moanblog

Hello and welcome back! I hope you haven’t missed us too much. Or, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ll fill you in: we’ve been offline for a few minutes. See, we’ve been switching webhosts. I’ll get into that in a moment.

But first, allow me to introduce myself. I’m a Dutchman called Pascal and I’m a psychology student at the University of Amsterdam. You can now forget all of that again because, don’t worry, this is not some sort of social experiment. Around here I’m simply known as the code monkey. With a little help from the excellent CodeIgniter framework, I typed up the backend code for moanlog. I also try to make sure everything stays up and running smoothly.

Which brings me back to us switching over to another webhost. Up until now, we’ve been using Media Temple’s Grid-Service. Me being based in the Netherlands means that the site has never been too fast for me, mostly due to the latency between the US and Europe. But over the past few days, the site has been remarkably slow and even downright unreliable.

We’re not the first web ‘start-up’ (if we are even that) not to have a revenue model in sight, so we try to spend our own heard-earned cash wisely. As such, we decided yesterday to move away from a $20/month service that doesn’t work out for us, and instead put moanlog on a hosting account I already had somewhere else.

For our US-based users, it means their traffic will now have to travel a bit further, as this new server is based in the Netherlands. However, none of our American test subjects detected any noticeable slowdowns, so if you are from the states, we hope you’ll have a similar experience. For everyone else, the site should now even be a bit faster.

So far for our big intercontinental move. If you’ve noticed any changes in speed of our site’s page loads, please let us know how fast the site is for you now – we’d love to hear about your findings!

It has been just over a week since we launched on the 11th of this month. I’d just like to extend my thank you from the first blog post, and express my gratitude for submitting moans and just generally browsing and checking out the site.

On that note, I would like to share some stats with you all just to let you all know exactly how we’ve done. We’ve got Google Analytics tracking all of our users around the Internet. Ok, well not exactly all around the Internet but just the site itself and it has proven to be a great insight into how your users interact with your site (yeah, you can probably tell it’s the first time I’ve properly used it ).

This image shows the total number of visitors moanlog had from the 11th to the 18th. As you can see, the day we launched we attracted 17 hits, of which 12 were uniques. The 12th however was a different story with 112 hits with 71 uniques.

Here’s a breakdown of the daily visits and uniques.

According to this, the average time spent on the site is 5:35, which either means people are reading through the content of the site, rather than loading it, thinking what is this rubbish, and closing it. Or, it means our usability is so poor, people are spending lots of time trying to find their way round. Although, if that was the case, the average time spent on the site would be lower as people generally give a site a few seconds before they get fustrated.

So what are visitors doing when upon loading the site?

According to this image, they’re loving the random function, submit is second most popular, which is a good thing on a site that lives on user submissions, they’re checking out who we are by visiting the about page and also browsing the moans on /browse/n/n. That’s pretty good, although I personally would like for people to care less about who we are and browse more.

Anyway, that’s enough stats for the time being. I’m going to post updates on the stats situation as we go.

So what do I make of the stats? I think the total hit count and uniques are quite impressive, especially taking how we launched into consideration. When we launched, all we did was change our status messages on various social networking sites and IM programs. Yeah, that was our launch. Months of hard work, just announced in the same notion as we tell people what we’re doing on, say Twitter.

I was not expecting half a billion hits in the first day, I wasn’t even thinking of 100 uniques in the first week. Why? We’re nobody on the Internet and we played it as such. So for a bunch of guys with no clout online, it’s not bad. The pageviews and uniques are decreasing, which I’m not too worried about. The fact of the matter is, we need more publicity. We’ll see how things pan out as they are, I’ve got no plan to launch some advertising campaign nor do we have the time for it. As the about page says, this is an experiment.

This is all I have to say on the matter, like I said up top, I’ll post more as we go.

- Gaurav

Well, it has officially been five days since we went live and we’re already approaching one hundred moans.  The explosion in number of submissions has not only been welcome but is highly encouraging.  Gaurav mentioned to me yesterday that some of the submissions should have awards for their entertainment and I have to agree.  (Number 95 is a particular favourite of mine!)

I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Gaurav for letting me join the team and help out with the site in any way I could.  I’ve known Gaurav for a number of years – I think it’s close to five now – and he constantly bathes us in ideas he has for interactive websites.  The one linking factor of these prototype sites ideas is always the social aspect.  The content is never the product of an individual in his plans, always the masses of internet users.

Whilst his idea previous to moanlog never saw the light of day, I was behind it 100% and I’m sad it never came to fruition.  As such, when he explained the idea behind moanlog and asked me to help out, I literally jumped at the chance.  (I’m not kidding, I leapt from my seat and hit the wall.)  I love the idea behind moanlog and I think this site has the potential to be something fantastic on the web.  Again, thank you Gaurav – I’m proud to be a part of this venture.

I also want to thank the other two lollers who make up the rag tag moanlog team.  Max is a stunningly creative individual whose skills in photoshop, notepadd ++ and all manner of programs never ceases to amaze me.  Pascal’s coding also floors me and using the administrative parts of moanlog is a breeze.  I am certain that it is this combination of fellows that makes the site as good as it is.

Remember, if you have any suggestions for the future of moanlog and the way the site functions, we would love to hear from you.  This whole site is fueled by you and naturally we want you to dictate how well the experience is.

Keep on submitting all that anger people!  We love to see what is getting you riled and we like to think that having this place is helping you to release that pent up tension.

I promise a far less ‘introductory themed’ blog entry in my next post.

The fact that you’re reading this means we have launched and months of work has finally paid off. We launched seconds ago. I would like to firstly give an astronomical thank you to Max, Pascal and Ryan for their work and putting up with me and my regime.

The project has been under development for over 5 months, which we know is a pretty damn long time for what is effectively a simple site. It’s taken so long because of my project management, but mainly because we’re all students and/or have jobs. Pascal was juggling full-time employment, with me and Max being full-time students.

So, you’re probably thinking why does this site even have a blog, or why we’re even making an effort. The answer is simple, it doesn’t matter how simple or complicated the site is, how big the team or company is, communicating with users is an essential part of the user experience and it’s something so many people and companies don’t even think about or do wrong. Anyway, this isn’t a lesson in social media.

For that reason we decided to launch this blog for people to give us their opinions, tell us what we’re doing wrong, what they don’t like, or even if they hate the site and think it’s useless (which we understand may be a lot of people), but it’s that communication and transparency I want to achieve.

In a few weeks or months when we have a decent amount of moans, we’ll start posting statistics on moanblog on what is being moaned about and hopefully try and break stuff down which will be fairly interesting to see how that all works out.

We also have an IRC channel for those of you who are familiar with IRC and/or prefer a real-time conversation.

So having said that, you are all more than welcome to join us in the chatroom and obviously here and I hope you all do.

Thank you if you’ve reached this far in the post. If you have any questions, please contact me at my email which is dotted all around the site.