LessThanHumble.com

I have literally spent the last 48 hours reconciling all of the billing information for XStreamHost.com although, now that I’m nearly done it feels great. IT doesn’t help that the process has been nearly a year past due since we purchased the company. We found tons of non-paying, terminated, and past due accounts. The next step will be launching the new website, and then our new customer portal. Very exciting times, and about as timely as possible.

In other news, we’re getting ready to launch at least one website this week and begin the task of heavily promoting another that has lacked attention for quiet some time (Free4UGifts.com).

That is it for now - I should have some very exciting news this week. Until then - take it easy.

“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.“ - B.C. Forbes

So great things are brewing in the works right now as far as business deals go, things that would make my life so much easier financial, stress wise, and work load. I’ve got a hosting project in the works that might triple our current customer base, as well as a screen printing project that could turn out to be great. I don’t want to say anything else in fear of jeopardizing them, but as soon as I have news I will be sure to post it.

For those of you familiar with Asterisk, I wrote a kewl, simple little system for recording voice prompts. Basically the way it works is that I identify every prompt/recording with a 3 digit code and then reference the recording by that ID. Here is the code I use the code to record and play them:

[recording-system]
; Voice Recording System
exten => s,1,Wait(1)
exten => s,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/802)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,9,1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,9,1)
[recording-system-record]
exten => 9,1,Wait(1)
exten => 9,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/804)
exten => _XXX,1,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,2,Set(lastPlayedRecording=${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,3,Record(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/${EXTEN}:gsm)
exten => _XXX,4,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,5,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/805)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
[recording-system-play]
exten => 9,1,Wait(1)
exten => 9,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/803)
exten => _XXX,1,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,2,Set(lastPlayedRecording=${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,3,Playback(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,4,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,5,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/805)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,${lastPlayedRecording},1)

You then just reference every message with either Background(ID#) or Playback(ID#). If anyone finds this useful, post here, I’d love to hear about your implementation/modification.

Anyways, I’m off to finish a Nagios configuration for my network, I’ll share some stuff on that tomorrow. Take it easy…

“A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.” - John D. Rockefeller

Today has been a great day. The greatest Monday I have had in over a year. Nothing extrodirnarly special happened, but it was a picture perfect day. It is normally a pain for me to get going in the morning because I generally work till 3 or 4am 7 days a week and get up at around 10:30am. But today was different, a definite polar opposite of my continual morning apathy.

I am not entirely sure why it took this long, but I do know that it is directly connected to the fact that I work for myself now, make a great wage, and literally love working all of the time. For some reason today, I just woke up and everything clicked. Because of that, I was able to get a massive amount of work done and feel great about doing it all over tomorrow.

None the less, I better get back to work so I can finish up for the night - until tomorrow, have a great night.

While developing one of our internal websites I decided to develop a system to track user browsing and input habits to enable us to further develop the website. This is really in a effort to improve usability, and not to mention our return on investment on advertising and bringing traffic to the website.

I will try include the base of the code later, but basically the system tracks each unique visitor (based upon IP address), initiates a session for the user, creates a log entry for every page view, and tracks data posted to each page(ie: the input from all forms). We can then generate statistics based upon these habits to determine how visitors are navigating the website and what they are using. Further more, we then use these statistics to determine the average/common habits of our users/visitors and then decide what we think is a positive/negative outcome of such habits.

So basically we track every page view, then for each user we determine whether or not they did a positive or negative action for us. An example of a positive action might be a product purchase, or an example of a negative action might be an account cancellation. We then take these statistics and determine what are the common habits for users who complete both positive actions (to improve the number of these) and those that complete negative actions in effort to discourage and such actions.

It is really a basic concept and I’m sure over the next few weeks we will modify things appropriately to improve the system. At that time I will try to make an effort to post it on here.

None the less, I found a great article containing a overview of the principle behind monitoring user activity that may be worth skimming:
http://www2006.org/programme/files/xhtml/17/xhtml/fp17-atterer.html

I should caution that you really need to consider such racking measures and notify your visitors through a privacy policy because their are definitely some legal considerations to worry about.

What do you guys think?

As of the 5th of this month, I am finally finished my work at my former employer, DakotaCom.Net. Sadly enough it took nearly three weeks for the effect, the relief, to kick in. I am happy to announce that this effect has finally kicked in and I am back to the prior motivation that I had before I started working for this company. Though, I am thankful that through this past year I have really come to realize that I’m may not necessarily be the best candidate to work for a company other than my own. This is primarily attributed to the fact that I feel I am an entrepreneur at heart and as such, already have way-too-much on my plate, and my own businesses to favor. I will say that I appreciated this recent job for the most part because I learned a lot, most importantly, the nit and grit of the technology world and running a successful business in such a cut-throat market.

In terms of exciting news, I am looking at getting a new vehicle of some sort. Fortunately DakotaCom.Net provided me with a company car that I was able to use for personal use, but now that I no longer work for them, I have to resort back to the old ride (1996 Buick Regal Baby!) which because of it’s 200,000+ miles on it, it is becoming less and less reliable. Money is not an issue nor is the need of financing. I am looking at either a 2005+ GMC Yukon, 2005+ Ford F150, or a new Honda Accord. Totally random, and non of them really compare to each other, I just need to decide what I’ll need for transportation and buy the vehicle that most closely matches that. Hopefully I can make a viable decision on it this week, until then I’m crippling around in the Buick, and riding my bicycle most places - how humbling.

On a brighter light, we’re finally ordering new PCs this week for SophMedia, which I’m really excited about. Basically we’re building 2 Pentium D 2.66Ghz machines with dual 20″ on each machine, plus all the rest of the good stuff. The best thing about it is that out the door we are only dropping $2,747 (thanks Newegg!) on them, including shipping. Hopefully this helps increase productivity and maybe even my excitement to put more effort into posting here.

Speaking of the businesses, we are in the process of reorganizing RuckusWorks (AZEntertained.com, Rated*.com, etc), and reorganizing the partnership arrangements. Although it is best not to release all of the details, I am happy to mention that the outcome will be really positive for the business. SophMedia on the other hand is doing great, we have been overwhelmed with local and internet-based projects, nearly too many, and are in the process of launching another project/website this week (I’ll announce that later this week) and finishing up the final touches on XStreamHost.com / APanel.

None the less, I have got to get cranking on my huge list of things to catch up on, until next time - Take it easy!

“My son is now an “entrepreneur.” That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job.” - Ted Turner