The Mobile Developer

Quite a lot of development has gone into mobislim recently. We have added the latest bango mobile analytics tracking tools to the site. These include bgo_campaign parameters etc. and these are passed to the site via the request query parameters. Once any of the 6 valid bango parameters are detected by the site, they are stored in the users session and are appending on all page tracking numbers and all bango relay numbers. Therefore we can track where a user has come from campaign wise, for every bit of content they download, and even when they register.

We had a bit of a dillema when adding this functionality, since in order to maintain session states for devices which do not have cookies enabled, you need to store the jsessionid in the parameters, and we removed the functionality for this when we began our mobile seo experiments. This was because we saw that google had picked up the sites with different jsessionid’s and were treating the same pages as different pages but with the same content and thus punsishing our rankings for it. However, I have read that google now has better support for both query parameters and jsession id’s… so lets see because afterall the most important thing is the mobile analytics - since without it you can’t really tell if your mobile seo is working optimally or not.

We now have 4 versions of mobislim. There is mobislim.com sa.mobislim.com which has some south african commedy videos on it and there is also the d2c.mobislim.com which we built for TMobile in the States. Finally there is the iphone version of mobislim. It is still on a staging url but I will put it onto a proper mobislim url soon and write about the fun I had with javascript, ajax, dodgy stylesheets etc doing that…

This evening I just finished the core implementation of our new Spring based MVC controller for providing SEO friendly url’s. It’s called the Scorch Controller and it takes makes all its decisions autonomously based on the ScorchState. After it has forwarded to the appropriate JSP it then gives the JSP the ScorchState which it used to get to the JSP. The page can then use the state to create the seo friendly external links for the ScorchController. A few weeks ago it was all a dream but now it is live and working at an undisclosed location. Tomorrow I am going to create a google mobile site map and submit the secret site. Then I am going to try and migrate the ScorchController into mobislim.com our slimming and dieting based mobile web analytics product, so we can see how the search engine optimisation is affected.

Animation FC did a great campaign with the Daily Star today, in conjunction with Manchester United Football Club and Bango mobile billing and analytics. With a front page ad for the Man U free wallpapers and free Premier Club screensavers, we were delivering a content item every few seconds and I was pleasantly surprised to discover the servers were running at less than 5% processor utlisation.

Obviously we used Bango for the wap site discovery and billing on the cross sell items. So, not only did we get great conversions on the upsells but we also enjoyed the benefits of premier league mobile analytics!

These promotions with the Daily Star will be ongoing, so we are looking forward to the official release in the new bango analytics API which will give us *even better* campaign tracking for cross sell items (if that is possible)!

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.

The Mobislim project is now entering its marketing campaign phase. Maria Bunter has been put incharge of marketing and we’ll be working with her as she drives traffic to mobislim. We have incorporated lots of mobile analytics into the mobislim site, so that Maria can track the effectiveness of her campaigns.

Maria has compiled a good list of mobile advertisers which she is going to use. I’ve dealt with some of them but there are some new names here. I’ve realised that an added bonus of this project is that I will be able to rapidly collate data on mobile traffic providers, and use this knowledge to make recommendations to our customers.

Maria’s list includes 4th Screen Advertising, Admob, Amobee, Adstar, Ads Handy and Mojiva .

We deployed Mobislim to its production server today so that Bango Bunter can check it out. We’ve got more categories too add but I’m pleased that our new CMS and analytics enhancements are giving us the flexibility we require for the project - and Bango Bunter is pleased with the way the site’s looking and working and particularly happy with how quickly we got it running - even despite the server issues we had with our hosting provider - fasthosts.

Here’s how the site’s looking at the moment:

It seems that content for mobislim requires a couple of enhancements to the CMS. That’s great because we love a bit of development ; )

Development of these two enhancements can now begin as I have informed my wife that I will be working this weekend. In case this is of any help to people like me who speak without thinking, when your wife asks what she is supposed to do whilst you are working, “tidy up the house” is not a good answer. My wife is consequently now not talking to me.

Here’s what we’re adding:

Adding Article Support: To date all the sites we have built have been designed to deliver content such as mobile wallpapers, ringtones, screensavers, themes and videos. However, Bango Bunter has sent a load of text articles for upload. We need our customers to be able to edit assets themselves so we need to have a way for the customer to enter Device Independent Markup into the CMS so we’re enhancing asset description to either take some text, or text provided in some XML. This will allow for the use of styleclasses on divs , for XHTML compatible devices, and for the align attribute, which can be used on paragraphs on wml  / chtml devices.

Adding Tracking Options: Since the main point of mobislim is to test out mobile tracking and analytics, we need to test out the various ways in which pages and assets can be tracked. There are 2 main types of tracking we are adding. We are adding support for indiviudal assets, so that an individual asset can be linked to a bango number. This is kind of a regression from the use of the bango relay, however we are putting it in so that we can compare the various ways in which different types of users might deploy tracking into their applications. The excting bit is that there is a new API coming out which will support page tracking with dynamic bango number creation. This means that if we have a view-article page, which displays an article asset, all we need to do is pass the asset id and any bango number in the package we are using for a project to bango, and it will automatically create a new bango number for tracking the hits on this particular article. This is super cool. We are creating a <tt:bango-tracking/> custom tag, which takes attributes required to control the bango api it talks to. This tag is tightly interwoven with our cms so that it gives site administrators as much control over tracking as possible with the greatest ease. I’m also toying with the idea of creating an open source version of our tag, which is more general and which will just let people drop it into their JSP’s so that they can add mobile tracking to their site, regardless of the CMS they are using. (Well, as long as they’re using Java anyway ; )

We’ve just started development work on a mobile internet site called MobiSlim. Assides from the usual requirements of devleoping a mobile internet site, this particular project holds some extra bonses in store. Key goals of this project are to examine first hand the various requirements of the customer, the site builder, the company providing the analytics and the end user. Also, since this is a project for Bango, we will be able to work with the latest releases in the Bango Analytics product range.

Our key contact for this project is Bango Bunter, (CEO of Mobislim) who is trying to add as much realism as possible to this project. In that capacity he has just sent us some intial content for the site and wants it built by Monday. It’s time to tell the wife I’ll be working the weekend.