The Mobile Developer

Having setup BasicState to monitor the various analytics sites, we managed to identify the one which was causing unreasonably large page times. Forthwith, we notified the analytics provider so that they could improve their systems. (Partly to help them out and partly because all the “server down” messages were really begining to takeover my inbox).

I was there pleasantly surprised to discover that over the weekend the server down messages had stopped and thought it must have been an easy win for the analytics development team. However, I have just realised that the daily summaries from the server monitoring provider have also stopped, and upon visiting their site, I get a DNS failure. I can only take this as a sign of the times. They were voted something like “biggest business to watch” by NBC in January 2008, but now in November, they have disappeared without a trace. They had been providing a very decent service, which I had used on a number of different sites and I feel sorry for nice guy running it.

Although, its perfectly feasible that its actually his hosting provider who has either gone wrong, or gone under. We shall see.

We’re currently working on adding some new features to Mobislim. These include a new premium section, which is available only to subscribers, experimenting with some mobile SEO, and adding enhanced site monitoring.

The new subscribers only section will use Bango Safe Subscriptions so we can have a special section which allows us to add premium diet articles and tips to users who pay our bargain 1$ per month subscription charge. I’m actually going to write an article myself for this section - on why it’s important to alkalise your body. I learned about this on an Anthony Robbins “Get The Edge” cd and am now totally into it. (So much so that I’ve spent £50 on an Anthony Robbins special green drink which helps alkalise the body). For more info, on alkalising, and why it will not only help you lose weight, but also stop you from dying prematurely, join the VIP subscribers section… only on MobiSlim!

For the SEO we’re going to be adding a google site map, and submitting the sitemap to google. We will need to compare where we appear on google mobile search before and after adding the sitemap to see if it makes any difference. I guess we can add some meta tags in as well just to see if they make any difference. As with most SEO I should imagine that incoming links will probably be the biggest help. Maybe we can get some links added to mobislim from some sites on wap.com.

As for the monitoring, we are currently employing the services of BasicState.com which pings mobislim every 15 mins. Basic State’s DataCenter is in North America, and we’ve noticed that they record some timeouts hitting mobislim, even though we know the site is fully visible. I have a hypothesis that this could be due to the numerous analytics providers code we have on the mobislim site. So I’m going to create a separate index page, with associated subdomain, and see if any 1 of the analytics providers code seems to be causing a large page load time when hit by the BasicState server.

Whilst doing this, I will also be adding the code of a new analytics provier which has now moved out of beta, so we can test what they can do for us too.