This past month Datayze saw a paltry 1.5% growth in users and a whopping 23% growth in revenue. I’m now up to $627.76 per month, and it was a shorter month! It’s not the $1000/month goal I had set for myself, but I am headed in the right direction.

I intended to focus on emails again this month, however I was contacted about a nasty bug in one of my web developer apps. Given the symptoms it sounded like something that could be effecting all of those apps. I have long since wondered why those apps weren’t more popular, and now I might have an explanation. Even better, the person reporting the bug appeared eager in trying the tool again when it was fixed. It was an opportunity too good to pass up. The issue was a logic mistake with an easy fix. From initial investigation and final testing of the patch was no more than an hour. I will monitor the web development section of datayze in the coming months to see how users respond.

The amount of spam I get is starting to get out of control, and I’m the biggest culprit. Whenever someone encounters a 404: file not found error on datayze, I get an email notification. If the automated script can determine what URL the visitor likely intended, I get an email notification. A corollary to getting a lot of visitors is getting a lot of notifications. Some are for meta data files I’m not currently hosting (e.g. apple-touch-icon.png). Some of those errors are for specifications I’m not using (humans.txt, ads.txt, etc). Some are probing (e.g. wp-admin.php to see if my site uses wordpress). This information is useful, but it can wait until I’m ready to sift through the logs and plan out my next update. No need to send myself a daily notification, or fifty. Instead, I’d like to only be notified in situations that are actionable and time sensitive, such as a misspelled forum referral that can’t be auto addressed.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I want to solve problems, and the direction I want to take certain apps. I hope to find the time this coming month to start putting plans into actions.

Posted in Work Life | Tags: Sarahsoft