I just did a quick post at Domain Name News on how none of the ‘top’ Canadian startups actually use a .ca domain (or even an expensive ‘generic’ domain).

And ooh looky, iBegin clocks in at #6 according to ComScore.

Greg Sterling loves coupons (or at least loves to talk about them :)). Many other analysts and writers in the local space also talk about coupons a lot.

Not to be snobbish, but I’ve never really cared for coupons. Yeah I will use one occasionally, but rarely do I go hunting and looking out for coupons.

And (to my surprise) it seems like I was in the majority. I was just reading today on how coupon usage had been declining for 16 years. It took an extremely tanking economy to reverse that trend.

What am I getting at? So many people talk about how coupons are a great way to prove to businesses that online traffic converts … maybe they should look into some other method to prove the value of their traffic.

I started dabbling in websites way back in 1997, but the first one to make me over four figures was a topsites. And at 18, that catches your attention.

Anyhoo - one of my topsites (which I sold for a quarter million … to help jumpstart iBegin) was doing roughly 100,000 unique visitors when I sold it. As I’ve bemoaned about it before, but those damn copycats are everywhere. And I was looking at the biggest one of my copycats … the site got 5.8 million unique visitors last month! To re-phrase - if June was a 31 day month, that is six million unique visitors in a day. And correct me if I am wrong, Yelp doesn’t even get that.

Sites like Blogtoplist and BlogTopArea (both knockoffs of our BlogTopsites.com) get roughly 2 million and 1.5 million unique visitors a month.

And people want in. I mentioned CSS Topsites before. It was pretty quick-shooting - I created it, contacted a few CSS site owners I had a personal relationship (including the giant CSSVault.com), and suddenly you have all these sites coming in. The links flew in, the homepage and an inner directory ended up with PR7, and … I just sold the site for $15,000 a week ago.

8 years ago people told me that topsites were for warez and porn. Today people still tell me topsites are for warez and porn. In reality they are an amazing viral machine that generates an absolute ton of traffic.

I will say - running a topsites is not fun. Spammers galore, it is a headache to keep that ship straight.

DDL:08 was a good experience for us - it was the first time we ever had a booth (though we have sponsored other events), and it was a good experience (more on that later).

Right now though I want to point out to a bonafide ass.

Part of our sponsorship was us sponsoring a Cyber Cafe. At the conference they have two sets of three computers connected to the internet. Two companies sponsor the cyber cafe, setting the homepage on the computer to a site specified by the sponsor. As such, three of the computers were set to www.ibegin.com and the other three were set to www.homes.com.

We noticed this earlier on, and it happened non-stop - some ass kept going over to the six computers and kept setting www.bizclip.com/portfolio/ as his homepage. And by non-stop I mean he would come by every 30 minutes to do this.

I never actually saw the bugger doing this as I was too busy to wait to catch him, but quite a few people let me know what was going on, including one of our employees.

I can only imagine the kind of service and product you would receive from someone who would stoop to such a level. Consider yourself warned.

Update: I should note that quite a few people did this. This one particular individual did it multiple times. At the same time - other than human decency I cannot imagine a way to ’solve’ this kind of behavior. Timers, perma-frames, etc - they all have drawbacks. So really nothing Kelsey nor we can do about it.

Just some anecdotal evidence.

We released a site some three years ago. It sat on our oldest server for the first 18 months, and it didn’t do so well in the search engines. Did around 8000 pageviews a day, with revenue at a partly $25-35 a day. Nothing impressive.

Then when we finally got our new server configuration up a while ago, we moved it. Instantly traffic went up a little bit - the site was faster, the search was faster, etc etc. Google also went crazy, crawling a *lot* heavier, and also sending more traffic.

Yesterday the site did 22,000+ pageviews, and over $170 in revenue (admittedly a little bit high, usually with that many pageviews it does roughly $125 on average).

Just as interesting is that (now) three of the top five (and the top two) are searches for the brand itself. That was not the case when it was on the older server.

Its taken me roughly four months to get here, but three days ago my notebook finally arrived.

I looked for a long time for a notebook with the following:
1. SSD
2. 13.3″ max screen / < 4 lb (basically not too bulky).
3. Docking station
4. A powerful enough gfx card that wouldn't choke on powering dual 20"+ (1600 res) monitors.

Lots of notebooks came close, but unfortunately none sealed the deal. Turns out to make the notebook under 4 pounds requires removing the circuitry that allows you to dock - oh dear. And USB docks are horrible - never get them.

So the specs (click):

So now its all nicely tied in. I can undock my notebook, and all my work is with me. I come home, pop it in, close the screen, and I have a 21″ + 22″ widescreen, with my speakers, printer, mouse, keyboard, keyboard (yes I have two connected, don’t ask why heh) all connected and ready for use. Pop the phone into the cradle and voila contacts notes all synched (I do have bluetooth I just haven’t tried using it yet). I’m not even using a wired connection into the dock - Wireless N powers me here - so bringing it with me into the living room is absolutely cake.

