matthewking

Another UK LTD company here wanting to use your service the minute its available, so many headaches to be avoided.

Nice work on that UI, simple, elegant and functional.

London, UK - Ruby on Rails

I and my business partner are available for any Ruby on Rails based projects. Preferably working remotely.

We're currently working with Rails 3, JQuery, Cucumber, RSpec. If anyone needs extra resources or a project completed quickly please message me on the email in my profile.

We're looking at making the move from Rails to ASP.NET MVC. So pretty much the opposite of what you've done, and we're planning on hosting on Azure. So I read this thread with great interest.

We've found that like for like the Azure platform is very well priced and is actually less expensive than our current Ubuntu setup, as well as being cheaper than comparable high level Microsoft hosting providers.

We don't much like lock in either and for the parts of the Azure platform that will lock us in we're extracting the code into a wrapper so we can replace with the minimum of work should we need to switch hosting platform in a hurry. Database wise we're going with SQL Azure and their 10GB limit I find to be quite spacious for our needs, although that would depend entirely on what you're storing. I believe they have 50GB databases in the works for the near future?

The deployment times are an issue and I have heard similar, but again I believe if you upload the project yourself then request the update the deployment time is greatly reduced making it less of an issue. It would take some doing to match Capistrano deployment though which is simply awesome and something I will certainly miss.

Didn't look at Windows Azure as an option? http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

You'd probably find this quite interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden

Possibly a little deep for this thread (just considering its not my thread), but my dream isn't a career change, its slightly higher - freedom from money. If money no longer plays a factor in my life, then I don't have to choose one thing to do, I can do whatever I want when I want.

For me that's travel, adventure and photography (landscape, wildlife, culture). There's two ways I can achieve my goal, make enough so that I don't have to work again (I make it about £1.2m~), or failing that live cheaply enough that money no longer plays a major factor in my life, i.e. I don't spend most of my adult life paying off a mortgage. The plan for that would be to buy a nice old, cheap yacht and live as frugally as I can whilst exploring the world.

So either way hopefully within the next couple of years I'll be living my dream.. id rather be "financially responsible" and do it, but I'm prepared to make sacrifices if that's not possible within my given time frame. :)

I went through a brief period where I was convinced I wanted to be a carpenter, specifically making furniture. I've also worked as a builders mate and roofer in the past both of which I enjoyed and all of which settle my desire to create something. It seemed better to be building something that actually existed in the real world, not just on the internet.

These days though I'm just trying to make enough money in the next few years that I'll never have to sit at a desk again, and given my current skill set and the general nature of the internet I think being a developer is the best way to do it ;)

The apple keyboard is my preference too, but the wired one with the numpad! I have no idea why they didn't make a wireless one with a numpad :(

(OSX) Textmate and Capistrano, aside from that I usually SCP files but if I have to use FTP I use Transmit.

Use source control such as GIT, commit your work then its as easy as 'cap deploy' to send it to the server, no messing with files!

You're making other people rich because you're not taking risks. The people at the top are there because at some point, they quit their job and risked everything they own for some crazy idea. Everyone told them they were stupid and that they should get a "real" job and to stop dreaming, the idea didn't go as expected at first, they persevered without earning and eventually they managed to talk someone into believing in them, or they managed to make enough from their product to start hiring, and that's when you came along.

If you want to be the one that makes the money you've got to be the one that takes all the risks. Normal people don't do this, they work for others where its "safe" and so they get their mortgage, spend their life paying it, and live in apparently ignorant bliss.

Start your own company or try just getting in earlier where there's still more risk involved and you get more reward for it. Otherwise just be aware that your employer is paying for your time, give them that time and nothing more.

I use pingdom, it runs on remote servers where locally run systems will fail if your datacenter loses its internet connection etc. Can't fault it but ignore the response times, I think the pingdom servers are just slow ;)

Only a film I know, but http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100318/ comes to mind, was just watching it the other day.

From what everyone is saying about the specific laws in SF it all makes more sense.

Retired at 35 and sailed around the world? this guy is my hero!

Well worth the paperback I should think. Another similar book I've read is Dove by Robin Lee Graham which is well worth checking out if you're into sailing. Things like this really make you re-evaluate your goals/path in life.

Dove by Robin Lee Graham

He could have had his computer, or email hacked.. have to wait to see if we hear from him before we assume he actually cleared all the accounts himself.

An advertisement? I thought the about page was a good introduction to the site, from there you can find the rest of the content without being thrown in randomly.

But for those who want to go straight to the diary, here's the link: http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/it-star...

You'd be surprised how easy it is to setup something useful, my in house one is about 250~ lines (ruby) connecting with some of my own API's too for config and reporting.

Previously I used advancedwebranking.com which worked well, but I only needed the rankings reports which I then needed to integrate into my own applications, so there was very little code to produce to get the functionality I needed.

Google and Yahoo have search API's that you can use for these tasks without breaking TOS. Most of the software apps around use the API's if you give them your key, or you may prefer to write your own script to use the API's.

Otherwise I guess you could just use normal search from your script, but keep it slow, the kind of speed you'd go if you were doing it manually, and leave it running until its done? depends how often you need to check the stats.

That does the job, thanks.

I just wish the "Next" arrow would stay in the same place..

Shopify.com should probably be on there..

It's a project from a few years back that failed to live up to my misguided immediate expectations. So it was put on the back burner and now and again I look back and its been making steady progress. I'll get back to it soon and see if I can crank it up a few gears. The investment in time has been done, and it has a foothold, so now it should just be a case of expanding on what's there.

I'm not sure if what you have described would work for my particular site, I think id need an actual product rather than just articles and content, otherwise it's a bit of a gray area?

I have a niche high market value site, generating a CPM of about $26, with a very healthy CTR. It's only a little side project and doesn't receive that much traffic, so it's certainly not my main business. But just goes to show, you don't necessarily need millions of page views, or indeed hundreds of thousands if you select your market wisely.

I've just seen Stephen Fry tweet this, and he has 650k~ followers, looks like its gone viral.. not bad for a nights work.

I think sometimes a duplicate is valid, after all I read through HN 2-3 times a day and I still managed to miss the thread for this the first time around.

A tool as brilliant as this, combined with an audience that reads tons of articles spread all over the internet every day, surely it deserves its own thread?

I can see myself using Readability to format most of the articles I read online now.

Thanks for the link!

Excuse my ignorance, but who is Mark Dowd?

Edit: link I just found: http://taossa.com/index.php/author/mark/

I am practically there already but I have a few things to sort out at home first, so may have to go an extra mile.

My ultimate goal would be to buy a cheapish yacht (they're cheaper than most people think) and sail around the world, like this guy: www.bigoceans.com - once you've got the yacht its not that expensive, I think that would be the ultimate freedom for me, and you can visit places that the average tourist can't get to!

Saying that, any kind of travel is good. I see you live by your word!

I couldn't agree with this more, what is life really about at the end of the day? Exploring the world, adventures and meeting people from all cultures and corners of the earth would be my best answer.

Unfortunately we're somewhat trapped in by the slave driver that is money, when you eventually return from travels to settle down, you need to adhere to normal society.

Hopefully the startup will fix that, otherwise I'll just have to do it on the cheap and worry about money later ;)