terrellm

Exactly... it all starts with finding a problem that needs solving. If you can find friends, family members, or local businesses where you have a connection then it may be easier to get started.

My first business was started when I had an idea for a software program and talked to a college professor. He put me in contact with another professor who just happened to know of someone in need of a software like what I envisioned. I agreed to write the software just how the customer wanted and they agreed to test. After the software was done, I began marketing it commercially and have since sold it in 56 countries.

I wasn't trying take anything out of context - I was just trying to gain a better understanding of why RoR was mentioned.

Thanks for the clarification and I agree it can be a challenge keeping up with any software that is modular and utilizes code developed by volunteers and hobbyists. Whether it by Python or even .NET using 3rd party components.

I'm not seeing how RoR is any different than other OSS. Could you elaborate?

Pick up the phone and call potential customers or even better you could meet with them in person.

Cold calling / meeting is tough in the beginning if you are introverted like I once was, but in my case the motivation to pick up the phone was knowing I would be able to put food on the table and pay the rent.

For our small software company's email, we use Google's Postini service that runs $12/mail account/year. Emails are routed to Postini which filters the spam and then passes the good messages on to our mail server. It was pretty straight forward to setup by updating DNS and configuring the Postini account. I don't recall having do do anything special on the mail server or mail clients, but it has been a while.

But if they take back or "steal" his subdomain the how will he blog about the injustice?

There's a BIG difference in Pitchfork/tumblr and this article where the author had @digg on Twitter where he/she displayed data from Digg's RSS feed. This big difference is the tumblr guy was not infringing on Pitchfork's trademark while this guy was.

If Joe's Apple Farm has @apple or apple.tumblr.com, he should be able to keep it if he has non-infringing content where he talks about the apples he grows. If Joe starts displaying iPod affiliate links and blogging about iPads, he has crossed the line into a situation where he may be infringing on trademarks.

Interesting word choice they used for Pitchfork...

"We started this process last week upon our first correspondence with the trademark holder."

Good point - I've updated the title to indicate subdomain.

Nice job on the design. I never was impressed with many Pligg sites because they were just so busy - lots of links to do lots of things. You've removed those extras and now the focus is on the content rather than doing things with the content.

A few suggestions/opinions:

  - Don't use a pure black font - maybe a dark dark gray
  - Drop the bold on the titles so it's easier on the eyes
  - text-decoration: none on the titles
  - Increase the line height for the title and secondary line

Good luck and keep up the good work.

How does it differ from Firebug with a few other FF addons? I'd be interested in knowing the pro's and con's.

Ironic considering he is an investor in Mahalo http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097661

I think the answer is "it depends".

$50 isn't a a lot of money to many people so your product could still considered an impulse buy.

If you look at a product that runs $25/mo, a user would look at $625 one-time fee. I'd imagine the one-time purchases would be much lower.

Last Fall I bought Agile Web Development with Rails (http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with...) and found it to be very helpful in transitioning from .Net to Rails. Based on how you describe your experience, you would do fine with this book.

There are a few more basic books, however, I didn't want to read 500 pages just to learn how to build a blog.

I also recommend watching some of the Peep Code videos as they go more into depth on specific topics.

I agree that people prefer a sense of ownership rather than renting, even if renting is in their best interest.

However, the problem with a one-time payment is that the vendor loses incentive to continue supporting the buyer after the transaction. The primary way to generate additional revenues from that customer is, as you say "sell new innovations and features".

This adding of new features can increase complexity which eventually impacts the ease of use and increases the learning curve. These two side effects can have a negative impact on new user signups.

I'm optimistic of the web app user model after having developed desktop software for the past 10 years. Each version has to "work just like the previous, but better". You can only do that for so many versions :)

That's one of the problem - most people don't know enough about SEO to know what exactly is going on. They place blind trust in those who are featured in the mainstream media.

While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice.

Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media).

With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.

HAML and SASS have made web design enjoyable again. The time dealing with the learning curve is quickly paid back in increased productivity.

