February 2012
3 posts
Conversationlist is back!
OK I gave in to the massive outcry (and when I say massive, I really just mean the three or four people that pinged me with quick questions about the closing of conversationlist)…Conversationlist is back.
As I mentioned before, the primary reason I shut it down in the first place was that it’s a complete side project…and it had been costing me about $70/month in server fees.
...
How's that whoclicked.it project going?
Since releasing an early beta version of my whoclicked.it project about a month ago, and gumroad getting a bit of press, I’ve had a few people randomly ask me about how it’s working out.
So I thought I would share some quick additional details.
First, the project is really just built around a personal desire I have had for a long time to know who is clicking on certain links I share....
Hey, are you a sports fan?
As of late I’ve been head’s down in a handful of really interesting things (more details to come on just what I’m digging into soon I promise)…and while it’s tons-o-fun to be building something new and exciting from scratch, it also generally means I lose almost all touch with the outside world.
I don’t pay attention to much news anyway, and I get enough of the...
January 2012
2 posts
The end of conversationlist...for now.
Today I’ve finally decided to shut down the current version of conversationlist.com.
It’s been a fun project to build and maintain over the past couple of years, but interest seems to have plateaued over the past six months and we’ve never bothered to try and turn the project into a profit center (honestly, I’ve never tried to make any money with it at all - instead I just...
How would you like to know who clicks on the links...
Today I’m making the first public mention of a new little service I’ve built called whoclicked.it. A simple service designed to tell you who actually clicks on the links you share around the web.
It’s an idea that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now, but was primarily driven by two things:
1. Prior to building whoclicked.it, I used bit.ly for almost all my link...
December 2011
4 posts
Andy Swan: 7 rules for pitching to investors that... →
andyswan:
So you want an investor in your business. Here are some rules that I, as both an angel investor and entrepreneur have found valuable:
Don’t pitch to strangers: People very rarely invest in an idea. They invest in people with ideas. If you don’t know anyone, get started now. Investors are more…
love it all.
Twitter : StumbleUpon :: Google :...
porchdog:
Twitter’s gigantic freakin’ revenue opportunity is promoted tweets. And similar to how Google found its business model at Goto.com/Overture, Twitter is taking its cue from StumbleUpon. But first….
Remember when Google didn’t have a business model? Yeah, the Internet and media giant with a valuation of $150-200 billion, $35+ billion in annual revenue, and ~$15 billion in annual cash...
why I think knowabout.it is a world changing...
Consider this sentence: “I am a Giant fan” Are you talking about the NFL, the MLB, a grocery store…or maybe a person, a place, or even a thing that you just like a lot? Without any additional clues, which conversation do you think occurred? “What is your favorite NFL team?” “I am a Giant fan” “What baseball team do you follow?” “I am a...
November 2011
9 posts
Where's the beef?
I haven’t had a chance to really dig into the Google music news much yet, but I have to say that my first impression is “meh”.
It just seems too much like a ‘me too’ product, they don’t seem to have anything really ground breaking or interesting above and beyond what iTunes already does (pretty well).
Sure it’s backed by Google, and that brings some...
playing with interfaces
I’m playing with some alternate interface ideas for knowabout.it tonight…nothing I’m quite ready to release yet, but something that I think some power users (like me) will really get a lot of value out of.
My recent reading list...
When it comes to reading, I generally go in spurts.
I’ll go for months without finding time to read much of anything (not counting blogs and links to awesome content knowabout.it points out to me) and then, I’ll suddenly read a handful of books almost all at once. The past few weeks, I’ve been in the ‘read’ mode and have powered through four books, all of which I...
simplicity.
I think the key to being ‘good’ at anything is directly proportional to how much simplicity you can bring to the table.
Indexing server crash
While I was out catching up with a few people in NYC last night, our main indexing server for knowabout.it decided to completely die…after spending a few hours trying to revive it, I finally gave in and pronounced it.
Of course, it’s the one server that had some code on that was not in version control, or apparently backed up anywhere…so now I’m left with rebuilding the...
I obsess over the 'why'.
One thing I’ve noticed over my career as a developer is that I’m generally way more concerned about the ‘why’ than the ‘how’. Don’t get me wrong, figuring out the ‘how’ is always a fun part of any project…but it’s never where my brain starts. At the start, I am always way more concerned with understanding the problem or the idea...
poorsquare.us →
maddynovich:
In the last 24 hours, my husband jeff (tech entrepreneur-extraordinaire) and his college friend Pinzler, hacked a site called Poorsquare.us. Based on where you are going, it scans Foursquare freebies and puts them into a single organized list (which you can automatically add to your Google calender!). It’s brilliant - next time we go out, we are totally using it to find free...
Stay active...
I’m going to try and get back into blogging at least some random thoughts each day…when I first started blogging, I was able to generate about a post a day for almost a year…but then I got into Twitter and my random thoughts were scattered out there instead of aggregated here (and, yes, I still plan to scatter my thoughts there when I can)…beyond Twitter, I also just got...
October 2011
3 posts
Keeping busy this past year...