Oh and if you travel, definitely get the ’slim-adapter’ (if they over it). So much less bulky and (with Dell at least) a lot more connection options (airplane, car, etc).

I’m also trying to get used to Office 2007, odd little creature it is.

We would have failed. Miserably.

As I emailed our in-house designer (the amazingly talented Elena of Design Disease) the fifth design for iBegin Source (since incarnation), it hit how much we had evolved since our launch. I had the original idea for iBegin in October 2005 (while showering of course). The entire idea behind iBegin Source hit me in October 2006. And the plans for harnessing that data for something bigger hit me in October 2007 (odd recurring theme eh!)

I was talking to my lead programmer, and he was very angry at the old startup he had worked at. They had burned through something like $6 million, and had recently launched something he had worked on. Except they had botched it. Badly. And he was railing how if they had spent the proper time it would have come out right.

I just shook my head and smiled.

When we had originally launched iBegin, I think about a dozen VCs came to us in the first 3 months or so. They all liked the idea of local social search, and wanted to expand on it. Quickly. Yelp was gaining steam, and with Judy’s Book and InsiderPages all growing too, they were convinced that untold amounts of money was to be made.

Thankfully, I had a philosophy, and I stuck with it.

And it became clear relatively quickly that the sales channel and the review channel did not mesh very well. A vice-versa catch-22 - if a business had good reviews, why bother advertising? If a business had bad reviews, why bother advertising?

By not funding and deciding to take my time, I was able to re-assess without having fire being breathed down my neck. Heck I even went on a one week vacation to clear my head.

And so iBegin Source came out. But we knew it wouldn’t make a big profit for a long time. We knew that it would take time to lay the groundwork to establish with potential customers. With potential partners. Not months, but years. And we had the luxury of not needing to meet annual forecasts as dictated by someone else. No need to bring immediate profit.

And boy am I thankful. Yes we have had our share of headaches. And yes sometimes its been nice to think “this would be so much easier with a couple million behind us.” But the reality is at the end of the day, the millions would not have made a difference. We would have been well on our way towards oblivion like the other review-based sites.

And we have much more up our sleeves. Our little ‘innovation’ house should be launching in the next 48 hours - nothing ground breaking, but interesting enough to maybe spark a few brain cells. And our long term plan is executing beautifully - even slightly faster than I had anticipated.

I love it when people cover companies that organically grew into something very notable. I hope to join those ranks in the next three years.

A common attack method of gaining access to a login is to brute force attack. That means on a login page, you enter a username, and then put in a random password. If it fails, you repeat. And repeat. Ad nauseum. If the user uses a simple password (eg ‘food’ or ‘password’), after enough attempts you will eventually guess the right password.

So to stop such behavior, software like vBulletin gives you five tries to get it right. If you fail, you get locked out.

Facebook extended it intelligently - if you fail enough times (I think I failed six times), it doesn’t just lock you out - it also redirects you to the password reset feature. Fill that out, and voila! You are back into business.

A nice little touch since vBulletin (and similar) lock you out for 15 minutes, regardless of you trying to reset your password.

Just a nice UI touch to have.

From the nuts and bolts to how you present data to your visitors - you can squeeze speed out in many ways.

The (relatively) popular talk is about optimizing the user-download sequence to wring out as much performance as you possibly can. I’ve talked about this in the context of CSS sprites (great for speed oomph).

But there are other things you can do at the server-level that often get skipped over.

Two quick examples:

Our weather widget is pretty popular. It is now used on over 200,000 unique pages. Every pageview on one those pages = a call to our server. So of course we cache the HTML we output, but that still means our hard disks get hit for every request. So we looked closely and saw that the cache never grew bigger than 2 gb. The solution? A server with 8 gb ram, 4 gb for normal memory options, and a 4 gb ramdisk that is used for the cache output. This saves a lot of wear and tear on the HDs themselves, while letting us respond faster than ever.

Second example - re-writing URLs. Often times people use mod_rewrite through a .htaccess file. The problem with that is say you have a file 5 folders deep: /home/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/file-here Every time file-here is called, the server is checking all five folders for the existence of a .htaccess file. If it finds one, it has to open it and read it. The solution is to edit your configuration file (eg apache’s conf file) and put the mod_rewrite there. This way you save five file checks (and potentially one or two file reads) for every single hit.

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg - a lot of other things you can do to wring out more out of your server(s).

Don’t know if that is a word, but frankly don’t care

I went CRT-free 5.5 years ago, and went dualie 4.5 years ago. Best idea ever - my eyes thank me, and having two screens is great for segmenting work.

I just ran into Ultramon, and I can’t believe I wasn’t using this app.

Beyond the various features it does have, each screen has its own taskbar (this is Windows only). It already feels much better