To be honest I have no idea where my users came from. I am winning seo though.

Origin of the img tag.

can we see it?

this is great...

Update on that contract. Keeping things obscure, obviously, but I found it rather interesting.

To answer the above question, I only used SO twice in a week. I already mentioned about the outdated, broken, and undocumented libs, etc. The code base was so whacked out that using any resources outside of a lot of guessing wasn't possible. It was pure luck for the company that they found someone who was able to decipher the cryptic code. I wasn't the first person they had look at it.

I managed to fix what needed to be fixed immediately, but the client was asking for other things. It's safe to say that every single line of code had a terrible mistake in it and nothing from the original base can be salvaged for later.

Overall, it's a bittersweet situation. I feel good for accomplishing the damn-near impossible, but I feel horrible for the client. I'm truly bothered by the developer who created this flying piece of garbage and passed it off as something worth paying "a lot" of money for. What a train wreck... nothing in it makes a bit of sense, and the dev who did this had zero understanding super basic concepts. Trust me, it is that bad. I hope the idiot that built this thing never works again.

So, I'm in limbo. I'm guessing the rewrite won't be something the client is going to go for. Even so, it probably would be written in a more "universal" language.

I have had that exact same experience. I was once brought in to "fix" something that was so broken that fixing it was literally impossible. They'd already spent a half million dollars on the project. I rewrote it from scratch for $10,000. But they still weren't happy because they spent $510,000 dollars on it, from their perspective.

When I started at the company I've mentioned (where I ended up with 10%...), we were receiving 75 visits a month, huge bounce rate, our website was essentially invisible.

2 years later we were pushing 2.5-3k visits a month with 40-50 quality downloads (leads). In that same time frame I worked with many venture-backed companies to dramatically increase their website growth and lead-gen.

I think in your case it probably requires you to do things outside your normal comfort zone, and you don't put in what I would consider a _real_ effort.

If you think it is not easy to do, what steps have you taken historically? What have you done today? What are you doing tomorrow?

Created a new thread but realized this LC thread may be better.

Does anyone remember the old PTP staking forum? I'm thinking about the possibility of starting a new not-for-profit forum based on PartTimePoker's staking mechanics. Anyone have any insight to what that might entail? I'd love to chat about it, please PM. Thanks

It's a multi-pronged strategy, with a lot of metrics and testing. This particular project was released on Jan 1st of this year. I was taking a break from the forums and everywhere else because I wanted to work from 5am to midnight every day (granted, "to midnight" included working at the crummy spot I was at, but same point). I sort of over-extended myself, working through a ton of sickness (note to "future you all": being 38 and working 100+ hours a week isn't good for you).

In 4 months, I ran up to about 4,000 page views per month, and basically doubling traffic month-over-month. This past month has been sitting back and seeing what the residuals are, plus I sort of needed a bit of recovery time.

The "effort" is expanding and testing various things that would be interesting to my audience, so I have various sections to the site. Each section requires a different strategy, but since it is about music, relevant.

There is a music theory ontology, based on some popular articles I wrote on that same subject. Those articles, on my personal blog, are fairly popular and drive some traffic. Since the ontology is valid, my site has the largest and most accurate collection of music theory stuff on the web.

There is also a blog with some ideas about music, some how-to, etc. Mostly entertaining and tongue-in-cheek.

The other section is for practice, which include random sheet-music generation to build practice music, MusicXML reading and generation. There is also a section that builds sheet music from your play.

There is then a section for discovering new music.

So, it's a lot of different avenues and they all require a different bit of promotion and marketing. This includes some driving from Twitter, FB, Quora. A lot of cross-promotion from start-up sites, guest blogging, keeping up with other musicians, YouTube videos, a mailing list, etc.

In effect, the mass of the work is figuring out how each prong is promoted and how it impacts the overall traffic, plus gives feedback on what to do next with the business ideas. The oddest feeling is seeing stuff that took considerable time, I thought was absolutely cool (and not possible to find anywhere else), and totally flopped, lol. So, you know, part of it is figuring out what to do with the dogs. That's sunk cost not only in development, but in promotions. This doesn't help the final page-view count.