12 months ago I was primarily doing consulting work for Bit.ly and putting together the beginnings of my own start up Digital Mechanical (the corp. entity behind knowabout.it). Since that time, I applied for and got rejected for the initial NYC TechStars program, ended my contract with bit.ly to focus on Digital Mechanical, pitched in with some consulting work for PlayPhilo, and am now also...
Introducing SantaHelp.me
For a little over a year now I’ve had this idea for a dead-simple mobile app called ‘report to Santa’…and this past weekend I finally found a couple of hours to actually build a first version of it (and a very lightweight website for it too). You should be able to get the app by following the links on http://www.santahelp.me (the iPhone link may not work yet as I’m...
Introducing fuzzypop.com
I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head for awhile now about trying to cross Tumblr.com with Letter.ly…and what would it look like, how should it act, what could it be used for?
Well, I finally got a chance to sit down and code out an initial working prototype for it at http://fuzzypop.com (and blog a little bit more about the idea at http://blog.fuzzypop.com - btw would love...
September 2011
307 posts
Make sure a certain number of scripts remain...
Ever need to make sure a certain number of scripts remain running on your server? Here’s a quick shell script that migh help you out:
#!/bin/bash count=0 for x in `ps ax | grep -v grep | grep my_cool_service | cut -c1-2` do count=`expr $count + 1` done if [ $count -lt 35 ] then echo $count echo “time to start some more services” while [ $count -lt 35 ]; do ...
Mapping an EC2 instance to a local drive on Mac
If you’re already using EC2, you’re probably familiar with SSH’ing to your box via Terminal with something like this: ssh -i your_ec2_pem.pem your_ec2_instance_username_like_ubuntu@your_ec2_host.com But did you know you can avoid this by creating a ~/.ssh/config file with details like this (obviously replacing the values with your specific EC2 details): Host your_ec2_host...
Some things on my mind.
Now that summer is all but over, and my kids are officially back in school (K and 3rd grade already!), it’s time to do a quick reality check and get myself organized again.
As part of that, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and moved my blog over to Tumblr. Overally a pretty simple and clean process of just exporting my old posts from my legacy DB (a PostrgreSQL datastore with a PHP...
I feel like RSS feeds will make a bit of comeback.
Over the past few days I added better/more RSS support to http://knowabout.it and so now you can easily hook in all the feeds you follow on Google Reader.
Since I was doing that, I was also just thinking a lot about RSS feeds in general…and how it’s really such a shame that they never *really* caught on with the general population. They contain so much great content, and they make it...
Updated version of the AVC PDF
I’ve been working my way through the massive AVC PDF I put together a week or so ago (I’m up to Mar of 2005 - so about 1/6th of the way through it)…and as I do that I’ve noticed a handful of little glitches that I wanted fixed.
So I took some time today to clean up a few little things and have uploaded a new, cleaner, version:
http://blog.botfu.com/avc.pdf
The main...
as a fan of avc.com
I’ve been a long time fan of Fred Wilson and all that he shares with us at avc.com…but Fred’s been blogging for a really long time (at least since 2003)…and at best I discovered his blog in *maybe* 2007…so I missed at least four years of meat (and to be honest I don’t remember to read his blog every day even now).
So I wanted an easy, offline, way to go back...
My quick bio/introduction
Kevin Marshall is a developer putting together a new company around his knowabout.it project (the basic idea is ‘priority inbox for your social data’). Prior to starting knowabout.it, Kevin had been playing around in the social data space via his wow.ly set of tools that include things like conversationlist.com, pu.ly, eli.st, and instapaperfeed.com among others.
Kevin has also...
Office space...
Recently, I’ve taken to sharing a photo via flicker to my twitter/facebook stream (I really only use Twitter and it synchs over to facebook automatically for me).
Mostly I do this just to give people a small peek into what my home office/world is like (I have finished basement that we use as 1/2 office space for me, 1/2 man cave, and 1/2 kids play area — you figure out the math).
...
Blog with emotion...
One of the really interesting things to me about music is the fact that while most songs are fairly short pieces of work…the really good ones, you are happy to experience over and over and over. And as you experience them again and again, you often find yourself reliving a specific point in time, or experiencing a specific emotion that you had when you first heard the song.
Most digital...
Disqus is truly a disruptive company.
A conversation involving Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Roger Ehrenberg - 3 of the most respected VC online.
I’ve touted it a few times in the past, but for anyone that’s doubted the amazing value that Disqus is generating…answer me this:
Where else can you listen in on a conversation among the top venture capital partners in the world? But it’s gets even better...
Getting distinct records out of Mongo and sorting...
It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted any actual code up here…so I figured I would share a little snippet that I’ve been using quite a bit in the knowabout.it processing stuff lately.
One of the things that happens a lot on the backend is indexing links or users…to save on processing, I don’t want to just loop through every user ever time the process...
Google isn't broken...the key assumption is.
There has been a large amount of chatter growing around the inernet that Google search may have reached a tipping point…that the search results are starting to be less and less useful as more and more low quality/spam finds it’s way towards the top of many search result screens. *
I’ve long been fascinated by Google’s approach, and the math (as well as the overall...
