eli_s

I'm amazed by your team's work. you're now bookmarked and on my 'check back often' list ;)

i'm looking forward to checking out flixel when I have some time.

keep up the great work.

This fool has wedged himself between the client and business and in the process has hijacked the business' phone number. When helphive goes out of business how many people will still try to contact their local plumber, get a no signal tone and assume the plumber is no longer in business?

Now this mafiozi wedges himself between a legitimate local business and their clientele - it's so plainly wrong!

What happens when this bottom feeder (helphive) goes out of business? How many people have now got a number for a local business written in their diary or on the fridge, which no longer works?

This is without a doubt unethical and I imagine illigal. Let's hope there's someone out there with deep enough pockets to sue this guy into bankruptcy!

Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated.

Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE.

The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy.

I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

For some reason people value karma. The possibility of a down vote makes you think twice about posting rubbish.

From that perspective the system is working as intended :)

couldn't agree more.

However if you're building a product for a well established industry e.g. if you were building new shopping cart software you would be entering a saturated market full of knowledgable potential clients and full featured alternatives. In this case you need to release when your feature set matches or hopefully exceed that of your competitors.

maybe that depends on your definition of 'made it'. Personally I think any self-sustaining business is a sign of success - and using this definition there are many thousands of successful software developers out there making a comfortable living building rich web apps that you'll never hear of simply because they don't fit into the social media zeitgeist

Often the problem with these types of high level abstractions is that there is so much magic going on behind the scenes that customising how things work becomes difficult and you end up getting locked into the 'Atlas' way of doing things.

I can't wait to get a chance to start playing with this though :)

I'm not a huge fan of get rich books and I wonder how many rich people ever read any of those books.

Also I don't really like the idea of hoarding personal wealth - why is it that the richest in the world seem to often give away their wealth after they have accumulated it? eg Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Andrew Forrest.

I remember reading somewhere about Warren Buffett. He said that he enjoyed the challenges of making money not the money itself. He also mentioned that to be ultra 'successful' one needs to devote oneself completely to making money to the exclusion of all else. Doesn't sound like the road to happiness to me.

From where I'm standing it seems that most people who got rich found something they loved doing and were really good at (the threadless guys are a good recent example). The money was a nice side effect of their passion.

I've been thinking about how to make the catalogue tools a bit more intuitive. At the moment you have to drag some products on to the page for the changes to styles to have an effect - i might add an alert that says this if the catalogue is empty.

Thanks for your encouragement.

Talk about killing a fly with a sledgehammer!

Something to look out for: the site seems very processor intensive. Using IE7 on a Core 2 6400 1gb ram the site becomes unresponsive and CPU is pegged at 50% - 90% each time the map is moved/zoomed.

Full screen map seems to be a killer. Maybe anbother way to display info such as large static map where you choose a region and then a smaller interactive map overlaid?

Also - is this a hobby project? If not how are you planning on monetizing?

Great work overall though.

I understand that for some businesses to work they need to start off big, but IMHO loads of YC and other VC backed businesses just aren't in that boat.

Maybe I'm a different kind of business person though. My goal is to build a small business that will sustain me and my family and get me out of the office grind - seems like a much more realistic and attainable goal than the "go big and exit with millions" strategy :)

On this page: http://motolistr.com/listing/316

The 'Email Seller' box is after the fold. This is the most important part of your page it needs to be right at the top next to the image of the bike.

Your design would probably work well with a fluid layout too. It takes a lot more work but if you do it right then you will get a better experience for small and large screen sizes.

I think you need to think a lot more about your urls - make them friendly for people and search engines, so instead of:

http://www.menkle.com/BrowseCategory.aspx?c=3

why not:

http://www.menkle.com/categories/electronics

and instead of:

http://www.menkle.com/ShowClassified.aspx?id=847

why not:

http://www.menkle.com/items/dvd/american_pie_2 or

http://www.menkle.com/washington/georgetown/dvd/american_pie...

some well thought out url rewriting will go a long way + will give the benefit of obscuring the fact you're using asp, which might help with security.

Now if only 100% of people had JS turned on things would be peachy :)

haha are you serious? What percentage of people are using ie6 & 7?

I think that layout shouldn't be that complex - lets be honest here we aren't building applications or anything difficult like that - we're layout out text and pretty pictures and CSS often makes this more difficult than it has to be.

That being said I still use CSS as often as I can for layout.