flooha

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058437

I'm curious how much it really matters. I can see it being a big deal for email, but for organic traffic I'm not convinced. Most domain squatters don't have anything up on the site, have a adsense landing page or something extremely outdated. Assuming your site has even mild success, your search engine ranking will be much, much higher. Sadly, the email issue is probably a show-stopper.

Also, I don't think a lot of people actually type the domain in the address bar. They're either clicking a link or searching.

The real question here is, can you pull a dropbox? Trademark the name, launch your site, get popular, then just take away the .com if the owner somehow infringes on your mark. Is this a valid precedent or do you have to have boat-loads of cash to actually make this work?

In any case, it's probably just easier to choose a different name. I just emailed someone yesterday about a .com domain name and he wanted $20k. Seems like the dropbox method might be easier.

...they definitely do clean the city. They keep the population of rats down.

I wonder if the dogs have learned to relieve themselves in places more acceptable to people or if the people just tolerate it. Piles of crap on the train is not very appealing.

rising out of, or in connection with, performing the Services

This bit seems to limit it to whatever I happen to be doing for them, but as this story, currently on the front page of HN shows, even lawyers have difficulty nailing it all down.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050952

For example, if I come up with some clever little bit of javascript that does something interesting, does it mean I can never use that for any purpose ever again? It's terribly ambiguous and limiting. I don't expect to take the job because I am currently working on my own projects and have no concrete way of defending myself against them claiming all of my work.

The second problem I have is this phrase:

Consultant also agrees to promptly make full written disclosure to the Company of any Inventions...

WTF does that mean? Even if it is limited to the "inventions" I "invent" for them, does that mean I'm supposed to immediately write some kind of disclosure after I "invent" something and give it to them? It's ridiculous. Let's assume this refers to my existing "inventions", not developed during the contract term, which I don't think it does. In that case, how could I possibly expect to protect myself? What if I forget to list one of my "inventions". They can claim it? I honestly don't think all of the doubt is even worth the time and effort to nail it all down.

I should pay a lawyer to go over it, but I already know I will require some lines to be removed, which will probably negate their interest in hiring me and thus make paying a lawyer a complete waste of money.

I understand the motivations for these kinds of contracts, but it puts all of the burden on the consultant and gives the overall impression that they can bend you over on a whim and screw you royally. It's basically making me not interested in the job, especially since I have my own things I want to work on. Initially, I recognized that my particular skills were exactly what they needed and it would be a pleasant job, but the "pleasant" part is quickly disappearing.

I'm probably just too uptight about this kind of stuff.

Recipient agrees that any violation or threatened violation of this Agreement will cause irreparable injury to COMPANY, entitling COMPANY to obtain injunctive relief in addition to all legal remedies without showing or proving any actual damage and without any bond required to be posted.

without showing or proving any actual damage

yeah, whatever.

Consultant agrees that all right, title, and interest in and to any copyrightable material, notes, records, drawings, designs, inventions, improvements, developments, discoveries and trade secrets conceived, discovered, authored, invented, developed or reduced to practice by Consultant, solely or in collaboration with others, during the term of this Agreement and arising out of, or in connection with, performing the Services under this Agreement and any copyrights, patents, trade secrets, mask work rights or other intellectual property rights relating to the foregoing (collectively, “Inventions”), are the sole property of the Company. Consultant also agrees to promptly make full written disclosure to the Company of any Inventions and to deliver and assign (or cause to be assigned) and hereby irrevocably assigns fully to the Company all right, title and interest in and to the Inventions.

I probably won't be getting the job due to crossing off all of this crap.

My gift to us all as a family was to go see Avatar in IMAX 3D tonight. It was amazing.

This is a good candidate for a/b testing.

Basically I'm trying to get you to find a good mentor. You can learn more in 1 week from a good mentor than you can by reading PDFs and blog posts for two years.

If you have questions, look me up on Google Talk as "flooha", or email me at matt [at] flooha [dot] com.

That this post is a mistake?

I'm particularly interested in the keyword distiller.

edit: I forgot to mention that I really like the design. Nice and clean.

It's amazing that the U.S. is (was?) considered the leader of technological innovation, but we're still so backward on something like this. It reeks of corruption and lobbyists.

Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server.

I didn't see any of those extensions available :-(

You can upload any extension you want!

The process is very simple. Here are instructions from our wiki: http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addo...

Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?

No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com

If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It's easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.

First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC, but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure.

Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server). There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps.

It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though most website will never need it.

Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps, especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores, private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain.

I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my comments.

If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing budget.

1) Exercise 30 minutes 3 times per week.

2) Spend at least 1 hour per day playing and interacting with each child, individually, without distractions.

3) Work on startup ideas at least 10 hours per week.

4) Spend at least 3 hours per week participating in your favorite hobby.

5) Only say fuck 5 times per day. ;)

6) Meet one new person each week.

7) Don't tell a single lie for one day each week.

etc...

You get the idea. The key is to force yourself to meet your goals, learn which ones are really important to your happiness and then focus on those. Obviously you can't go nuts and try to do everything all at once, but just making small changes and trying to accomplish something every day can make a difference.

For more practical advice, eliminate the things in your life that cause you pain/stress with extreme prejudice. You have to be really honest with yourself and willing to make tough decisions, but this was the thing that has helped me the most. For me, these things were mostly people.

http://imgur.com/uHeAq.jpg

It's not magic. If the upgrade adds value, they'll pay.

It's a marketing tactic which works for some and not for others.