I’m delighted to share that I’m soft launching (How to) Datayze, the tutorial and tip side of Datayze.

I’ve been thinking about writing up some tutorials as a complement to the website apps for some time now. I’ve shared some of my ideas here, but wordpress has a tendency to mangle the formatting. I tried to force the formatting with CSS, but even that has proven to only be a partial solution. A blog format that incorporates the notion of freshness/staleness based on post age isn’t really the right place for tutorials, anyway. The tutorials were getting buried and hard to find. Besides, if it’s one thing I’ve learned, more traffic on one part of your site can give a collateral boost to the rest.

I liked the idea of having (how to) on it’s own subdomain, like https://howto.datayze.com, so that the URL reads as “howto datayze” but some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus advised against it. For now, both addresses are accessible, but the primary address I’m linking to is https://datayze.com/howto.

For a first past I wrote four articles:
– How to Minimize CSS
– How to Minimize Javascript
– How to Convert a URL to a Query String
– How to Add Spell Correction to 404 (based on a past blog post)

I’m keeping it as a soft launch soft launch because the technical writing isn’t where I want it to be. I’m hoping Google will Index the pages while I’m working on polishing up the text. (I’ve quickly become a SEO convert.)

My biggest fear in launching a tutorial section of datayze has been the technical writing aspect, and that the dyslexic mistakes I’m bound to make will make datayze look less professional overall. In a typical month I’ll get an email or two pointing out some of my misspellings and grammatical mistakes. I appreciate it, but also a bit embarrassed each time.

I’m really proud of the automation behind (how to) I wrote. I can copy and paste my php/javascript code and though the magic of javascript/css it’s nicely formatted with line numbers that aren’t selectable during a copy and paste. My first incarnation of a tutorial website required me to format the code myself. Pain. in. the. butt. Not to mention slow and error prone. The auto formatting script should get my tutorials up faster. The fact that line numbers aren’t selectable will make it easier for readers to just copy and paste the code snippets. Now if only I could automated the technical writing part, I’d be all set. (I think the desire to write this code is part of the reason I got over my fear of creating (how to) in the first place. I love creative solutions!)

Articles that are coming, once I figure out how to sufficiently generalize them so they’re useful for others.
– How to get around ad blockers
– How to automatically format code

Back to work for me.

The past couple of months I’ve worked on a number of optimization and improvement projects for Datayze.com, most of which the immediate benefits of were either small or unknown. Projects like adding an SSL certificate or minifying code. Sure it’s generally better to have an https connection, but it’s not strictly necessary for a website that doesn’t handle sensitive information. The code footprint was small, so that 20% gain I got from minifying it didn’t amount to a significant difference. I considered these projects future proofing. Maybe some day I’ll serve premium apps that require payment, and code footprints have a tendency to grow. Besides, these projects are all good practices web developers are encouraged to follow as a matter of principle. Google wasn’t penalizing websites who weren’t following these best practices yet, but was leaving the door open to in the future.

For at least one of those projects that future is now, apparently.

Google is now experimenting with mobile first version of their index. Now is a good time to have a mobile friendly website, especially one using dynamic serving like Datayze where the content between the desktop version and the mobile version is identical, but displayed in a device friendly way. Some speculate that the change will result in a penalty for desktop only centric websites, however that does not appear to be the case. Yet. There’s that word again. As we become an increasingly mobile world, I can imagine a scenario were it is more advantageous to use the mobile based index for all searches, than to keep two indexes, or use the desktop based version.

The change to a mobile first index is coming at a rather fortuitous time since I started creating the mobile friendly versions of my apps back in August and had just about finished them. I had exactly five pages left that technically satisfied the mobile friendly test, though my human eye wasn’t quite satisfied with them yet.

Admittedly I had mixed emotions when I first heard the news. Fear. (What if my mobile version website isn’t as robust as I think it is.) Excitement. (Maybe the fact that I’m mobile friendly now will give me a competitive advantage of my competition that hasn’t made the leap yet.) It looks like most of my competition is already mobile friendly, so this change probably a wash for me. Good news: at least it’s not a penalty like it could have been!

Onward and Upward.

It’s been a phenomenal month, but before I dive into it, let’s recap last month. In October, I had my highest ever grossing day ($4.03), and an 8 day stretch averaging $2/day. In total I earned $36.51 which was one of my better months. I didn’t mention it in my previous blog post, but the number of users is up 48% compared to September. That’s the first major increase in user base I’ve had since starting my business back in 2014!

On to this month.

This month I earned $70.72, for a daily average of $2.28. I had a $6.10 day, a $6.05 day, and a 15 day stretch averaging $3/day! I also had a 74% increase in the user base compared to October! A very good month indeed. More good news: I’ve also had a number of clicks on the static ads I generate when an adblocker is detected. I’m always happy when something I’ve spent a lot of time on bares fruit, and I spent a great deal of effort on that script!

It’s been a good month and their are plenty of reasons to be even more optimistic about November. I indicated early this month that my search clicks were ever increasing. That patterned mostly continued throughout the month. This past week the increase is a little less clear, but that could be due to the holiday. That means even if everything holds steady, November will likely have a larger user base than October. The value of a click is still higher than it used to be, but lower than last month. It may seem counter intuitive to be grateful for that, but I worry that a high click value is a random event and not sustainable.

This month I’m hoping for $100 for the month. Given the ever increasing user base I think it’s possible. There are a couple of possible monkey wrenches, however, that could keep me from reaching that goal. There’s one day less in November, and the Thanksgiving week is historically a tough one for my business as most people are offline and enjoying family time. Least year I had a 17% decrease in average daily users after November 21st than compared to before. Revenue practically disappeared. Over Halloween weekend (which I’m defining as Friday the 28th though Halloween) I only had a 8% decrease in daily users, but that corresponded to a 36% decrease in daily revenue.

As for progress, it’s another month of mostly tinkering under the hood.

The increase in traffic is forcing me to address some long standing issues. Now that my user base is up so much even my unpopular apps are getting some hits. Up until this point my modus operandi has been to release early and give the search engines a chance to index it. In entrepreneur terms it’s called the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). My Site Navigability Analyzer, for example, did not have a way of re-crawling a page. If one had a broken link on their domain, the Site Navigability Analyzer would record the error and move on to the other pages. There was no way to tell the crawler that the page was fixed and to recrawl just that page. The webmaster would need to start the crawler over at the beginning. That’s fixed now.

I did release a new app this month, but I’m not ready to talk about it as it’s accuracy just isn’t where I need it to be yet.

This coming month I’m going to divide my focus between continued app improvements, and the continued Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort. The correlation between increased search traffic and increased forumn linking to app URLs is stronger than I anticipated, and runs both ways. Continued SEO is likely the best path forward to quickly grow my business.