Tag: The Cheese Grater

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Journal Makings

Dead Wallet

dead-wallet-logo-avatar

Ever since the demise of my old pet project, The Cheese Grater, I’ve had an empty void that needed filling. Something to take care of and grow. Five years later and that void may very well be filled by my new pet project, Dead Wallet. Armed with more knowledge of front-end and back-end technology, as well as a much deeper understanding of WordPress, now is the perfect time to do something.

Dead Wallet is a website dedicated to curating really, really, ridiculously good looking cool stuff. Stuff that you’ll want to buy, and probably will. It’ll probably kill your wallet. Get it? Dead Wallet?!

Nice.

I was toying with this idea for a while after getting a few Amazon gift cards. I didn’t like the idea of spending those on stuff I actually needed because, well, where’s the fun in that? So I started looking for random bits that I thought were cool, but for some reason Amazon is more insistent on showing me Pressure Washers and Gift Ideas for Kids rather than something awesome like a Gold Casio Calculator Watch!

No biggy.

That gave me an idea and the kick I needed to get this going. Obviously at the time of writing this post it’s still in very early stages – it’s actually only a few days old, but that’s okay. I built the theme from scratch and plan on developing new features over time depending how it evolves.

That’s all. Stay fresh.

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Journal

Style & Creativity

I did a soft launch of this site last month and it’s had quite a good response. Style & Creativity is the new website to spawn from what was The Cheese Grater. After a server-side hacking, The Cheese Grater was compromised and I decided to leave it deceased as the numbers were falling on it and I just didn’t have enough time to maintain it anymore after I started my new job.

Nevertheless – Style & Creativity is a new project focused more on… yup, Style and Creativity. It’s got a wider contributor base than my old site, as it was only me. But after reaching out to contributors through Twitter and such like, it’s seeing a new level of community driven content that just wasn’t the case with The Cheese Grater no matter how hard I tried to push it. People just didn’t ‘get’ the old site.

It’s still early days (I haven’t even settled on a logo for it yet), but you can visit and register to it over on http://styleandcreativity.com

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Journal

The Cheese Grater – Update

As of last night, my current hosting suspended my account as I was getting too much traffic to The Cheese Grater (over 115k unique visitors and over 450k pageviews a month) so as of today I am looking for a new host that can support the site at it’s current size with room for more traffic, however, in an attempt to avoid the account getting suspended and ALL of my websites coming down The Cheese Grater will have very limited if any usage until I can get a plan together for execution and hopefully save the site.

Fingers crossed this situation will be sorted out and thank you to the vast community of people who have been with us from the start, during the many face changes and the challenges until now.

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Journal

Media Pack.

Well, 4 days into my summer holiday, pretty good when something is happening, boring when not but I can’t help but feel I’ve already wasted the whole summer, don’t know why? I probably just need to get out more!

On another note (the main note of this post), I got an email today from the company who supply the ads for TheCheeseGrater.co.uk asking for a Media Pack.

I just thought it was a pack of promotional goodies that I send out to companies for potential investment and such, but in this case it was a simple PDF of details on the website statistics and pricing for adverts to be placed on the site as well as some additional information.

I checked out a few on the internet as I was a bit unsure as to what they actually contained and they were pretty long, average 10-12 pages. They were so BORING.

Who has time to read all of that?

Well, mine was only 5 pages. Nice, simple, straight forward and to the point. The way I saw it is that if I supply the key information (such as visitor stats etc.) and a little about the website they’ll have enough information to decide whether or not they like what they’re reading. The previous ones I saw had so much clutter on the page, I felt like I had ADD reading it, jumping around the page like a Mexican jumping bean!

I used quite a cheeky tone of voice it because it goes with the website and I think that helped me get away with it being so short.

Time will tell I suppose. If people keep coming to me, then I know it must be working if not, then I’ll review it.

Next on the agenda for summer – to start freelancing again, unless I get a temp Summer job in an agency of course.