I thought I’d drop one refresher post here detailing my recent projects just so the few of you who end up here have another launch pad to rocket of!

This year I’ve been pursuing the idea of my Ikigai, trying to get closer to the best work I can do. I’m fairly sure at this point that it involves supporting fledgling entrepreneurs who are just about to, or already have made the leap. I’ve found myself mentoring new entrepreneurs naturally in the past, and have made several businesses helping them with products. Now I’m trying to hammer down even further and really work out what good I can do.

Here’s this years projects so far:

Niche Report.io

A Niche Report is going to be the first step for a new entrepreneur, (or a seasoned one entering a new niche). This new service takes 4 weeks worth of work doing market research, and rips through the process with AI, bots, data crunching and multi-exit oversight (me). In the end you get a market research report on your niche within 24 hours; and it’s got all the key signals you need to inform how you should proceed into the niche, or even if you should.

Project Pages

Project Pages is a WordPress portfolio maker, in essence. It’s a plugin I made 8y ago or so, but I’ve rebooted it. It’s focus is on helping makers, creators, and generally capable people document their creator journeys and try to connect-the-dots of their work. This runs parallel to my overall search for my own ikigai, and you can see I’ve updated my own personal project pages recently.

CoupleFlow.app

CoupleFlow is an AI Insights tool for relationship communication. It sits with you in your couples DMs on Telegram and gives you weekly check-ins which help you grow as a couple. CoupleFlow uses tuned AI which is trained on the latest relationship science to observe for the characteristics of a healthy relationship, and steer you towards it. It might help with a range of communication problems with relationships or marriages. (I will keep improving it with feedback over at CoupleFlow.app.)

I also added a Telegram Chat Analyser which gives users chat stats on their Telegram chats.

A small side project: CRM List.io – compares various CRM apps so you can find the one which fits your business.

As ever, you’ll get up to date stuff on my main website (this is an old blog which only gets an update a decade 😀 ): woodyhayday.com/blog

Here’s to all the makers and entrepreneurs! Long may we make things.

Woody

14th Oct 2024

P.S. I’d also like to mention my friend Mike Stott has started a great new blog on Content that Converts, which is also valuable to new entrepreneurs, check it out!

The post Projects 2024 first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

This is a quick post about the first of the plugins. Checklist Plugin (@ ChecklistPlugin.com.)

Checklist Plugin is a quick and easy-to-use plugin which lets you add check lists to your WordPress posts and pages.
It’s designed to streamline the process of adding and managing styled check lists to your posts, which are a great way to enrich content, but often are a pain to manage as a blogger. It’s a snap at $17. You can get it here (on CodeCanyon)

I’ll include some examples in the post below, but if you’re a blogger and you want to easily enrich your posts with stylish check lists, get Check List Plugin

Example Checklists:

Final thoughts on Check list Plugin

Simple, but effective – This plugin isn’t super complex and it doesn’t add loads of load to your WordPress. I’ve purposely kept it lean, but it is very useful.

Extendible –  The developers of us out there don’t want to wade through bad code or have issues tweaking CSS of badly formed html elements. Checklist Plugin has CSS sheets in SASS and is properly formed. It’s a breeze to style new themes with CSS.

Bold futures –  This simple plugin is just the start. Rather than build out a plethora of features, I’ve kept this small. We’ll see what the wonderful users of the plugin need it to do, and I’ll build it out from there.

The post Checklist Plugin for WordPress first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Just a quick post to say that yesterday evening I released the free version of Social Gallery. As Social Gallery has been so popular (now over 700 copies sold on CodeCanyon) it seemed only fair to share some of the awesome out to the WordPress.org family (and to the non-profit’s and such that asked me for assistance.) This “Lite” free version of the premium Social Gallery gives the major functions of Social Gallery but just has all the frill chopped out – it’s still a great way to get more engagement out of your blog images and will no doubt help lots of WordPress fledgling bloggers get more likes & comments on their content. I’m glad to release this free version so as it can be used by all!

If you want to try out Social Gallery Lite you can get a copy over at WordPress.org:

Or read more about this free version release on the Social Gallery Plugin.com blogpost.

Happy Social-Lightboxing to all!

