Comments are free but the code is rubbish

One of the things I’ve been keen to do for a while is to add some better comments functionality to London for Free to make it feel a bit more web 2′y.

And as things have gone a bit quiet on the work front lately, I thought I’d seize the moment today to make a start.

I [...]

Worth the effort

Well, the redesigned site has been live for 4 months now and it seems to have been worth all the pain of recreating it (note to self – it takes longer than you think!)

In those four months its had over 70,000 visits and over 335,000 page views: comparable figures for the same period last year [...]

Ticking along but could do better

The site’s been live now for 11 weeks, and yesterday’s visitors helped take the adsense earnings for July alone to over $100 – in only 9 days.

Amazing! Google is one cow I would gladly kiss.

So I thought I’d have a look at the visitor stats so far.

Since 24th April when the site was relaunched, it [...]

London for free goes mobile

Well, since the relaunch a couple of months ago of the main London For Free site, this has been at the top of my list of phase 2 stuff to do. Then last month, there was an excellent article in .Net magazine, describing the basics of making your site mobile.

So finally today, I started creating [...]

Captcha the spammers

It was only a matter of time, I guess.

Recently I had started to receive spam emails through the web forms dotted around the new site. Thinking back with horror to the time a few years ago when I was receiving thousands of spam messages a day, I knew I had to do something to stop [...]

Serving its purpose

The site has now been live for just ten days and I’m already seeing a significant increase in affiliate earnings.

Some broad facts and figures:

- on my old site, google adsense adverts were generating earnings of around $5 a month simply based on the single link sitting neglected on my old home page

- over the [...]

Up and running

The re-designed London for Free site is now live.

After spending every weekend this year – and many evenings – working away at it, it feels strange to suddenly not have to write content, design pages and fix bugs.

The good news is that after only 2 days since it was launched, I am already seeing double [...]