The Codebelay Blog

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  • 3 Creative Ways to Recruit Developers

    Recruiting talented developers in this market is still extremely difficult. How should a recruiter find the talent (PHP, Ruby, MySQL, iPhone, .NET, Java) your clients need? I outline a few creative out of the box solutions below.

    Disclosure: I work as the lead developer at AppDevAndMarketing.com . This article in no way suggests we’ve used any of these methods.

    Update on 4/15/2011: Ya, I’ve had to resort to all these methods and they’ve worked for us. 😀

    1. Turn your project managers, account executives and marketers into coders. This is a fairly cheap investment with a high ROI. It is cheaper than paying out a bounty, and you already trust these folks. Send them to iPhoneDev Bootcamp now! Just be sure to prepare their machines for the development they’ll need to do. I tried this at a previous place of employment with great results! If you were trained by me and are reading this, please ask for a raise.

    2. Look for places not so obvious. Use dating sites to find talent. Ya, I know, you haven’t used that match.com account in awhile, or have sworn of okaycupid.com or JDate, but guess what. For you bleeding edge types, try the iPhone, dating app, Skout. Although s/he might not be the person of your dreams, s/he might have the talent you need. The key take away is to use unexpected social media spaces for recruiting. Don’t be sleazy or sly about it. A simple, “Hi, I read your profile. You seem very talented in X. I’d actually like to hire you. Coffee or drinks?”

    3. Use IRC. If you’re smart enough to do this, you probably shouldn’t be recruiting, but IRC is this best place to find pure, raw talent. Details on how to get onto IRC can be found on Google, but the best guide for newbies can be found on this gaming site. Use reputation defender services to help improve your business reputation and attract reliable talents.

    There’s one more special place that I haven’t revealed that will guarantee you top talent every time. Leave a comment and I’ll contact you with that exclusive place to find developers.

  • 5 Reasons to Go to WordCamp LA

    I just got my ticket for WordCamp LA.

    Here are 5 reasons you should go:

    1. You run a WordPress blog. WordCamp LA brings together folks who have the same challenges you have in SEO, web design, and extending WordPress functionality through themes and plug-ins.
    2. You are in LA. ’nuff said.
    3. The view of LA from the LMU Campus is fantastic.
    4. Thom Meredith will be talking about his WordPress related experiences while working for the LA Times.
    5. Allison Day will give a talk just for beginners on how to decode the code in WordPress Themes

    I contacted the organizers about giving a talk on how I used HyperDB to scale the Nikon Festival site. We’ll see if I hear back from them.

  • Testing Out The WordPress iPhone App

    I’m driving from LA to San Francisco today. I’m trying out the WordPress iPhone app to see how much it differs from the Desktop experience.

  • How to Triple Your Site Traffic with the 3 Keys of an SEO Blog Post

    My website traffic tripled yesterday!

    Once again the 3 keys are:
    1. Use adwords to tell you which words are expensive.
    2. Use the expensive adwords in your post. In this case, “make money with adsense,” is worth $1.50 per click.
    3. Blast your social network using something like ping.fm .

  • 4 Tools For Blogging on the Go

    Great blogging tools make you more efficient. They can also help you drive more traffic to your site.

    1 Camera+ brightens up your photos and makes them look so much better. You can share your photos on major social networks.

    2 WordPress for the iPhone is a must. I’ve written posts on my iPhone and it’s a great tool. Whatever blogging software you use, make sure you find the one that works with your smart phone!

    3 Seesmic for the iPhone allows you to share your blog post created on the go. If you use ping.fm you can share one blog post on linkedin.com, facebook, myspace, friendster, flickr, tumblr, twitter, and bebo in one status update!

    4 Once you’ve posted your message, it’s time to study your Google Analytics. The only iPhone app that does this for me is Analytics Apps. At $6.99 it is pricy, but if you’re on the road lots, it’ll start paying for itself.

  • The 3 Keys to a Blog Post with SEO

    According to SEO companies like VICTORIOUS, page speed is an essential ranking factor for all websites. So, on how fast your web pages load, will determine how high your SERP rankings will be on Google. Again, here you need to make sure that your web hosting provider isn’t bottlenecking your website where it matters, negatively impacting your SEO efforts. If you need a good hosting service to increase your website speed, you might want to check these wordpress hosting company plans.

    This is just an Seo packages for small businesses experiment on how to make money with adsense.

