Enjoy this computer ad from an issue of PC Format in late 1996, about ten years ago. £2999.99 (about $6000 today) for a Pentium 200MHz with 16MB RAM and 2GB hard drive!
We don’t know how good we’ve got it these days.
I briefly added it as an update to my latest post, but in case you didn’t see it.. I sold Code Snippets (and the entire bigbold.com domain). I sold it to the amazing DZone, who are best known for Javalobby and DZone.com (Digg for developers, as I call it). DZone owner, Rick Ross, wrote a little bit about the acquisition.
I’m really pleased DZone has it because I know they’ll be great caretakers and developers for the site. They have an absolutely massive developer community around their various Web properties and could blow Snippets up to an entirely new level that little old me wouldn’t be able to reach alone. I also have the option of working alongside DZone wherever I can to help them with the site, ideas, and so forth, so even though I’ve given away my baby, I still have the option to ‘go visit’ if I want.
If this were a really slow news week, I guess you could now say a British Web 2.0 property has been sold, but I couldn’t be so pretentious. Still, for something cobbled up mostly over 2 days back in 2005 (though with significant work much later on to make it look nice), I am pleased with the outcome. All I need to do is sell another nine such sites, and I could afford a house! Of course, I’d rather build up and sell FeedDigest in a year or two instead, and that’s the next thing on the books.
Note: Most people who read this blog don’t e-mail me on @bigbold.com addresses anyway.. but if you do, please don’t anymore! Use my name @ petercooper.co.uk instead.
I’ve had an offer from someone who wants to buy my Code Snippets site (and, indeed, the entire bigbold.com domain). I am not certain whether I will take it or not, but will be thinking about it over the next few days. The offer is a good one, and if I decide to sell, I don’t think anyone will better it. However, the Internet is a funny thing, so I’m posting this just in case someone’s had their eye on the site and is interested in making a last minute offer.
I can’t offer too many details at this stage, but the site’s stats are openly viewable by clicking on the “Site Meter” button at the bottom of all Code Snippets’ pages. Currently we’re looking at about 280-300 thousand page views per month and 190-200 thousand uniques. Extremely good rankings in Google all round, most traffic coming from there. Traffic nearly entirely coders (judging from the referral strings!). Profit about $800 a month, but the space is rather underutilized due to my laziness. Increasing this would not be much of a challenge. Several other pages on the domain have value in their own right and could be monetized too.
Based off of the offer I have had already, only offers of $30,000 or over will be considered at this stage. I severely doubt I will get any, but.. you gotta try, right? 
E-mail me at peter -/at/- petercooper . co . uk.
Update: It’s sold.
I’ve been doing a lot of playing with Ubuntu lately. It’s an extremely competent operating system once you get down to it. I’ve installed the Beryl and XGL stuff, an OS X style theme, and it’s looking pretty good. Check out this quick screencast (taken with the fantastic xvidcap).
Just in case you don’t read my ‘daily life log’ on the front page of Peter Cooper.co.uk, I have a new blog called SuperYay. It’s formatted in a tumblelog style and is just a place for me to blow off steam by posting crazy things I find on the Internet. There’s nothing serious or deep there, it’s generally links, weird pictures, and ‘freak you out’ randomly changing designs. It’s generally safe for work, but this cannot be guaranteed, so if your workplace has a strict set of Internet ethics, you might want to steer clear.
As I’ve been tagged by Dr. Nic Williams, and I never get tagged for anything, I figure I’d have to come out of retirement for this post. The meme is ‘five things you don’t know about me’, so here we go:
1. I was interviewed for the position of head of online media at the BBC. Back in the late 90s headhunters and recruitment agents were going nuts. So nuts, in fact, that they sent a 17~18 year old me to a job interview for the top online media job at the BBC. It was extremely funny, and there was no way in hell I was going to get the job, but it was a great experience in a very tough interview situation and I got to wander around in Broadcasting House. The recruitment agent never contacted me again. Problem solved.
2. I have OCD. I am starting to get it under control, but I am constantly checking doors, and can never trust when someone else has locked a door (unless I really try). If Laura locks the front door, I will check it after her. I can’t stop it (again unless I really try hard). I am beginning to develop an attitude of “who gives a f**k” to the situation and am trying not to check anything, but I know that approach could end in trouble.
3. I got paid £10,000 for six weeks’ work with no spec, no management, and which was immediately discarded at the end. The company involved had no technical spec (just a vague idea), did not want me to create a spec, and the supposed project management did not actually do any managing. A workable product was, however, delivered, but did not meet the unwritten specifications of someone somewhere, and the whole project was discarded, although I only found this out through my co-developer weeks later as the company in question never contacted me again. Very weird experience. This sort of experience is why I am tending not to do client work anymore.
