From My Perspective – Official DateHookup Blog

This is just a little notice to make sure your website works properly on the iPad. Specifically make sure it doesn’t end up re-directing to your mobile site. It seems the iPad user agent string contains the word ‘Mobile’ in it, not terribly helpful, thanks Apple. My site was re-directing to the mobile version. You have to look for ‘iPad’ in the user agent, but it will also contain ‘Mobile’ so put some logic in your code to make sure you handle it properly. Kind of annoying, but an easy fix.

The iPad user agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

The best thing about a website is it’s on 24/7.  That means you can make money in your sleep, in the shower, when you are on vacation, etc.  It’s extremely awesome.  But it also means it’s on 24/7.  That means your site can fail at any time for any number of reasons, leaving you permanently on edge, waiting for that dreaded text message alert saying your site is down.  Such is the life of a webmaster.

One of my servers’ network cards decided it had had enough of this life and promptly died, leaving me scratching my head as to why my site went down.  I mean who would think the network card would fail right?  I spent an hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong, why can’t I connect to this server!?!?!!  Then eventually I noticed the little green light next to the network card was blinking.  I am not sure what that means other than it ain’t working, so I switched to the secondary network card and viola, fixed. 

I had bought a couple of new servers and was configuring them this week, and wouldn’t you know it, one of them has already had a hardware failure.  What the hell, 2 failures in one week?  I hadn’t had a hardware failure in the previous 7 years, so suffice it to say I am a bit paranoid at the moment.  My plan is to make sure for every process I have at least 2 servers that can handle the job, so if one fails I will be able to move the process to another server.  As soon as this new server actually works I might be able to implement this plan.  Yeah I know it’s probably not the ideal way to set up redundancy, but it should work pretty well.  Networks and servers are not my strong suit, plus my cabinet is a bit cramped and I am not going to be moving it to a new rack any time soon (what a pain that would be, I shudder to think about it..), so no super fancy load balancing or replication for me right now.  I just figure that would be one more thing that could fail anyway.

Do you hate servers as much as me?  Someday they will just work, everything will have 10 backups built in, nothing will ever fail.  Ahh, that would be the life.  I eagerly await that day.

So I went ahead and filed for a trademark on DateHookup.  You know, it wasn’t as much of a pain as I thought it might be.  I went to LegalZoom.com to take care of it.  I just had to fill out some simple forms, pay like $169 (plus the fee to file the trademark with the government) and they handled the rest.  Super easy.

It’s actually a good thing I went with them.  Because it turns out a trademark is a very precise thing.  There are some specific things you must do if you want your application to be approved.  One is to have the little (TM) next to your mark somewhere on your site.  I had to go back and forth with customer support.  Eventually we got it all figured out.  They were very helpful, no automated customer service bots.  Actual people (I know, amazing isn’t it?).

So is it all done?  Nope.  It could take over 18 months for the government to get around to approving or rejecting your application.  I am confident of its approval, I have been using the mark since 2002 and there were no  real conflicting marks to deal with.  The main reason I did this was so advertisers on Google AdWords could no longer use my name in their ads, thus bolding the text on their ad and leading users to their crappy websites instead of mine.  Fortunately, Google does not require the trademark to be approved.  You can submit the filing number to Google and that will take care of it.  Now if you type ‘datehookup’ in Google you won’t see the term ‘datehookup’ in any ads.  Their click-thru-rates will drop and most likely the ads will be dropped by Google, or at any rate my users won’t be fooled into clicking on them.

If you own an online business, I highly recommend filing for a trademark.  It’s pretty easy.  You can have your attorney do it if you have one, but that will cost you a lot.  I would just use LegalZoom.

File a trademark application:
http://www.legalzoom.com/trademarks/trademarks-overview.html

File a trademark complaint with Google:
https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint

Another Valentine’s Day, another surge in traffic for DateHookup.com.  Or is it?  I can never really tell what months are up and what months are down with my traffic.  Every year has been different.  The reason is I always make changes.  Last year I made some changes that really increased traffic to the site, right around Valentine’s Day.  Was it solely my changes or was the season part of the reason for the increase? 

I am crossing my fingers, hoping there will be a nice increase in traffic over the next couple of months.  January was higher than December, but it wasn’t much higher.  I was hoping for more.  So far I am not really seeing much of a change leading up to V-Day.  I made some changes again too that are definitely going to raise traffic, at least in the short term.  I like to really confuse myself so I never know what the hell is going on.  So again, I probably won’t be able to tell if the season leads to more traffic or not.  Hopefully it will lead to a crapload of traffic and I will know once and for all.  I mean Valentine’s Day, online dating, come on those are pretty related.  People should be looking to meet someone, which should mean more traffic to dating sites.

Come on people!!! Come to DH!!!

So I’m browsing DH the other day and guess what I see?  This ad, which Zoosk was running on DateHookup.com through Google AdWords.  Seriously?  You run this ad on DateHookup and you don’t think I might have a slight problem with it?  WTF??? 

Needless to say I disabled this and a few other ads, luckily they just started running them the same day.  Lesson for the day: Always remember to go to the Ad Review Center in AdSense every once in awhile to see what ads companies are running on your site.  Keep in mind just browsing your site is not good enough as an advertiser can customize their targeting by location.

Only slightly less insulting is this ad, which one will see if they type in ‘datehookup’ into Google:

Cute isn’t it?  Not only are they infringing on my trademark but they are talking crap about my site too!  Nice.  Well until I get my trademark officially registered I guess I can’t do anything about it.  Weak.

Do you own a dating site (or any site for that matter)?  Type your name into Google and see which a**hole companies are putting your name in their ad.  I know Zoosk does this with other dating sites.  It’s one thing to advertise with your name as a keyword, but it’s quite another thing to stick the keyword in the ad.  Not cool, and not really legal either.

So Apple finally unveiled their new tablet, the iPad.  I figured they would go 1 of 2 ways with this device, it would either be a a giant iPhone or it would be something totally new that we never would have expected (I don’t know exactly, some super awesome new technology that made it super thin or something).  They went with the giant iPhone.  Seriously it looks almost exactly like an iPhone except super big.

Why am I not impressed?  Mainly because I could have already predicted this exact device.  I expect more from Apple.  When the iPhone came out it was revolutionary.  The iPad is nothing more than a heavy iPhone that doesn’t fit into your pocket.  The price is good though, I’ll give them that.  $499 is really good for a new device, and you know Apple always maintains high margins so they are making good profits off each one most likely.

Now of course I have not tried one of these babies out yet, maybe it’s cooler than it looks.  It’s going to depend a lot on publishers really.  If they can create some compelling content then it might be worth having.  I like reading magazines, I get like 5 subscriptions sent to my house every month.  Could this replace those?  I don’t know.  Could this device replace my laptop when out of town?  Perhaps.  That might make it worth having right there.  How does it read?  Does it hurt your eyes after awhile?  If you can legitimately read a book on it without it bugging your eyes then that would be pretty cool (but then I wouldn’t be building my physical book library anymore, hmmm).

In the end I’m sure I’ll buy it because I always buy this crap.  It should come in handy while traveling (I watched a movie on my iPhone on my last trip, it’s a pretty crappy experience let me tell you).

(BTW, if the web browser doesn’t support Flash and file uploads I’m going to be seriously pissed, Apple better not F this up)