The post Free “Lite” Version of Social Gallery released! first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Owing to the fact that I just wanted to get everything down and perhaps because it was my first ever, my 2012/2013 review ended up a pretty mammoth document. I’ve published bits I would like to share here, the actual review though covers as many angles of my life as I can compute

If you haven’t ever done a personal annual review I urge you to give it a try – it doesn’t even matter if it’s later in the year – it’s a great way to take stock and remember your big-picture intentions.

I hope to get around to a project this year which will delve into such human “systems” in far more detail (I want to write a book on it) – but from this first year alone I can tell you there’s a lot of value in this process, give it a try!

I’m Woody Hayday and here’s my 2012 Annual Review:

(Stolen from my very own facebook)

Books

I didn’t read a whole lot in the first half of 2012 but endeavoured to catch up with myself by the end of the year – in my eagerness to absorb M.Scott Peck’s fantastic “Further along the road less travelled” and the Dalai Lama’s “The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality” at the same time I blew my own mind out of the back of my head in January. This was totally unhelpful to my overall flow of reading (this year I’m avoiding heavy stuff when I need to keep motivated.)

Here’s my pick of my 2012 reading – some fantastic books here, I can hardly give them enough praise:

• Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charles T Munger – This coffee table sized book has more value in it than 80% of business book’s I’ve read, combined. Phenomenal wit  and fantastic, rational truth’s. Learn: Margin’s of Safety & Framework of Models.
• Seeking wisdom – From Darwin to Munger – A more consise edited version of Poor Charlie’s Almanack – you can read one or the other but you might miss 20% of the good stuff overall. This is incredibly dry until about half way through, but persevere!
• Letters From a Stoic by Seneca – Phenominal wisdom from 2000 years ago, shame most of humanity is too preoccupied to absorb it! Absolute imperative read.
• Winning Concepts by Dave Gannaway – Simple, positive, 80’s businessman attitude building
• The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine – American & French Revolution commentary never had such retort, fantastic example of a semi-modern genius rationale, highlighted to me the vacuum of non-correction which seems to exist around societies, specifically Great Britain.
• Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place by Malcolm Lowry – Fantastic, mad literature that’ll catch you off guard.
• The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde – A classic, bored me until it won me over in it’s penultimate pages.
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – Storified advice on following your dreams. Well written and enjoyable, a great, stealthy way to get positive drive on a big project.
• The Universe in a Single Atom by The Dalai Lama – The Dalai Lama is responsible for several great books – this one is a step heavier than some since and covers the convergence of eastern spirituality and wisdom with modern science, quantum physics and such. Immense but heavy!
• Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M.Scott Peck – If you haven’t read “The Road Less Travelled” read that and come back to this a year later. It’s dense with reality, wisdom and psychology in the best way possible, but in being so I also found it overwhelming (perhaps I read it too fast.) This is one I’ll re-read for sure.

[None of these are affiliate links.]

Projects

Mixing client web development consultancy via StormGate with my own projects, 2012 was still a less fractured year to those before it. I committed to a few major projects which I will mention here but I also didn’t manage to get round to a few I hoped to (finishing off that novel) – C’est la vie!

ChooseFest – The largest project I took on in 2012, ChooseFest is “A festival search engine that matches your music tastes to a better festival” and was fairly successful, closing the year with 600+ users and some really great feedback. Long-tail search engine rankings and a viral nature have carried it well into 2013, where it should continue to grow. Unfortunately work on this one was cut short early in 2012 due to other things getting in the way, I hope to work more on it this year.

Social Gallery – A side project founded from a client’s request, Social Gallery is a WordPress plugin which adds a “facebook style” social lightbox to your blog images – it’s pretty kick ass as you can see. Though this started out as a small experiment it’s been fantastically recieved and is now on it’s second version. It continues to sell well on CodeCanyon. (Branding on this one was done by the fantastic MRK Designs.)

Other noteworthy side projects: Remote backup & health monitoring system for shared hosts (I can now get insane value by using the best of the shared hosts coupled with this setup.) Sales Rocket Pro – this client project had some nice gamifaction intentions! Easy Envato Assistant (tiny project but useful.) Base CRM Contact Form plugin. Seedr’s listing for ChooseFest (temporarily postponed). Lots more including several innovative facebook integrations, a Facebook HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery animated game, a handful of mobile related WordPress plugins and lots of other alpha release’s that I can’t reveal yet

Travel & Health

Compared to previous years I only took a fraction of time away from work this year – I was back and forth between Belgium (Gent) and the UK fairly regularly, with trips to Romania and Denmark. I also got a great week of strategising in a log cabin in the Ardenne. I was glad to see lots of my friends and family visit in Gent, but otherwise had wanted to maintain focus on work. I also hit Wilderness Festival which was cool.