    I created a google ad words campaign focusing on what one does to start a blog and make money:

    You do not need to know how to create blog software. You should learn more about SEO and its importance before you create your blog as this will help you with customer traffic.

    The three keys are:

    1. Sign up for AdWords and create an adwords campaign. Do not run the campaign unless you really want to drive traffic to your site and pay for that. You only want to know which adwords are expensive which means those adwords get searched lots.
    2. Use all the adwords in your blog post. If you look above you’ll see that I did as close to that as I could
    3. Use ping.fm to blast your entire social network with your blog post.

    Does it work?

    Stay tuned for tomorrow when I publish the results here.

    Update on August 20, 2010: I tripled my site traffic just by doing those 3 things above yesterday!

  • Blogging Every Day For Six Months Starts Now

    I’ve decided to blog every day for 6 months starting now to see if it will get me 10,000 uniques a month. That’s blogging everyday until February 18, 2011.

    In this blog post, I just want to share a few things that make blogging different from writing.

    I want to share these things because of this piece of wisdom: Blogging is not writing.

    • Each sentence must have a popular Google Ad Word, like blogging or Google. 🙂
    • Keep things between 50 and 150 key words.
    • Engage folks via social media.

    Writing is really about engaging people, really moving them. Blogging is a subset of writing that has to take into account search engines and making words and the code that underlies them very friendly to the search engines.

  • Internet Speeds in Santa Monica and Westwood Suck

    Internet speeds in Santa Monica and Westwood suck when you compare them to Kyrgyztan (14 mbp/s) or Latvia (24 mbp/s). Never mind that these areas in LA have economies that dwarf these two places.

    The average speed in these areas seems to be at about 1.5 mbp/s in Westwood and 10 mbp/s in Santa Monica.

    1.5 mbp/s is simply not acceptable in Westwood. 10 mbp/s is simply too slow in a town that prides itself on being the movie capitol of the world, especially for someone like James Cameron who has his offices there. Using a messenger to ship a DVD is still faster than using the bandwidth available there.

    If West LA is to have a world class tech scene, we must have more bandwidth. More bandwidth is what allows a place like Silicon Valley to develop technologies first. A good example is AJAX, which sucks when most folks are on a modem. However, leveraging faster than average bandwidth allowed folks in Silicon Valley to learn this crucial technology / technique first.

  • 4 Ways to Avoid Foursquare Fatigue

    As a social media expert, I’ve noticed a severe decline in Foursquare check-ins by innovators and early adopters.

    This phenomena, which I’m calling Foursquare Fatigue, can be avoided by following these 4 tips.

    1. Use two phones on different carriers. We all know that AT&T’s 3G blows on the iPhone, so carry a spare phone like a Blackberry running Verizon. That way you get all your bases covered. Can’t check-in with the iPhone? Check-in with the Blackberry. Now you’re stylin’.

    2. You don’t have to check in all the time. Ya, getting the mayorship for Starbucks is huge and forces you to check-in 5 times a day, but after that 5th cup o’joe there’s a diminishing point of return. Why not save money, not check-in. In fact, don’t go to Starbucks.

    3. Check-in with Yelp. Ya, I know. It’s pretty pointless because you don’t get the Foursquare deals, but there’s been less of a reliability issue with Yelp where check-ins are currently faster and less buggy than Foursquare.

    4. I have Stalin, who said, “No person; no problem,” to thank for this one. The discovery I made is this: No Foursquare, no foursquare fatigue.” Logic is magic.

  • How To Pitch At Capitalize

    Last night I got to check out an event in Cambridge called Capitalize hosted at the SCVNGR offices. The audience gets to see a company pitch to VCs. Last night’s company, Peekaboo Mobile, pitched to two investors from Dart. They were asking for $550,000 to $770,000.

    Basically, the investors wanted to see 3 things:

    1. a great solution to a small problem involving a very specific customer, e.g. an app focused on moms that tells moms where stroller friendly businesses are,
    2. a message that shows how all parties involved are going to make lots of money, e.g. tossing the phrase, “We are going to make you lots of money and this is how,” works wonders, and
    3. a solid set of numbers showing cost to acquire customer and ROI.

    Peekaboo didn’t have these 3 things so they weren’t written a check outright, but they’re still making money. Also it takes a lot of courage to stand in front of a crowd and get scrutinized by VC.