Poker Copilot: The Costs so far

Inspired by an open and informative blog post by Peldi Guilizzoni, I’ve listed all my expenses to get Poker Copilot to its current state: that is, launched and available for download.

ItemAmount
Hosted Server (one month)$30.00
Logo/Icons$287.50
Builddesk$99.00
Domain Registration$9.95
JFreeChart$58.01

TOTAL
$484.46

I haven’t accounted for my time spent on the project. I guess that is by far the biggest expense. All those precious hours I could have been watching television lost for ever.

Sidenote: Working with tables in Blogger is messy and the results are not nice.

Running Poker Copilot While on Holiday

I spent the last ten days travelling through France, Andorra, and Spain. Remarkably, I was able to easily keep an eye on the Poker Copilot endeavour. Every hotel I stayed in had wifi, almost always for free. With my Macbook in tow, I checked twice a day for e-mails, blog comments, and website activity statistics. One afternoon I escaped the Mediterranean heat by hiding in my hotel room. I used the time to move this blog to its new home, blog.pokercopilot.com. Using blogger.com made this a straight-forward task.

I spent one night in a 12th-century French castle. Even that had free wifi – although the signal had trouble getting through the metre-thick walls.

Poker Copilot indexed in Google

About 10 days ago I uploaded the website content to pokercopilot.com. Now, thankfully, Google has indexed it. First step in marketing: done.

Next goal: start getting visitors from Google, at least daily.

My next step is probably to optimise the content for Google indexing.

Changes Already

Poker Copilot has only been released for two days and already I find myself changing things, due to feedback. Two things I altered already:

* Under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) two buttons were not rendering properly. Note to self: make sure future testing takes place on Leopard and Tiger.
* The charts were redrawn immediately after each hand history file was read. This caused too much unnecessary rendering. Now the charts redraw no more than once per second.

I’m going to bundle these changes and some outstanding others for a version 1.01 release at the end of July.