I started out the year averagely healthy and ended it about the same – my intention had been to pursue the slow carb diet and continue to do MED workouts at the gym, alas I let work get the better of me and did not maintain this. I did manage to run my first 10k (the Gent Staad Loop) though, which was exciting.

2012 Summary

It was a full on year of development, I probably produced more lines of more elegant code, drank more coffee and blogged less than any other recent year. Overall I am happy with the outcomes achieved, what else is there to be, after all ChooseFest turned out to seal the end of a fantastically large learning curve, Social Gallery a surprise hit and I managed to find 3 or so books which have utterly transformed my outlook. I should hope to remember that any future successes should be proportionally devoted to Charles Munger, Seneca and my special way of learning: the practical art of digging yourself holes you then have to climb out of.

I hope to realise enough success in coming years to confidently share the hell of a ride it’s been so far.

Have a phenomenal 2013!

P.S. You may get a 2012: Looking Forward post too, if your lucky!

P.P.S. I borrowed this post title from Chris Guillebeau’s 2012 Looking Forward (hope that’s OK Chris), if you haven’t read anything of his stuff check out his latest book $100 Startup, it kicks ass.

The post 2012 Annual Review: Looking Back first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

If you have live amongst the majority of bloggers and use WordPress then go ahead and get Social Gallery, the next update is going to be BIG and contain lots of awesome new features.

[Social Gallery is a WordPress plugin which adds an engaging photo viewer to your blog, it’s the original Gallery Share Plugin]

The post Social Gallery Plugin Sells 200 Copies! first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Developer-client relationships go wrong. It’s a fact. Developers that weren’t up to the job, projects that get abandoned, whole web-apps get written that never get used. Hopefully you haven’t experienced this yourself; if you have I am sure that there were some deep lessons learnt from the experience.

The “Win-Win” of web development
It’s not good for either side of this relationship for it to end out of turn, aside from the “cosmic karma” of wrongdoing to others it’s not good business for either party if a software project doesn’t make the cut. To this end, producing a new website or app should be a shared goal between the client and the developer, that’s what the following 5 crucial points try to help you accomplish, a joint vision of a web based outcome.

All the points are crucial, but you can jump here:

1. Have a clear vision
2. Developers will
3. Validate developers and test them
4. Clients will
5. The three crucial documents

The post 5 Crucial Points for Hiring a Web Developer first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Facebook-Style Photo Viewer – Social Gallery

Social Gallery is a WordPress plugin which adds a fancy “Facebook-style” photo viewer to your blog images. It’s a bit of an improvement on the existing lightbox plugins which have served their time well but really haven’t been innovated in too long. This WordPress plugin came about through the combined timing of a client requirement and a schedule collapse, but the end product has ended up working out quite nicely (you can see it in effect by clicking the image below.)

Click this:

(Photo is one of mine I found lying about in WordPress – Aberaeron, West Wales)

What your seeing is version 1.0, you can see the full website here and buy it for $14 here. Future versions will have some fancy additions such as Disqus comments (as well as Facebook comments) and more clever ways to feed content into its sidebar.

Social Gallery rides off the wave that is Facebook, using a similar photo-viewing style to give your users a better media experience as well as garnering the benefits of association with Facebook. If you think about it 900+ million users will be familiar with this way of viewing images so it makes sense for more of us to adopt it, Social Gallery is a really easy way to add this functionality to your WordPress.

Features:

• Facebook-style lightbox
• Get More Likes & More Shares
• Get More Comments
• Engage your Visitors
• Adds Facebook Comments
• Familiar to Facebook’s 900+ million users
• Easy to Install

If you want to know more just hop over to SocialGalleryPlugin.com

The post Facebook-Style Photo Viewer WordPress Plugin first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

The benefit of using GIT in the way below is that it maintains version history AS WELL as offering a managed host, i.e. it deals with uploading as well as versioning (in 1 git bash push.)

So here’s the scenario – there’s one of you, or maybe a few core founders/dev’s and you want to use GIT to version control your developments of a new web app or site. You already have a shared hosting account with 1and1 which works fine up to 20k hits a day or so, is there really need to have the thing scalable on demand from day one? No? Great, read on. If you REQUIRE scalability off the bat (I bet you don’t, really) then go find a PaaS/jump on AWS, for now here’s how to get GIT versioning (with automatic publication) working on your 1and1 shared hosting.

