Holiday on the M1
I'm sitting on the M1 motorway. The rain is hammering on the window, and I'm not going anywhere fast. The day started so well. It's Saturday and I've decided to take a day off. My brother is having a party in Maida Vale to celebrate his move from Xfm to BBC Radio 1 - an extraordinary career move. It's a straight forward 1 hour trip down the motorway, so we decided to pop in and see the family.
Four hours later and were still sitting on the motorway. The weather is terrible and multiple crashes have reduced the road to a car park. The inevitable "shall we turn back" conversation is on its fourth round, but so far we've remained committed to getting there, at least for half an hour before having to travel home.
You never know, it might clear up in a minute.
Hosting and payment gateways
We're getting nearer to the final hosting solution, and not a moment too soon. I've narrowed it down to two great companies that are putting together hosting proposals for us, in exchange for sponsorship.
The solution will have to cope with some pretty big spikes in traffic. At the end of June we'll be on a whole range of morning tv programmes (like BBC Breakfast) and I'm sure that will propel website traffic pretty high. It's been really tough in predicting what traffic levels will be, but I guess so long as we have rapid scalability we should be OK.
With hosting well underway, the only other major area still to be fully implemented is the donation gateway. Someone is going to need to come along and make this market a whole lot simpler! I've heard that it's much easier in the States, but the UK banking system still seems pretty out of date when it comes to online processing. Our problem is that we will be processing 1 million relatively small transactions, and we can pay no more than 2% of the total amount in fees. You'd think that a kind hearted bank would waive their fees due to the fact that every single transaction is a pure donation to charity, but it turns out that kind and hearted are not words in the banking vocabulary (unless it happens to be Bob Geldoff asking of course).
I'm still waiting to hear back Charity Technology Trust and a range of other backup options we have secured.
Learning to speak "server"
At a certain level, website hosting is simple. I was a web designer in a past life and back then I just stuck a website on a virtual server and away we went. So the thought of arranging the servers for this project website was not a big deal. I was going out to look for a reputable company to sponsor us, providing what we needed in return for the excellent exposure that would be generated.
But then I realised that the hosting world had adopted a new language, and it wasnt English.
Apparently we need a scalable, load balanced, fire walled, duel server platform with more redundancy that a UK car manufacturer. Good job I left it to the last minute then hey.
Apart from learning to talk server, I also had a go at getting some pictures for the all important website profiles. Unfortunately I havent seen the light of day for several weeks, so they came out really badly.
To disprove the suggestions of vanity, here is my very worst shot. I was laughing so loudly there wasnt a chance of staying in focus.
Myspace blog
I'm now on countdown to the charity project launch on June 1st. There's still so much to do, but everything is pretty much on plan. I've been advised by several different people to open a blog on Myspace that will just follow the project.
http://blog.myspace.com/million_paulIt looks pretty dull at the moment but I'll see what I can do to improve it. Oh, and the picture is temporary.
I'll be adding movie clips and photos of my progress so it should make an interesting read when everything gets going. I'll continue to post the odd non-project post here, although this thing is going to make up most of my time.
The trouble with blogs
I had some really really good news yesterday, but contractually I can't talk about it yet. So why be annoying and mention it here? Well I don't know, but I just thought I should.
See, that's the trouble with blogs. The best blogs are access-all-areas, but in the business world you just can't get away with it. I guess I could risk it, but then I might loose a deal, or tip off my competition. Tricky.
I guess this is a entrepreneurial lesson of sorts. When you own businesses you know everything that's happening in your little world, but you have to control how this knowledge filters through to other people. Sometimes you will be several different people in one day, representing multiple faces of the same truth with each person you talk to.
Although I try and keep things open and honest, it's definitely a survival skill that you need to master.
