Have you ever submitted the most awesome blog entry to ycombinator, or the coolest youtube video to digg, and no one seemed to care? There are a number of places where users submit content, and either that content gets into the spotlight and cherished for 15 minutes, or its cast into the depths of obscurity with little to no feedback as to why.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get feedback not only on the content that you submit, but on the way you submit it? Maybe your angle is all wrong, or you misspelled the title, or any number of things? It could be useful for veterans as well as noobs. Have an idea for a press release, or a submission to slashdot, but want to try a few different angles? You could experiment with posting different titles, and bodies and have users rank and give feedback, with the focus less on the content, and more on the presentation.
Then when content is ready they can post to social sites (reddit, buzz, fark, etc.) through our site, and we can track who gets the most diggs/upvotes/etc. So you can see from start to finish what worked and what didn’t. Think of it a s a social media sandbox, a place to pitch your ideas before you pitch to the world. What do you think?
Known Implementations:
Limited feedback can already be gained from comments from the posting sites themselves, though they aren’t always helpful, and rarely focus on how to better present the submission.
PR professionals, and other pay for marketing consultants
Link spam, and self promotion would dominate the site initially, unless enough incentives are given to users, maybe users above a certain rank will get their links posted without nofollow…
Is the idea too specific or is it too general? Can others do achieve the same result with another service, or no service? How does one market to the marketing community?
When I was first getting started out in the wide world of web development, i yearned for someone to show me the way. I eventually just sucked it up, posted a bunch of questions to a bunch of forums, and bought a metric ton of books. In the end I turned out okay and my latest app, disposable email seems to have come out just fine. Even so, now I’m left with no experience working with others, and even more importantly no experience with (multi-person) project management.
Now, I don’t have a ton of money to hire full time developers, and I would prefer not to piecemeal out work to contractors. What I do have is plenty of real world experience in web developement and a little money. If I could go back in time and offer my college self a little bit of cash and an experienced developer’s time, I would have jumped on top of the opportunity. That’s exactly what I want to do with UT in Austin students interested in web development right now.
I envision seasoned developers willing to devote a few hours a week to be mentors to a small group of students (I’m thinking a one to three ratio). In exchange they would get a dedicated and agile team at a cut rate price. It would be a win-win symbiotic relationship, the mentors get some extra hands on their projects as well as management experience, and the students pick up real world programming and project skills as well as a little beer money. Mentors can certainly use this opportunity to network with other developers and entrepreneurs. They say the best way to find a good fit for a co-founder is to work with them, so why not work with them on a project together without spending a fortune.
This is still just an Idea, for now, but i think it could go places. If you’re interested in getting some extra help on your projects, or just want to make a difference let me know by filling out this google doc spreadsheet. If you have any constructive criticism, or good ideas please leave them in the comments. I’m calling this idea a Geekternship though that may change if someone has a better title.
When i first started making web applications complaints about my designs, (which can be super frustrating…”i gave you a website…now you want it to be gorgeous too…sheesh”).
So I started taking note of what I liked and didn’t like about site designs. I made a delicious list and tagged the sites i liked with “webdesign-inspiration” if they have something that specifically stood out to me. Design is an art, and every artist learns by imitating. Find a feature you enjoy and try to duplicate it. Firebug is your friend.
But never get too attached. Just because a child spends hours on a macaroni picture doesn’t mean everyone will love it. Listen to your users/friends and take their advice with a grain of salt. Re-design, is just part of design.
Find a few design blogs that you can relate to, i like css-tricks, and check them every once in a while. If you like sparten designs, read http://www.alistapart.com/ . A typography based webpage design takes more skill and patience to make look good than just throwing some blue web 2.0 buttons on your nav bar.
Keep a folder of screen shots of web designs you like and constantly ask yourself what makes you like them, and how can you incorporate those features in your site. Check out http://www.designmeltdown.com/ for some good ideas. Some people have also recommended the non-designers design book.
Mockup your design in photoshop or another graphical programming, to seperate your method (css, html) from the design process. It may feel like your wasting time when your not putting text into an editor, but being able to generate several potential mockups and pick the best can save you huge amounts of time.
Finally, if you have any limitations (mine is colors) there are plenty of resources to help you out, just search for them. Such as http://www.colourlovers.com/ Good luck!
Check out my webdesign in action and let me know what you think of my Free Email application.
We could easily implement a 200 year change over plan. So when something has to be replaced it is replaced either with metric, or with a combination metric and english units. The next time it gets replaced it has to be metric. One world one set of standard units. VIVA la revolution!!
A permalink is a permanent link to an article or blog entry. Its what you get when a user clicks on the titles of one of your wordpress entries, so if they want to give the link to someone else, the url will always be the same. By default wordpress will make the permalink to the article the articles ID, so it would look like example.com/?p=123, which isn’t very descriptive. Instead if you log into your admin panel and select settings and then permalinks you can change the format of your links to something a little more human readable, and much more search friendly such as http://www.thinkbohemian.com/2010/01/29/national-instruments-extreme-video/ which tells you not only the date it was published but the title too.
You may find after you’ve changed your permalinks that your articles now all get a 404 error. This is because your server thinks that your looking for a file in the /2010/01/29/national-instruments-extreme-video/ directory. So we need to let our server know not to do that. There are plenty of examples of how to do the re-write if you’re using apache, but if you’re an nginx fanboy like I am, there wasn’t very much information. So to make this happen we need to add a few extra lines under our nginx.conf under the location / { section like this:
This is the completely ridiculous video that my team made for an inter office competition. I don’t know if anyone else will appreciate the subtleties in the work or find it half as enjoyable as I do, but I truly love this video. Shot and edited in under 24 hours, lets see if you can guess the theme of this years compeition!!
In case you were wondering, my footwear of choice is sandals, and my favorite sandals todate are Teva’s mush. They don’t have any leather, so you can get them wet. No plastic or seams touch your feet, the soles are super comfortable, and they last a reasonably long time. All that and they only cost $24 new, (if you look you can probably find them for around $11 especially in winter)
So if you’ve ever tested changes to a Ruby on Rails model in the script/console, it can be a pain having to completely quit and restart the application each time you make an adjustment. Instead you can use the reload! command
So this:
reload!
Acts as if you just did this:
exit
script/console
So not only does it require one less command, but you can still use all previously defined variables. Awesome!
WhySpam.Me my free email service, entered a video for Rackspace’s “Coolest App In The Cloud” contest and if it wins, I will donate $300 to Haiti relief. Voting ends January 27th, so make your vote count now!
If you accidentally put your password or underwear size on your public git repository, you may want to remove that item first get it out of future repositories by modifying the .gitignore file
mate .gitignore
add the file you don’t want to show up in the public repository, such as config/environment.rb
Then you can call this command to force the branch to be filtered. Note this command will remove the actual file from your hard drive, so make sure to have a backup.
git filter-branch --force --tree-filter 'rm config/environment.rb' HEAD
You can then push your newly super secure repository.
Richard is currently developing http://www.whyspam.me , a new suite of anti-spam tools designed to show you who is filling up your inbox. It’s in an active beta right now, so go check it out and let me know what you think!!!
After graduating from Georgia Tech with a Mechanical Engineering degree, Richard moved down to live [...]more →
Have you ever submitted the most awesome blog entry to ycombinator, or the coolest youtube video to digg, and no one seemed to care? There are a number of places where users submit content, and either that content gets into the spotlight and cherished for 15 minutes, or its cast into the depths of obscurity with little to no feedback as to why.
I am also the webmaster for