There is some stuff, like the blogs, that are relatively easy to promote and get views, but they don't help much with generating the visitors that browse. The sheet music stuff is where the real browsing happens, and pretty much the showcase system.

Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to really make a total go of making this my only job, but there's a lot of ideas. I know that there is something worth paying for, but LOL if someone is using adsense to monetize a music site, or any site that isn't getting 100k visits a month. Actually, if I got that much, I'd be lucky to be earning $30 / month, which would be a total waste.

So, in effect, there is a mixture of "slow burn" and "viral" content and promotion, then measuring results. Also, there is meat-space promotion, where I tell people to check it out. It's rather surprising to see people start up so darn skeptical, then after, idk, 2 months, they come back and are saying "oh ****, there's something there and it's going to be incredible if you keep working on it."

Personally, I'm more focused on slow burn growth, since I'm sort of considering a subscription service, working out an idea of beta, working out opening up a store, etc.

So, yeah, I'm working really ****ing hard on promotion, programming, considering business realities, being not-sick, gathering work contracts, trying to live a normal life, etc.

Yeah, this is the bummer. I was looking at the time-line to replicate with a total feature freeze and... idk. It's something I'd be interested in doing, but you bring up a good point about the client's perspective. I hope it goes well for everyone involved.

I know what they ultimately want to have, but I know that's definitely not possible at this moment. The things they did want aren't even done from what I was able to tell, but that could be me not being able to decipher what was happening in many parts. It says a lot about our programming languages that you can get things to work despite code quality.

I guess I'm in shock from the whole thing. After so many thousands of rejections, I feel like I missed some serious life lessons along the road.

daveT,

Tbh it seems like you tried to bait us so you could drop a brag post about how well your initial traffic growth was and how hard you are working!

4k views/mo for a consumer site is obviously small, but in a few months it is a great start and very impressive! By this stuff being hard, maybe you had some grand delusion about "going viral" or something like that where all of a sudden you go from 4k visits to 40k overnight.

It requires a lot of work, but I wouldn't consider it as hard. Hard to me would be something like rolling your own crypto, or building a secure operating system. Things that no matter how much you work, you will likely never succeed at. Online marketing is a grind, sure, it takes a lot of time and effort, and guess and check and slow iterative processes, but "hard" it is not.

Anyone implemented Google Measurement Protocol before? Just got it up and running on our site and:

- Drops page loads significantly as you don't need ga.js, lack of external scripts always good
- Send the page views/events asynchronously as a batch when page unloads so no page slow down
- Tracking ~20-30%+ more visitors (ad blockers etc can block it, same with no JS enabled)
- Far easier to track, eg transaction tracking. Easier to call an even via your back end code instead of somewhere on a thank you page

Pretty easy to setup, but you gotta do a bit of your own custom filtering. Would highly recommend it as another edge in faster page speeds. Seems essential if you're doing conversion any sort of conversion tracking, loss of data can be quite harmful.

Larry, I've been around these parts enough that I'd assume people wouldn't think I humble brag. I simply responded to your query and had no intent of baiting people, and yes, you are correct, it is outside of my comfort zone. I dread using social media, etc.

You bring up an interesting point that I did have to figure out the hard way. A "viral" success isn't really that useful in the long-run. I'm definitely a proponent of slow-burning, and it's interesting to note that many people have written and made videos about this very topic.

I guess what I mean about hard is... it's hard to figure out what people will be attracted to. You really can't figure that out without taking a risk, which often means weeks of going user-perceived "dark" to add a new feature. I feel like this is a critical junction where you can accidentally abandon users, etc.

And I don't think "hard" should be relegated to the universe where there is a max of 100 people on earth who can do X. If anything, it's proof-positive that building a web application is very hard, if not impossible, for many people... It's relative.