Firstly go read this, its a great guide that pretty much* got me there (95% of the credit to Abhijit), there’s just a few changes to get it to work on 1and1.

How I did it: GIT on 1and1

Load up your FTP, get to the root of your hosting and make your main site dir, in this case we will call it AppDev1:
/AppDev1
Next make two directories underneath it: “repo” and “live”, I shall explain these after you have made them:
/AppDev1/live
/AppDev1/repo
What these two are going to do is give you a live “root” for your web app/site as well as a GIT repository (which stores all the changes.) By separating them you keep everything simple. [live = web root folder, repo (or whatever you call it) = git bare repository.]

Next locally (on your machine) create a folder which you want to develop in:
C:/EpicNewApp

…And load up GIT BASH (assume you have) and enter the following:
cd "C:/EpicNewApp";
git init;

Next go ahead and load your SSH client (putty) and log into your 1and1 Account (there is guidance on 1and1 under SSH accounts, if you need it.) Once logged in enter the following:

cd "/AppDev1/repo"
git init --bare
cat > hooks/post-receive
#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE="../live" git checkout -f
chmod +x hooks/post-receive

*note: This differs from the aforementioned guide in the address entered under GIT_WORK_TREE, this is the only way I could get this setup to work on 1and1.

You can also simply stick these lines into a file called post-receive and upload the file to the “hooks” folder of your new bare repository (repo), if you are so inclined.

That’s it, your done with the SSH, now you can bind a remote location in GIT BASH (replace the obvious:)
$ git remote add web "ssh://u99999999@yourMain1and1Domain.com/~/AppDev1/repo/"
…And go ahead and push to 1and1 (you will need your SSH password to do so.)
$ git push web +master:refs/heads/master
All being well this should have pushed a version to your /AppDev1/repo folder and also updated the live files as per your changes!

Happy Ghetto Versioning!

Note: As per comments, removed .git reference from link, thanks Ano.

The post 1and1 Web Hosting & Git – Installing it for singular dev first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

It was a busy November, but it paid off – completed a good few projects for some great clients, and whats more I won no# 1 Top Freelancer @ people per hour!

You can read more about some of my recent projects here, although there’s only a few case studies up, the most public of the projects was a great life planning app that I built to first iteration, you can check it out (DO IT NOW!) @ 5years.me – built in the cloud on PaaS, behind the scenes I have also helped develop a social media analytics platform that is a marketeers wet dream, maybe as it gets properly released I will divulge more on that. Needless to say November was a great month of good work for great clients – off the radar now until my big project in early 2012

The post Recent Projects, Top Freelancer People Per Hour first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

Javascript – Using JS to find Browser Country / Location not from IP Photo by ToastyKen

Common solutions to identifying a users locale/localizing/localising a web client:

Using PHP / ASP.NET take the users IP and feed into an ip to location service (geo ip) to find a country from ip.
Pro’s: Server-side off the bat, can cache a database of IP’s (although would you?)
Con’s: Adds another 2 hops to at least initial page load, IP location service’s can cost or be faulty

Using the request headers (again server-side) to identify an “accepted language” and then guestimating their location (taking en-US…for example.)
Pro’s: Server-side to start with, no extra hops/calls required, this data is already available whether you use it or not, more useful for language (although limited)
Con’s: Unreliable – mostly because of a few of the BIG browsers default to en-US for all english users, often international users might learn to use a browser in English anyway – defeating the point

Another solution (work in progress:)

A step towards a proper solution, and in my case a solution for MY original problem, is to at least work out their TIMEZONE. What? I hear you say, why the timezone? Well if you know, for example using analytics data, that your user base is 40% US, 50% UK and 10% rest of the world you can at least make a START by dealing with the two major constituents of your audience. I can envisage A more complete solution though, by combining the use of request headers accepted language AND the following Javascript timezone detection:

Searching around a bit I found this which showed a lot of promise. This javascript works out the users Operating System time offset, and from that you can define which timezone they are in. Useful, if like me you know your users in a specific timezone are likely to be in one country, not particularly if they are possibly in multiple countries within a timezone.

