Posts Tagged ‘Grabble’

Posted on March 19, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

New Media Marketing Conference

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Next week I’ll be presenting at the 2nd Annual New Media Marketing conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, Johannesburg. This four-day conference features an impressive lineup of speakers and I have to say it’s an honour to be presenting at such a great event.

I’m going to be talking about incorporating SEO and Social Media into a company’s marketing spend and it’s a perfect topic for me as I feel very passionate about both areas. These days I find myself working with Social Media more and more but my initial passion was always search.

I’ve long felt that while Google is an awesome company and I highly respect their ethos, one company should not control so much of the world’s data. Personally I’d rather have Google own my data than say Microsoft but I still maintain vertical search is a necessity in this ever dominant market.

When I developed Grabble in 2006 I thought I was onto a winner. Sadly it never took off (it’s almost dead in fact) but what I did gain out of this project was an appreciation for search and the technologies that power it. Grabble evolved from open source Java applications, Perl and then I settled on PHP.

There’s a reason why Google have a couple hundred thousand servers collecting, storing and processing information but none of this I could understand, contemplate or appreciate until I tried doing it myself.

What’s even better than talking about some passionate topics is the fact that I’m the second presenter which takes a lot of the pressure off me to really enjoy the remainder of the conference.

If anyone is still interested in going to the conference I have a whole bunch of vouchers which give you 25% discount off the conference price. Get in touch with me and I’ll happily hand them out.

Posted on November 22, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

African Web 2.0 map

Hash (aka Erik Hersman) has done an amazing map of Web 2.0 sites through Africa. Lots of people have commented and seen it already however it really is worth a mention here. Well done Hash, looking forward to using it soon!

Posted on March 21, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

Back online

So it’s been almost two weeks but I’m finally back online. I’ve learnt the hard way that if you don’t have RAID configured on your server you will lose everything if your hard drive packs up. A difficult lesson to learn but slowly picking up the pieces.

Grabble and others should be back online in the next couple hours/days…

Posted on January 18, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

Debian Wiki Launched

I’m please to announce that I’ve officially launched my own Debian Wiki. Over the last two weeks I have been setting up a new server for Grabble and due to my growing attraction to Debian I decided this new server will be powered entirely off of the ever popular GNU/Linux distribution.

The Debian Wiki was created solely because I needed something to help me keep track of what I was doing when setting the server up and as such it has developed into a whole series of tutorials if you will. There is a lot of documentation out there for Debian however it is difficult to make that documentation work for the new (soon-to-be) stable release of Debian 4 a.k.a. Etch and the Debian Wiki aims to fix this problem.

Every single HOWTO on the Debian Wiki has had to be tailored to work with Etch and as such I hope that others can find value when needing to setup a similar item on their Debian based server. The Server Category items on the Wiki are confusing to the layman however as time goes on I want to have a whole bunch of Desktop related items so that people who’ve never used Linux before can actually see that it’s not that difficult to operate!

So head on over to http://linux.justinhartman.com and give me your thoughts!

Posted on December 20, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

Is bad publicity good? and why i do grabble

It has been said that any publicity, good or bad, is good either way. Well I experienced my first bit of ‘bad’ publicity today with Grabble and I’m still undecided if it’s good for Grabble or not. In a recent post by Uno De Waal about the Grabble search engine I got less than rave reviews and it seems as if the readers of Uno’s Blog were just as perplexed.

It would appear that my lack of revenue model on Grabble is coming up for some critism and I must admit Uno is not the first to do so. While he may be the first person to publicly state this revenue model issue I have had a few people comment on this issue on a personal one-on-one level.
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Posted on December 18, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

Grabble shopping goes into beta

Grabble Shopping is the first of many new add-ons to the Grabble portfolio. This new sub-product of grabble is an initiative between Grabble and PriceCheck and hopes to provide a useful comparison shopping website for all users of the Grabble search engine.

About three weeks ago I was approached by Kevin from PriceCheck to potentially do some work together and I was certainly looking to provide some time of search for shopping websites in South Africa.
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Posted on October 30, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

Grabble.co.za is launched

It’s the latest addition to my stable of projects and I’m extremely proud to share it with you! Grabble (http://www.grabble.co.za) is a new South African search engine with a difference! Grabble gives you fast, accurate and AD FREE results and best of all we only search South African websites.

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