4. Laura found me on Match.com. Actually, she found me. I had given up hope by that time, but I happened to have a profile still on there from when I was in Los Angeles the year before. I randomly got a message one day in January 2005 from Laura, and it all went from there. Yes, she pursued me, so how could a man resist?
5. I was too cheap to pay Match.com any money. You have to be a paid member to reply to messages on Match.com, so when I got the message from Laura, I wasn’t sure whether to bother signing up. Luckily, however, they had a 7 day free trial so I figured I could sign up, somehow get her phone number quick, and then cancel before I got charged anything. I actually did this.. making me the biggest cheapskate ever.
I’m not tagging anyone else to do this as I have a guilt-complex about putting on other people (#6!) so if you want to post five things in the comments, feel free to do so and I’ll enjoy them!
I’ve decided to stop personal blogging, at least in the style I have been doing here at PeterCooper.co.uk. I’ve been blogging in this way for 7 years (since September 22, 1999 - yes, you can definitely tell I was a teenager by that writing) and it just hasn’t clicked for me. I’ve never become known as a blogger, rarely get links from anyone else, and have always relied on Google for most of my traffic (and that party is now totally over given the latest updates). Some people manage to pull off persona, blogs to a large degree of success, such as Jason Kottke, Robert Scoble, and Hugh McLeod, but they still have a focus in one area or another, which is something I, perhaps, have lacked.
This is not a sob-story though. Ruby Inside has grown beyond my wildest dreams, and it proves I can put a great, popular blog together within a particular niche. At heart, I’m a generalist rather than a specialist, but I’m beginning to feel I need to start putting down roots and become a specialist, at least on a blog-by-blog basis! Therefore.. the eclectic, personal blog is over. Ruby Inside will continue, and, I am sure, more new blogs will follow, but they will each have a focus and a specific audience.
As of this post, this blog is becoming an ‘announcement’ style blog, in the same vein as Nick Denton’s. He posts once a month, if that, just to make a point or announce a new site he’s launching. I’m going to redesign the front page of PeterCooper.co.uk to emphasize my bookmarks and Twitter feed a bit more (I update those anyway) and simply have my small ‘announcement’ blog poking out at the bottom or the side or whatever. So don’t unsubscribe, but don’t panic if you don’t see any posts from me for a while.
Signing off, and not for the last time,
Pete.
Google continues its on-going trend to suck ass by ranking verbatim reprints of my feed by ‘myFeedz‘ higher than the original posts at this site. In fact, Google is now even ranking pages with only links to my posts higher than my actual posts even when I search for the post title as a phrase.
First step, I thought, would be to send a nice letter to myFeedz:
How can I have my feed removed from myFeedz? Or.. rather, how can I have my articles being reproduced verbatim on your site?
I have no problem with it personally, but Google does, and now all my pages are disappearing, only to be replaced with your reprints of them which is obviously “not good”
You can e-mail me at XXXX@gmail.com
Second step, though, is to record my thoughts that the Google search engine is rapidly becoming a piece of useless crap only good for indexing ripped off content. Google has indexed my posts up until about the last week, yet when I do a verbatim search for “The Markov Manifesto” (the title of a post I made almost a month ago), I get these results:
All but the last two results are complete trash, and even the last two aren’t the original post. This is pretty crazy considering my site is a PR 7 and all the ones above me are Supplementals! I can repeat this experiment for most of my posts, even those where the original post actually comes up. In some situations my posts come first, quite why it varies this way is a mystery to me.
All respect to the wonderful people at Google who, I am sure, are mostly pretty great engineers, but I think those swimming pools, pool tables, and dogs running around the workplace are screwing with their management’s decision-making processes by making fine engineers work on total crap rather than improving their core business of search.
Supposedly the US Department of Defense are blocking all “HTML-based e-mail”. I’m thinking this might be a good solution, depending on who you generally converse with.
Looking through my e-mail, all of the spam comes in HTML e-mails (image spam, junk mail, graphic ads) and all my legitimate e-mail is text (except a few people who insist on using HTML stationery, but who I could white-list or give ultimatums to). Put it this way, I don’t get any legitimate mail from unknown sources that’s both HTML and valid. Combining a weak white-list with blocking HTML mails from unknown addresses could probably eradicate 99% of my spam. Might be worth me writing a quick POP3 filter just to try out the theory..
Check out this great photoessay by Time Magazine that shows just what lucky bastards the folks at Google are.
I'm Peter Cooper, an eccentric British sort.
