Dom on Tour May 2012
posted 02 May 2012 by Dom Hodgson

Over the next few months I will be visiting various parts of the country to talk to people about EmberAds. We’ve already booked a few meetings in London next week but there is still plenty of time in my schedule for you…

Now that people can use EmberAds, the promotional roadshow can begin (we call it a roadshow but I’ll mainly be on the train, getting the most of out the last few precious months of my rail pass).

If you would like to meet me for a chat then just send us an email roadshow@emberads.com or give me a call on 07787446456 and we can arrange something.

We are already planning trips to

• London
• Newcastle
• Bristol
• Edinburgh
• Cardiff

and will be at

• SASCon
• Manchester Ecommerece Expo
• Think Visibility Sept. 2012

Hope to see you there!

Dom.

And we are go!
posted 15 Apr 2012 by Dom Hodgson

Yesterday I was presenting at the BrightonSEO conference (title “I appear to have started a sweetshop and advertising company”). At the end of the presentation we pushed the button (100 party poppers) on the new homepage and product matching technology for EmberAds meaning that we can officially call ourselves launched!

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  Dom on stage at BrightonSEO | Image by Dan Bell

So +links and +products are now officially added to the product listing of EmberAds. What’s that? You don’t know what they are? Well, luckily I’m here to explain…

+links

EmberAds was always designed as an easy solution to monetising your website and +links is a feature designed to do just that. Rather than having to go through your links, find the specific url for each retailer and convert it into an affiliate link, you just create a normal link to the product or service. If it’s to a retailer in our database (and we hope it will be) it will be converted to an affiliate link when the user clicks. Don’t worry, we’ve made sure it’s quick! Your other links are not affected and if you’ve already got other affiliate links on your site then we leave those alone…

+products

During our beta period we used banners and images supplied by retailers. Whilst in the short term this gave us a good amount of inventory it soon became clear that we needed more, so we stepped up our plan for +products. In our database we have products from hundreds of retailers and if we find your site to be relevant, you will see product banners which link directly to the product page on the retailer.

So thats two features and a lot of party poppers. Cristiano and I had a great time at #BrightonSEO and we are looking forward to the next time when we can sit at a table with a bucket of sweets and entertain you.

Working at EmberAds
posted 12 Apr 2012 by Rahoul Baruah

At the moment, there are five of us working at EmbersAds, across two cities, with one office. Actually, there are ten of us, if you include the three cats, one (geriatric) dog and the hamster.

At first glance it would seem like that’s not an ideal set up for a new company; how do you know what needs to be done? Who’s going to shout at you for turning up late? However, we believe that stuff doesn’t matter - we all have experience of working remotely and we think it makes us faster and better than most organisations.

The key thing for us, especially at this early stage of our life, is that we need to be writing code. Lots of it. And working all together, in an office, isn’t the best when it comes to writing code. In fact, it’s positively harmful, as the interruptions (even an innocent “do you want a cup of tea?”) break your concentration. By the way, I do want a cup of tea. One sugar please.

So we follow a few simple rules to make sure that we get the best out of working apart without losing the best from working together.

Chat rooms

The single most important thing is our chat room. We use Campfire, a tool built by 37Signals - another company that embraces remote working. Campfire gives us an easy to read transcript, and an easy way to share code snippets, images, videos and annoy our co-workers with stupid sounds (I’m looking at you Durling).

So when you start work (whether you have rolled out of bed or not), it’s easy to scroll back through the transcript and read what the rest of the team have been discussing (and saying about you) whilst you were away. Even better, important stuff can be starred - so you can see it at a glance and it is highlighted in the search results.

As the day progresses, we chat about what we’re doing, paste bits of code and just talk about things going on around us (you know, the important stuff; my cat’s just sat on my keyboard, my dog stinks) - mixing work interaction with the social stuff you normally get when sharing an office. We even post our fair share of (sometimes funny, sometimes less so) photos and videos to the room - to reproduce that “gather round the monitor and take a look at this” feeling.

Code Review

The second most important tool we use is Github. In common with many ruby developers (and the developers of the Linux operating system kernel), we use “git” for version control. Git (yes, the author did know what the word “git” means over here - that’s why he chose the name) tracks changes to our work and helps us make sure that work in progress doesn’t break production code. Github themselves are experts in the field of remote working and we have copied a number of their practices as they make perfect sense for us.

