Insights
A list of things you can do to afford Mixergy Premium in 2012 (and why you should bother)
This is an unpaid and unsolicited editorial piece. I don't have any affiliate links or agreements with Andrew, I'm just a very happy member of Mixergy Premium, and I see this as a way of providing value for my own audience. If you're not already familiar with...
Thanks Louis C.K, now here’s my Dad
Sorry if this is a little "off topic" for this blog but I was really inspired by this recent (and wildly successful) experiment by Louis C.K in independent release of artist work. My father, Nick Dooley has been performing as a street musician for a long time and this...
Your templating engine sucks and everything you have ever written is spaghetti code (yes, you)
Templating is a real hot button in the web development community. The only other topic I can think of more prone to sanctimony and religous flame wars is quality control and testing. The high horses that people usually get on are that all too familiar TLA MVC...
We are proud to have been a part of the new Energy for Opportunity website – now live!
Just a quick note to let everyone know about a new website deployment that we're very proud to have been a part of deploying: http://www.energyforopportunity.org/ Energy for Opportunity is an organisation that focuses on skills and training for building sustainable...
Escaping single and double quotes for use with XPath queries in PHP
I've been working with the Basecamp API to plugin our IRC bot that we use for time tracking and I'm astounded to learn that escaping single and/or double quotes for XPath queries in PHP does not have a well documented, best practices solution. In fact, it seems as...
The reason that outsourcing software is so difficult
I just watched another fantastic TED talk video that Will Franco (a.k.a FlyWheel) over at Jive Systems linked me to a couple of weeks ago. The video focuses primarily on changing from the "carrot and stick" model of management and incentives and into a "ROWE" (Results...
Help us build an awesome crowd sourced search engine
We created a tag based search engine that is capable of parsing business reviews and turning them into an awesome crowd sourced search engine, called WhatWhere. Now we just need a crapload of data! We've created a page to collect "recommendations" which are kind of...
Have you ever been accused of sounding too technical? Maybe people just don’t care
If you work in a technical field, there is an automatic stigma about you: you are incapable of communicating technical concepts to the lay person. Recently I've been putting a lot of thought into communications and how I can improve my marketing material and a big...
The Inaugural Post on the Decal CMS blog
I've posted a follow up to the original "Doing business without doing a startup" blog post I did on here a couple of weeks ago with a more in-depth look at the last year and a half working on Decal CMS: How we built a web application and didn't launch in 482 days It's...
PickDrop: NOT available on the Mac App store
PickDrop is available for download free of charge. If you use and enjoy it, please feel free to donate via PayPal. A couple of weeks ago, I created a command line bourne shell utility that let you "pick" files up from multiple locations on your computer then "drop"...
I love it when a PLAN comes together
Yesterday I showed the Nokia Plan B site to my friend Chris Langlands from http://www.fastmedia.com/ and he pasted a link to this old photo of a Nokia tyre located at: http://nokiamobileblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/nokia-tires.jpg and said we should chuck it on...
Doing business without “doing a startup”
I read this article by Mark Suster last night with some disdain. Typical delusions of grandeur tech startup bullshit. I then read this follow up article by Eric Ingram and just had to step in and say my two cents. It seems as though both of these people have come to...