The Mobile Developer

We had confirmation today from Bango Button that we could upgrade the framework for mobislim.com so that it could utilise our new Scorch Controller (TM). This was also ok’d by the mobislim web mistress and mobislim blog writer - Maria.

Scorch Controller ensures that the cms publishes search engine friendly url’s. But simply putting mobislim under Scorch Control was not a big enough challenge for the day. I am therefore currently working on enhancing the ScorchControl to:

• Create a dynamic page title based on the current asset / page command function.
• Read in meta data from the current asset and if present use this to populate the “decription” and “keywords” meta tags. (This requires adding these fields to the asset object, and creating setters for these in the CMS.
• Generate related tags for articles / assets. i.e. if an article is tagged with “health”, “slimming” and “diet-pills”. Then when on the view articles page, there will be links for health, slimming and diet pills, which list all articles containing these tags.

We can then create a google mobile site map for the new mobile seo friendly url’s.

I propose to have the above all running and migrated by the crack of dawn tomorrow. The fact that I can do this within this time frame is all down to the beauty that is Spring MVC - the Java framework which the Scorch Controller is implemented in.

More soon!

Today there was another Animation FC / Daily Star / Bango campaign. This time with Celtic and Rangers. It was only promoted in the northern version of the newspaper though. We didn’t have the massive number of hits as we did with yesterdays Man Utd Free Wallpaper + Premiership Clubs Spinning Animated Screensavers Promo but still saw a lot of happy people downloading free content!

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.