Downcase All Text In Disqus Comments
The other day I came across a couple of comments where people were asking for a way to downcase text of a disqus comment thread…and one of the requests was specifically for a Google Chrome Extension. Since it was something I thought I could hack together quickly, I figured why not just throw it together quickly for them?
So that’s what I did (you can get the extension here if you...
Making a variable available to all my Python...
As of late I’ve been working on a handful of Python projects using the Tornado framework (which I love by the way). In that work, I’ve often run into a situation where I want to use a variable within my wrapper template and I don’t want to have to define and pass that variable within each of my python methods. So how do I do that? The answer is actually pretty simple, just...
My time with bit.ly
This week marked six months that I’ve been doing contract work for Bit.ly and while I’ve loved my time there and had a blast, I’ve decided to end my contract so I can focus a bit more time and energy on building knowabout.it into a real business.
Before I completely move on to my next thing though, I wanted to take few quick moments to reflect on my time with...
What I've been up to for the past 6 months or...
It’s been awhile since I did an update on the various things I’ve been working on, so I’m going to take a few quick minutes and try to do that right now…but partially because I can’t remember, and partially because the list would just be too long anyway, I’m only going to cover the last six months or so.
When I went through the quick list, even I was a bit...
For those of you using my Adium Plugin for bit.ly
As many of you know, I’ve been doing some contract work with Bit.ly since this past July (super awesome place to work and full of top notch talent btw).
Anyway, internally Bit.ly (and much of BetaWorks) uses the Adium chat program to communicate and as such, there are always a lot of really interesting links flying around the office…but very few of those links were actually bit.ly...
Doh!
So I made a public mention of knowabout.it today and I guess I wasn’t supposed to (yet)…so I’ve disable it for now. Sorry if that’s what you are looking for here (hopefully I’ll be allowed to re-enable it before too long).
In other news, I’ve been busy hacking on things for bit.ly as a contractor during the days and pushing along a handful of other...
I haven't forgotten...
For those of you wondering, no I haven’t forgotten about my series on teaching you to program…and I promise that I’ll get that series going very soon.
I’m just off right now starting a new company around the latest and greatest version of knowabout.it, doing some contract work for bit.ly, building an alpha version of Tomzy (which, by the way, might be one of the first...
Setting up your development environment.
Now that I’ve outlined my basic goals for this series on beginning programming we need to spend a little bit of time setting up our development environment. Once we’re done with this step we’ll finally be ready to start digging into code!
For the most part there are three different operating systems you are likely to be developing on, Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. Since this...
Looking for ideas...
I’ve got about 60 domains in my collection right now and only about 17 of them are actually ‘in production’…and though I’ve got ideas (or some might say dreams) for the 43 that I haven’t yet ‘officially’ released, I’m always in search of new and better ideas for things to build.
I can also say that without a doubt, the best ideas for projects...
Introducing fuzzpop
Today I ‘officially’ released the first version of fuzzypop.com as yet another wow.ly tool for social data.
For those of you counting, that makes six ‘in production’ projets within the wow.ly suite (Conversationlist.com, FriendStat.us, fuzzypop.com, HiveMind, pu.ly, and URIData.com)…and I have at least seven more ‘in development’ at the moment as...
Developing for the Blackberry...
Developing for the BlackBerry really has me appreciating the iPhone even more!
It’s not that the development is hard…in fact it’s pretty easy if you’ve got any sort of background in Java (which I luckily do).
The problem is that all the physical devices are different…different screen sizes, different handset options…which means that to be compatible with as...
Good post...
Bijan had a really interesting post today about comments and general discoverability that I think you should all go read (including the comments of course).
Overall I tend to agree that there should be a lot more/better ways to discover things online than we currently have…and comments is one area that seems particularly ripe for that sort of thing as Disqus (and others) start to reach...
5 people I wish I could start a company with.
Charlie O’Donnell had a post today about “Five people that I wish I had something more interesting to say to” which I thought was really fun to read and think about (plus it pointed out Marco Arment to me who I now find fascinating and have started to follow as well).
Anyway, in the comments of the post, I mentioned that Charlie himself would make my own list of five…and...
closing out my 35th year...
I’m wrapping up my 35th year of living tonight…and so I guess it’s time to do a little bit of reflection again…here we go in a totally random, as I think of it sort of way:
1. Though I’ve been a super early employee before (see Pro Video Productions, Cory Publishing, and reviews.com) and I’ve started two of my own companies from scratch (see Falicon...
A little sidebar on Conversationlist
Conversationlist has been up and running for a little over six months now…while our initial release saw massive adoption thanks to some attention from Fred Wilson and Ev Williams things eventually calmed down a bit…and now we only see a few new users a day (well for a few days/weeks we saw no new users but that was because I moved the system to a new server to handle some scaling...
Sometimes it's just silly...
I understand the reason and thinking for the fact that you can’t use Javascript XMLHttpRequest to call scripts from remote servers…but the fact that all you have to do is use it to call a local script that in turn calls the remote server renders the whole thing a little moot no?
In the case of Chrome extensions, you just need to make sure you’ve set the proper permissions for...