan is to stick with Flash Chat for now as the chatroom isn’t very heavily used. As soon as I’m getting 15-20 users I’ll switch to 123 Flash Chat which starts at a reasonable $300 for 100 users.

I’ve had a few complaints about the chatroom software I was using so I finally got round to sorting it out today. I’m now using FlashChat which I’m very pleased with - and I’ve had some really good feedback too.

It was pretty easy to integrate the chatroom with the user database and I’ve also linked the profiles in too. Best of all is the price at an amazing $5!

The only negative is that it does seem to hammer the server a bit and I think it’s going to be responsible for bringing forward my move to a proper dedicated server.

I’ve been thinking about how well we do on the Joel Test.

Quite a few of the rules are not very relevant to a one-man team but there were a few things that struck a cord. The first rule is to use proper source control which I’ve been meaning to do for some time. I’ve not set up CVS which has been a great help.

The other things I really need to get on top of are:

• Must write a schedule for the next 3 months.
• Fab Swingers desperately needs a specification.
• I do have a to do list but I really need a proper bugs database. I might use a Google Spreadsheet for it.