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!

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I’d like to announce that Social Gallery – the Ultimate Social Lightbox plugin for WordPress has been acquired by Epic Plugins.com (announcement here.) It’s been fantastic to build Social Gallery up as a product and a useful tool, having sold over 1500 copies and many, many add-ons it’s been very well received and helping it grow has been a ball.

Thanks to each and every one of you who has used and promoted Social Gallery – you’re all awesome.

Epic Plugins is a great home for Social Gallery, it fits nicely into their growing suite of fantastic plugins, I thoroughly recommend checking them out – each and every one is hand crafted by Mike – the chief of Epic Plugins and a top dude.

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Its official, we have opened up ChooseFest.com, so go check it out, now, what are you waiting for? Click Here!

ChooseFest is all about festivals, music festivals. In short it takes your music tastes (from facebook, last.fm scrobble history, a list you type) goes through all of the line-ups (kept up to date daily!) and then spits out a convenient, summarised list of all the festivals which have the bands (and singers) you particularly like at. It’s kind of a festival search engine, its kind of a music to festival matching site, but it will be a whole lot more in months to come.

What problem does it solve?

Ever tried to find the festival which has the most bands you like at? It’s a nightmare. Each festival has its own “arty” site, each festival has different dates, prices, availability, not to mention they have their bands and artists in obscure orders over several web pages. All that data collating is not easy or fun. ChooseFest.com Makes it easy (and hopefully fun), you just stick in who you want to see and up pops your best options.

Where’s the project at?

ChooseFest is a StormGate production and you can find it on facebook and have a go with the prototype (alpha app) @ ChooseFest.com. We have a few hundred users and are now soliciting feedback, it would be great to hear what you think, and at such an early stage your comments could really make a difference to us.

Want to help out?

Please help us Spread the word, share us with your friends, give us feedback! – the more people we can tell about ChooseFest the more chance there is we can make this a really, really useful tool for us all.

The post Finding Your Perfect Festival – ChooseFest.com first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

“One extends one’s limits only by exceeding them”

M. Scott Peck, who wrote amazing things.

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That was a few weeks ago, 10 days in Denmark later I am home again, feeling strangely idyllic. Denmark took some money, a fair handful of braincells, but I gained so much in return. A fantastic country Denmark, full of friendly cool people and good experience. I have so many stories from such little time, but all I will say is that the Danish (and other nationality :)) people are awesome, thanks for having me and I shall be back ;).

The post Denmark, true story first appeared on Woody Hayday | Blog.

I intend 2011 to be a much more blog-rich year, I am already brainstorming some posts for February that will go live perhaps from the Ukraine, should my travel plans come together. The whole blog will be taking a new slant as I move on to new projects; I will likely be blogging a lot more about writing (as I finish this novel), travel, self-employment and entrepreneurship (as I now maintain my own sole/soul living.) This does mean a move away from code specifics, but no doubt with the way my businesses are online based there will still be a good helping of web development and technology posts.

It looks as if the majority of my 2011 shall be in London, with perhaps a few escapes to the Ukraine, Spain and elsewhere. Hopefully this less nomadic period will allow me to secure a larger business, finish this book and get fitter.

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2010 Has been a good year for travel, from the sandy cocktail beach’s and fast paced mountain biking through lychee groves of Thailand across to the lake of Pokhara and the remote Bandipur in Nepal; sidestepping riots in both countries and a ridiculous ash cloud, through grace or luck. From central park and the Guggenheim to the Robert Moses beach and Long Island, New York was epic; and now in 48 hours or so on to Agadir, Marakesh, Casablanca and Fez, Morocco, its been a good year for travel.

While at home I have also picked up climbing, something I wish I had done more of while in Thailand. The Castle near Finsbury park is a fantastic location, especially when visited with a few good friends. I need to do more of that. I also look forward to a time when I have a piano in a house of mine so I can truely take that forward and carry on learning

Through work and exploration this year I have absorbed C#, something I am quite happy with as it bridges the gap in my skillset between open-source and MSFT, between web programming and local app development. In my opinion it is also a good year for Microsoft, despite their mediocre year on NASDAQ; they are releasing much more rounded products and seem to be beginning to see the benefits of what I see as a change in strategy. Either way C# has lead me to refine my rapid application development and brought the brute modern processing power directly into use, I would thoroughly suggest it to supplement your language base if you are leant heavily towards php/LAMP (while I would only use it over php for few of my future web projects.) RAD in C# let me experiment with an arbitrage betting program and write a quick Reddit wallpaper grabber (yes I know it needs fixing); as well as a bunch of other stuff like a Filezilla bulk user import, an SQL->php hardcoded rewrite of a huge site that meant 300% quicker loads, a remote image processing app, tons of little sharepoint integration bits, a full sharepoint 2010 site migration routine and also a true 3rd gen website asset management tool, which I will perhaps post more about.

