Its been quite some time since I posted anything so I feel a necessity to publish something. I’ve started many posts since the last one but I never really liked how they turned out so I discarded them. I’ve learned plenty of new things which I tried to share but never had enough time to devote towards a solid post about any of it. Considering that time seems to be always something I’m lacking, I will just post a random rant about what I’ve been up to.

I’ve started working on a Facebook app for a client called Redflag. Its an app that lets parents monitor their child’s Facebook accounts for potential bad friends. Its a fairly complex app written in both node.js and Ruby on Rails. Node.js was something I hadn’t worked with before this project but I really like it. Its a little confusing thinking in terms of asynchronous execution of code in our app because there’s a ton going on behind the scenes and its a little difficult to visualize how thing all tie back together through callbacks. The complexity of our node.js backend makes it extremely difficult to test well but we do have a small but growing suite of jasmine tests for it.

I’ve been continuing to work with San Francisco Soup Company on their kitchen management application and have hired another developer, Jose, to help out. He’s an excellent developer and writes some really solid code. We’ve migrated the site to Rackspace’s cloud and I’m really liking Rackspace over Amazon’s EC2 these days. Their web interface is much more usable and I can actually get ahold of someone when there’s a support issue. The server seems to run much faster than similar EC2 instances and is cheaper so I’m pretty happy with Rackspace so far. We’ve been working on refactoring the code and building a more comprehensive test suite which is coming along extremely well.

More interestingly, I’ve started partnering with different businesses to expand my development and design resources. These additional resources will allow me to expand Onomojo in new directions and produce better results than I could just by myself. My focus is on partnering with companies that have solid development processes or are at least adaptable enough to conform to my own methodologies and best practices. By partnering primarily with businesses instead of individual talent, I will be able to provide more consistant results for my clients without the HR headache that comes with managing a team of remote developers. I have an agressive growth goal for 2012 and with the partnerships I’ve been building I believe Onomojo is in a good position to realize those goals.

I’ve also made great progress towards getting back into graduate school. I am working on a plan that will let me continue being CEO of Onomojo but allow me the flexibility to get my PhD. I’ve retaken the GRE and got a great score. I’m still working on narrowing down my school choices and drafting my applications. I don’t expect to apply anytime soon though. I need to have my ducks in a row before I jump back into academia. I won’t be applying until next year at the soonest with a starting date of 1.5 to 2 years from now.

It was just brought to my attention that my company’s homepage was pointing to the wrong app. This has happened a few times since I’ve switched to EngineYard. They don’t include www aliases in the default nginx configuration so you have to add them with a keep.domain.conf file. I recently migrated my company site to a new instance and left the default configuration. When I checked to make sure the app was setup on the new instance properly, http://onomojo.com , it worked fine and I didn’t think anything of it. Of course, I didn’t test http://www.onomojo.com which ended up pointing to an app that is still in the early phases of development since I didn’t customize the nginx config. What a huge goof. No wonder I’m getting mixed responses from potential new work lately. If you’re reading this and you saw the awkward half broken site with the test video please revisit the site again.

I’m happy to announce a Flash addition to our Onomojo homepage. The artwork was inspired by an artist here on the North Shore of Oahu named Heather Brown. The actual artist for the Flash animation and the latest addition to the Onomojo team is Rhys Lynn. Here’s a preview of the new splash page and the new homepage. The homepage just changed backgrounds from the green dots that were there before but it looks a million times better with the blue background. Let me know what you think.

I’ve been working with one client for several months now and they are extremely pleased with the results I’ve produced for them thus far. Here is a snapshot of the monthly analytics data for the site over the past year. You can get a larger view of the graph if you click on the image.

I started working with them in July and by August you can see that their traffic more than doubled. From July to now, I’ve continued to work with the client on increasing rankings through seo, link building, and improving visitor retention. The result is that their natural organic search traffic has seen an increase almost 10 times what it was, from 1,800 to 17,000. I’m pointing this out because I like the latest Google Analytics monthly graph view. It really helps in showing trends over time and its encouraging for clients to see the upward results from my seo work.

Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.

I’ve been working on a link exchange management service lately and its now ready for production. There are still things that need to be done on it but its now operational and ready for public consumption. The service is called, LinkLuna, and you can use it to manage your link exchanges. Best of all its a free service that anyone can use. It integrates easily into your existing site using our simple api and I even had a WordPress plugin built to save you time integrating it into your blog. Try it out for free and let me know how I can improve the services.

UPDATE: Project dead.