5: Immigration and Things
6th January, 2022 21:40
This is going to be a short post today. Edited. Turned out longer than I thought.
The day has gone by in a flash and I have not had a moment to sit down and write, but my wife has just gone to bed so I have a couple of hours that I like to call my pottering time.
Work ended up being pretty productive today, once I got started but I had a couple of life tasks I needed to do first thing which ended up taking up most of the morning.
I'm not sure If I said before but my trip to the States recently included me getting married.
My wife is American. Very long story on how we met but long story short I am currently in the process of applying for a Green Card, which will allow me to live and work over there.
The process can take about 2 years so I'll be in Bristol for a while yet and my wife will travel back to the US every few months to check on stuff with the house etc.
Anyway, the immigration attorney had sent me a bunch of questions that I needed to gather info on to be able to answer, and that ended up eating into the morning a couple of hours
I then sent an email to Ben. Ben's the guy who developed this whole Paper website system. You should check it out.
I'd found a small bug the other day and I also had a new feature idea I wanted to suggest to him.
Whilst I was doing that I also read Ben's own daily blog post and he mentioned that one of his next project ideas was going to do with Firebase.
Firebase is part of Google's back-end as a service. It has loads of parts and I am actually using it myself for Puzzlebouts.
- Hosting. Puzzle bouts
- Cloud Database (Firestore)
- Cloud Web Functions
The particular reason I am mentioning it now is it also gives you access to any Google Analytics sites that you have wired up.
I actually wired up this site with Google Analytics (it's a Paper Website option), and it looked like I had a spike in traffic a couple of weeks ago. This actually would have been when I was ill, so at first I couldn't understand why.
Then I remembered that Ben had kindly mentioned this blog in his round-up post about his Paper website development journey.
So people had obviously clicked through and taken a look here. 192 people on one day from quite a number of different countries. That was pretty exciting to see.
The unfortunate thing is it does not seem as if anyone signed up to get notified of new posts. Maybe because it looked like the site was dormant. As I was ill. Damn. Seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.
It got me thinking today though.
How do you go from no audience to an audience?
I need to do some research on marketing. I'm beavering away coding everyday but in the end if no one ever knows my site exists it could be a great site but a flop.
I have a Twitter account and I follow a fair few people on there, but I don't have many followers.
I guess I need to start actively publishing the fact that I'm writing this. Keep plugging away and a slow drip drip of people may start to take interest.
Its an area I'm pretty ignorant about to be honest, but I need to get into it if Puzzlebouts has any chance of being a success, although at the moment for me success would be if one user registered!
And for that I need to complete the core functionality.
So back to coding again in the morning.
Stay tuned ...