Near U has had a fairly good year and I have added a few more sites to the portfolio (I still need to diversify though) – mostly bolstering and fulfilling old ideas for domains that have been stagnating, I hope to shift this up a gear to bring it all back into line now I have the freedom to do so; the cold financial climate does seem to have slowed people buying cars, specifically though on-line auctions this past quarter but I have high hopes for the new year. Part of managing this portfolio of now more than 200 sites has been writing up a proper asset management tool geared towards websites (mostly affiliate) as assets of value, csharp has allowed me to write this multi threaded, flexible, detail rich program in a ridiculous short stint of evening programming, perhaps it may even make its way as a sell-able tool, this however is to be seen.

In the last few months I have also been running with Sharepoint 2010 (another example of microsoft getting themselves together) – which although on its preface is limited or “nothing new” in fact has quite sufficient enough depth to hold weight as an intranet solution. I doubt you will find better workflow, versioning, integration and scope in a web-based solution (even if it is £120k for enterprise for 1000+ users) – developers should not be scared of it. To supplement a sharepoint installation I would also advise the familiarisation of developers with WCF, microsofts best answer to web services moving forward.

There has been a few good books recently which have also left a resounding impression, The Road Less Travelled (by M. Scott Peck) left me thinking more about the sub concious and revealed new angles on understanding people will that I will forever remember. In Nepal I left my copy of The Art of Happiness on a bus, but luckily found another copy in a bookshop in Pokhara; it is a fantastic book that taught me more than anything to see things more clearly and seek contentment truthfully. The Richest Man in Babylon was suggested to me by a friend who is investing in silver, which seems sensible – what a fantastic little book! some basic rules on managing money are told through a Babylonian narrative which is fun and quick to read. If reading like this was more present in our schools we would all be wealthier, at least everyone except producers of instant gratification goods. I also subscribed to Harpers this year, after finding it in Bangkok airport with hours to kill. It has significantly inspired me to proceed with writing my novel, it is always a great read and the harpers index is good:

Percentage of U.S. car owners who keep maps in their glove compartments: 50, Sunglasses: 23, Gloves: 0

Estimated value of Chinese household income that goes unreported: $1,400,000,000,000; Portion of China’s GDP this represents: 1/3

Number of poisonous dead mice the USDA airdropped into Guam this year to eradicate an invasive snake species: 316

Number of times between January and June that google turned over user information to government investigators: 4,287

Might have already posted about this before but Evernote has served me well all year, allowing me to dump my ideas, wacky thoughts or notes into a single searchable repository, wherever I am. I also started backing up to the cloud (cant wait to write new software that takes advantage of the amazon storage cloud) via JungleDisk, which seems to be pretty spot on for me, and backing up iphone contacts to Google contacts was also a helpful find. If you guys are not yet using Chromium (NOT Chrome), that’s another no-brainer. Install it, you’ll see what I mean (sorry Mozilla, you were trumped on speed.) Spotify has continued to be epic, even if the lack of nichey remix’s and the removal of some epic songs is irritating. Finally I have to say that Microsoft dropping their Express versions of visual studio 2010 and SQL Server is both useful, and strategically a good idea. Their IDE is pretty ridiculously good, and providing free (although slightly limited – SQL max db of 5gb for example) versions will bring in the hordes, and if they develop anything decent, chances are they will shell out for licences legitimately.

Best music find of recent months: Emancipator

Looking forwards I now cant wait to finish my novel, write a bunch of new useful softwares and in 2011 start another business, perhaps a software house selling software as a service? I have a pretty devilishly good idea that will leverage the amazon clouds scalability. Perhaps. Either way I fly to Morocco in 48 hours and I haven’t even thought about it yet. Better go.

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*update: I found a similar software here on new scientist, its not the same that inspired this post but its relevant, video from there.

But what about other avenues? democratise the tools of remapping motion from film and it could be like the mass adoption of photoshop, only for video. With clever mapping of 3d objects within a video stream you could augment your characters as if they were 3d objects, recolour body parts, resize them or inflate their limbs, replace their face with that of a 3d model, give them a tail, wings. As the software gets more clever perhaps we will see more of these quirks in our video.

Perhaps also it will lead us to question what we see in video, just as photoshops *should* have made us re-evaluate our trust in images (innately we seem to trust them still but I guess its only been a decade or so.) Mapping of video in 3d could allow modifications which alter the truths they it appears to show, conspiracy theorists could call fake a whole lot more. No doubt secret services or some agency does similar now but more fakes could become mainstream, with the ability to map anyone’s face over a video of another person no doubt people would use and abuse the technology. Making the system realtime could allow tv presenters to be thinner, accentuated or fat, it could change the way the media consuming world thinks of body image.

Apart from the possibility for fakes I would like to hope it opens doors for a whole new breed of indie producer, an indie film reproducer, remapping digital actors or placing 3d cut out actors onto new or improved sets, writing extensions to old movies and remapping classics. Replacing actors, improving lighting, adding dimensions or taking away reality. Remixing film like we do music, perhaps new breeds of film will spring up, what could the dubstep of film be?

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