In particular, our “master” branch holds the production code; ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. As we work on stuff, we create a “feature” branch - a copy of “master” that is linked but separate. And then when a feature is ready, we raise a “pull request” and paste the URL into Campfire. At this point, a couple of things happen. Firstly, our “continuous integration server” kicks in and runs a load of predefined tests against the branch. This helps us be sure that what we’ve added in doesn’t break what’s already there (it’s not foolproof but it’s way way better than nothing). Secondly, the rest of the team choose a point to break off what they are doing (or, in some cases, wake up and get out of bed) and take a look at the code.

They comment on it (Git shows you each change on a line-by-line basis and Github lets you attach notes to individual lines) and are expected to point out badly structured code, argue about the fundamental nature of the feature in question and highlight grammar and spelling mistakes (hey, we’re developers, we’re pedants at heart). Only when one or two of us have OK’ed the changes can the feature be merged into the master branch. Again, the integration server tests it all and we deploy it pretty much immediately.

Meetings

Meetings aren’t great. They interrupt us, take time out of our day, and for the most part don’t really help much (think about it - what can you actually remember about the last meeting you were in). But they can be useful, in the right circumstances (although a lot of what is achieved in a traditional team meeting is handled by our use of Campfire - status updates, who is working on what; that stuff just happens).

What’s more important are the big picture meetings. So once or twice a week we have a conference call (thank you Skype), where we spend half an hour outlining what we need to achieve over the next few days. And then, once or twice a month, we all meet up at the office to gather round the whiteboard (as that is the one thing we haven’t been able to find a decent online replacement for).

The Office

Speaking of the office, we have a lovely space in the Round Foundry in Leeds. Although soon we’re moving over the road to Towerworks; a historic building from the heart of the industrial revolution, now taking centre stage in the 21st century. But no matter how nice the office, there’s still a part of me that likes working from home.

The Beta Has Begun
posted 05 Mar 2012 by Dom Hodgson

This weekend we were at the Think Visibility conference to give attendees the first glimpse of EmberAds.

Inbetween the sessions, the bouncy castle and the sudden appearance of Chewbacca many attendees came to our area and had a chat about what we were doing.

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  Dom on stage at Think Visibility | Image by Martin Cunningham

We had a few sign ups and by the end of the day we were live on actual websites that we didn’t own!

We’ve still got a long way to go with EmberAds. We are now processing live data and click-throughs and even though the matching isn’t perfect now, its getting better every day.

We also met up with webgains and hopefully we should have those retailers who want to join us integrated soon.

So if you fancy having a play and giving us some feedback then sign up today.

Think Visibility
posted 14 Feb 2012 by Dom Hodgson

We’ve been working hard at EmberAds towards a very special date, 3rd March 2012, that’s the date of the Think Visibility conference in Leeds and a date that we hope to launch EmberAds into a public beta.

The attendees of the conference will get first dibs on our technology and we’ve got a prize for the first person to make a commission.

Not only will we have a stand at the conference during the day but we are taking over the main party in the evening (EmberAds Evening Entertainment ™) and our whole team will be around to answer questions and give out product demos.

If that’s not enough we’ve also put a team together for the SEO Gokarting so there is plenty of chance to catch up with us.

We are really excited to show everyone what we’ve built however we’ve still got a lot of work to do so I’ll say thanks for reading and see you on the 3rd of March!

Welcome to the EmberAds Blog
posted 13 Jan 2012 by Dom Hodgson

Being in semi stealth mode isn’t much fun to be honest, especially when Dom is in charge of marketing (it’s quite hard to shut him up about EmberAds). So we’ve created this blog as an outlet of things we are working on, events we will be attending and probably the odd post about Caius’s beard.

Within the company we’ve been having a discussion about what sort of blog we want to be, so we’ve taken a look at some of our favourite qualities of company blogs and taken a little bit from each:

• the humour of the Dreamhost blog
• the detail of the Flickr code blog
• the high quality content of the 37Signals blog
• (hopefully one day) the subscribers of techcrunch.

At the moment a big PR push isn’t on our agenda and we are going to keep (quite) quiet about what EmberAds is all about until we have an open beta. As readers of hacker news, we’ve started to get annoyed with the amount of startups that announce this amazing feature set, but only have a launchrock page as their homepage.

So please subscribe, comment, let us know what you think…