A solution / exploration – location detection in javascript

The following Javascript gives you both indicators, using navigator.language/systemlanguage it detects the browser’s language, and then using an expanded upon version of the above script it will provide you with the possible countries from the users OS timezone offset. How useful this is to you is depending on the application, but check it out – build some fantastic solution off of it, then show me, because I probably won’t get round to it!

var langCode = navigator.language || navigator.systemLanguage;
var lang = langCode.toLowerCase(); lang = lang.substr(0,2);

var dateObject = new Date(); //this timezone offset calc taken from http://unmissabletokyo.com/country-detector.html
var timeOffset = - dateObject.getTimezoneOffset() / 60; 
var c = ""; //this will ultimately end up as a country/csv of possible countries
switch (timeOffset) { //I expanded upon this switch, adding all the possible countries
	case 0: 
	 c = 'Algeria, Ascension Island, Burkina Faso, Faeroe Islands, Ghana, Guinea Republic, Iceland, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Morocco, Sao Tome & Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, St Helena, The Gambia, Togo, United Kingdom'; break;
	
	case 1: 
	 c = 'Albania, Andorra, Angola, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Congo, Croatia, Czech Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), Denmark, Equatorial Guinea, France, Gabon, Germany, Gibraltar, Guam, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia (Fyrom), Malta, Mariana Islands, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Monaco, Netherlands, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia'; break;
	 
	case -1: 
	 c = 'Cape Verde Islands, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Guinea Bissau, USA'; break;
	 
	case 11:	
	 c = 'New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu'; break;
	 
	case -11:
	 c = 'Niue Island, Samoa (American), Samoa (Western), USA'; break;
	 
	case 11.5:
	 c = 'Norfolk Island'; break;
	 
	case 12:	
	 c = 'Fiji Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Tuvalu, Wallis & Futuna Islands'; break;
	 
	case 13:
	 c = 'Tonga'; break;
	 
	case 2:	
	 c = 'Botswana, Bulgaria, Burundi, Cyprus, Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), Egypt, Finland, Greece, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Lithuania, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Palestine, Romania, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Turkey, Zambia, Zimbabwe'; break;
	 
	case 3:
	 c = 'Bahrain, Belarus, Comoros Island, Djibouti, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, latvia, Madagascar, Mayotte Islands, Moldova, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, Yemen Arab Republic'; break;
	 
	case -3:
	 c = 'Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Greenland, Guyana, Uruguay'; break;
	
	case 3.5:
	 c = 'Iran'; break;
	
	case -3.5:
	 c = 'Surinam'; break;
	
	case 4:
	 c = 'Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Mauritius, Oman, Reunion Island, Seychelles, United Arab Emirates'; break;
	
	case -4:
	 c = 'Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Barbados, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Dominica Islands, Dominican Republic, Falkland Islands, French Guiana , Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat, Netherlands Antilles, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, St Kitts & Nevia, St Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago, Venezuela'; break;
	
	case 5:
	 c = 'Diego Garcia, Maldives Republic, Pakistan, Turkmenistan'; break;
	
	case -5:
	 c = 'Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, Cayman Islands, Columbia, Ecuador, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Peru, Turks & Caicos Islands, USA'; break;
	
	case 5.5:
	 c = 'Bhutan,India,Nepal,Sri Lanka'; break;
	
	case 6:
	 c = 'Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan'; break;
	
	case -6:
	 c = 'Belize, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, USA'; break;
	
	case 6.5:
	 c = 'Myanmar (Burma)'; break;
	
	case 7:
	 c = 'Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam'; break;
	
	case -7:
	 c = 'Canada, Mexico, USA'; break;
	
	case 8:
	 c = 'Australia, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan'; break;
	
	case -8:
	 c = 'Canada, Mexico, USA'; break;
	
	case 9:
	 c = 'Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, North, Korea, South, Palau'; break;
	
	case -9:
	 c = 'USA'; break;
}

//at this point Lang should be a 2 letter language code (e.g. en), timeOffset will be the users hour offset from GMT and c will be the csv of possible countries!
alert('Lang: ' + lang + "\r\n" + 'timeOffset: ' + timeOffset + "\r\n" + 'Possible Countries: ' + "\r\n" + c);

You can get the full source for this zipped here, included is a minified version wrapped in a function, isn’t that nice of me? Use it as you will, and if you create something epic, show me!

Countries/timezones: I built the timezone offset switch based on the wikipedia list of countries and their timezones, so its comprehensive.

The post IP to Location Alternative: Javascript – Using JS to find Browser Country / Location not from IP first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.