I'm trying to do something that hasn't been done before, or rather, trying a totally different perspective on a problem that isn't solved. In fact, music-sheet generation, from building sensible practice music (effectively computer-generated composition) to generating music from someone's play, may in fact be impossible. I'm the only one using a base ontology to do so and just hoping that I can help push the knowledge ahead. Many other people are using my ideas to build other systems and programs, but computer music is a very large field with few practitioners, and so far, there hasn't been a lot of progress outside of MIDI.

I'd consider Gullanian's work extremely difficult as well. It's a truly impressive product.

indeed is horrible for newbies. they take your resume and completely mangle it so that

NAME
ONLINE POKER PLAYER in huge text is at the top... wtf... there is no option to only upload your own resume?

they dont even have a google docs option...

StackOverFlow is infinitely better. You can upload from google docs and they have a space for you to write a message to the employer.

Dave,

I was mostly just messing with you re:bragging.

I think you're right that it is very hard to think of what people will be attracted to, and that's why you need a secondary strategy. Even the best marketing people will get into ruts and not be sure how to push the needle.

The strategy is to keep grinding and putting in the effort, measuring, testing, optimizing. It's a proven playbook, just gotta put in the hours.

Right, page views are really nothing more than vanity metrics, unless you are a corp that absolutely depends on page views for income. I don't, so it's a totally different qualitative difference, and figuring that piece out is pretty difficult. I'd classify it as hard since so many companies fail on the fact that they have no income or positive P&L.

I have nothing at all to brag about. As mentioned, I'm not generating enough income to lift my long finger to anyone.

Wow super interesting, after finally making my game stable I got around to doing a stats page that analyzes things like winrates and puts out graphs etc. Its a game of two teams that can be played with 5-10 players. It turns out the game is really balanced well i.e. each team wins the expected amount for 5, 6, 8 & 10 players. And one team wins way way more than they should (based on simple math) for 7 & 9 players. Wonder what the takeaway here is, clearly its almost impossible for game designers to figure this out on their own if they're making a meatspace boardgame.

I'm struggling to think of a board game I've ever played that wasn't mostly symmetric, but I've never gone super nerdy, just stuff like Monopoly, chess, etc. I guess there's some first mover advantage to both of those so they're not actually symmetric, but close

Grue,

What is the team doing different than the other in 7/9? Are there rule changes there?

I would say most game designers aren't well suited for optimizing problems like this, which is why lots of games (Monopoly) blow giant dick.

Dudd,

No turn based game is symmetric. They're inherently asymmetric. Game state is never identical for both players.

Monopoly blows dick? You're going to have to show some work there. 7/9 implies two teams that aren't evenly matched in player count, which is difficult to compensate for in the best balanced games.

I think among game players Monopoly is considered a pretty flawed game. It's basically never played by them - it's played by family and kids and stuff mostly. And of the times I've seen it played in family settings, most people skip the first half of the game and distribute properties first. If you want to see something funny look for the guy who explains how to win at Monopoly.

I read the 7-9 one as 7 or 9 players per team, not 7 or 9 players overall.

Rusty,

You're leaving out the inane grinding when a player is 100% to win at the end. Old school board games love to continue to have turns when the outcome has been decided.

Effectively its a game of 3 different states: 5-6 players, 7-8 players, 9-10 players. So maybe the takeaway is that they did a good job of balancing the 5 & 6 player track. Other ones not so much.

I don't think anyone is going to be able to help you without understanding the mechanics more.

Is it turn based? There may be some irregularities with 7/9 that make it wonky. (5 being /2 of 10 helps explain why that odd number would be reasonable) Starting locations?

I dunno. I should just list off a bunch of random stuff that could possibly be an answer since I have no idea what mechanics exist.

Yeah, symmetric was definitely the wrong word since it has a formal game theory definiton, just that thimble vs top hat play exactly the same in Monopoly whereas theoretically a fighting game should be perfectly balanced despite the fact that every character has wildly diverging move sets