Using Rails and Sinatra for web app development or StaticMatic for static page development handles all of this for me, but the auto compiling will make it easier for prototyping.

This actually isn't that hard to do if they just request it.

I use Paypal for selling my software product and had my account manager setup "auto sweep" where the funds are automatically withdrawn each night.

Just go to Godaddy.com and click on Domain Auctions. Their dropcatching of deleting names isn't that good, however, it's the place to go to get a name that was registered at Godaddy/WildWest.

For expired names that were registered at Godaddy/Wildest, the name goes into a 10 day auction around 25 days after expiration. At the end of the 10 days, it goes to the highest bidder. Then the winning bidder has to wait another 7 days before the domain is in their possession.

I've spent some time studying domain names as I found the topic interesting and I have seen the value in a good domain name. Several of my software programs and websites target the agriculture industry. The whole web 2.0/misspelling/non-.com extension/drop-the-vowels doesn't work well there as it just confuses people.

As far as the players, SnapNames, Godaddy, and Pool still are still around. Enom's Club Drop is now NameJet. As mentioned in the article, Network Solutions had an exclusive agreement with Snap (now they are using NameJet). In the past few years, many more registrars have adopted this strategy where they partner with an auction service and make money when the domains are sold.

Most names with these partner agreements become available around 35 days after expiration. These names do keep their original creation date so it's as if the original owner transferred it to you rather than it actually deleting and being re-registered.

If the name is with a registrar who does not have a partner agreement or a name that is not backordered during the auctions, it eventually deletes around 75 days later where the actual dropcatching referenced in the article picks up.

The .ASPX extension in the URLs led me to make the same assumption

For anyone who can't read the "x-small" font in the main body, Readability is your friend (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability)

I think it's a novelty, however, I would not use a domain hack for a business unless I knew I could plug the leaks in traffic. For example, del.icio.us was a domain hack but they ended up buying delicious.com.

The average Hacker News reader knows domain hacks (I think?) but their parents probably do not and will just add .com at the end.

I'm not sure of a tool to automate testing of ads. It's more of a gut feeling / experience in creating the ads than it is creating an endless number of combinations. Goal completion is influenced by both the ad and the landing page. I've had cases where the weaker ad became more successful by pointing it to a different landing page.

I'd certainly be interested in discussing further as it sounds like you have some experience in Adwords and conversion too. I develop software and am always looking to share techniques on testing and improving conversion. Feel free to email me (info is in profile).

If you create multiple ads, Adwords will rotate the ads. You can choose which ad is most effective based on click thru % or even better conversion rate if you have conversion tracking setup.

Also, make sure you set "Ad rotation" to "Rotate: Show ads more evenly" under the campaign's settings so that your ads are shown evenly.

As someone who used to develop in ASP.Net and still maintains a lot of ASP.Net code, it's nice to see some progress being made. Clean URLs are certainly a good thing.

However, touting the Page.MetaKeywords is so last year since it's no longer used as a ranking factor (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-do...).

TextMate is one of only a very few applications for which I'd actually tell someone to buy a Mac (CSSEdit and Coda being 2 more).

It's such an essential tool for so many developers - I'm in it each day for my rails apps - that I can't imagine the pressure being placed on Allan to make it "just like 1.0 but better".

I really like Maciek416's "Textmate Liberation Fund" and see where that has the potential to make Allan more money than giving away a free upgrade.

Good point...poor lifestyle drives healthcare costs up. It would be interesting to see fast food spending or avg calories/day on top of this chart.

It doesn't make it useless as all of my site is static except the contact form. To utilize another option just for a few lines of code in a contact form didn't seem practical to me.

I'm sure open to suggestions though.

Thanks for the tip on configuring Apache... I may look into that next time. I've got my .htaccess set to rewrite the urls to extensionless, so it didn't make too much of a difference.

Just create them locally on your computer and use rsync or ftp to send them to your web host.

With static HTML, you don't need any databases and it doesn't matter what type of server or operating system your host is running.