The Kansas City Royals are having a great season. Especially in light of recent history. One of the fringe benefits of their winning season is the almost constant availability of cheap turkey sub sandwiches at Planet Sub. For the uninitiated, Planet Sub offers $2 turkey subs on the day after a Royals win—home or away.
Well, the night of the Royals home opener, I had an idea. The Royals play a lot of games in a season. So when it comes lunch time, it’s hard to always know whether the team won the day before. So I spent about an hour and a half in front of my computer and conceived Two Dollar Turkey, aka http://www.twodollarturkey.com.
I don’t manually update the site. It runs itself. Every day, it just goes and reads yesterday’s sports scores and displays whether or not the Royals won—Yes or No.
I hope this feat of technological wonder enhances your world (and your lunch).
Stop following so many RSS feeds. Stop following so many people on Twitter. If you’re following over 500 people on Twitter, you’re doing it wrong. The temptation for those of us just venturing out to make our mark on the face of the great abyss know as the Internet is to feel like we need to stay on top of every single trend, technological advancement or piece of news that comes down the wire.
News Flash: You don’t.
Once you’ve got your idea, stop learning new stuff. Reduce your info diet to something manageable and ignore everything else. No one ever got rich through information overload.
In my presentation on Web Entrepreneurship at KCRUG, I mentioned a small handful of links that I think are important for would-be Ruby on Rails startup boostrappers to follow regularly. Along with a few blogs of some friends, these are the only RSS feeds I follow.
Even with these links, remember to be smart. Read the headlines. If the headline isn’t about something that could possibly make you money or help you with your dream project, skip it. You don’t need to know everything. In fact, you’ll be worse off, if you do.
I had the privilege of speaking at the Kansas City Ruby User Group last night on the topic of Web Entrepreneurship. For the uninitiated, I work full-time on a web startup called Storenvy of which I am the sole developer and co-owner. I’ve learned quite a bit over the last year through that process and through getting more involved with the Ruby on Rails community.
My presentation is in no way exhaustive, but it does cover four topics that I think are very important for any would-be web entrepreneur to be familiar with before he or she gets started. Here are the video and the slides.
Continue reading Web Entrepreneurship Presentation at KCRUG…
Ok so I haven’t updated my blog in like forever. But this had to make it onto the web. I got the following email last night in regards to a client website I made over a year ago while I was trying to bootstrap Storenvy.
Hey there – I had to comb through a bazillion commercial real estate sites in KC tonight and thought my eyes were going to bleed from the bad templates, blinking fonts and animated gif animals.
Your site for GPatterson looks fabulous. Thank you for knowing what you are doing and doing it with great style.
That’s it – random props from a stranger =)
Laura
Big smile! How about that! Laura felt compelled to open up her email and write to a complete stranger for no reason other than to compliment him on what she perceives is a job well done. That rocks.
Thanks, Laura. Great karma, and a great encouragement to do the same thing for the people whose work I am impressed or inspired by.
‘Nuff said.
I’m currently developing on the Amazon Flexible Payment Services platform. To simplify the process, I’m using a rubygem created by Tyler Hunt called Remit.
I looked up Tyler’s blog to take a look at what he’s up to, and the format really struck me. It looks like it’s a 3-way mashup of his Del.icio.us, Twitter, and Netflix activity feeds.
Simple. To the point.
Kind of what I was going for on the front page of this site. Me likey.
I haven’t been a big fan of Weezer’s efforts since Pinkerton, but this definitely deserves a mention. The band’s new video for their upcoming album officially contains references to everything I’ve ever seen on the internet. Definitely worth a check out.
Recently yours truly got interviewed on the radio about Google Apps. I was in the Kansas City Power and Light District where Google was putting on a Google Apps Roadshow. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it seemed like the Google guys were eating it up.
Could this be my big break?
Listen to the interview. (It’s at the bottom.)
Most likely you’ve been taught to put your javascript <script> tags in the <head>. Well, according to the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team, you shouldn’t. In fact, they advocate that you should place your javascript <script> tags at the very bottom of your document—just above the </body> closing tag.
If external javascript files are included in the <head>, the browser downloads those js files before rendering the rest of the page. Who wants to wait? If you include the scripts at the bottom of your document, the page loads up then fetches the scripts. In most cases, this is desirable.
A panicked client of mine contacted me today with concerns about his website. Every few times we would load his company’s homepage, it would show an incorrect website. This site had links to p0rn and other subject matter that a fine business would deem unfit to put on the front page of its website. See the page that was being maliciously loaded here. So I got to work hunting down the source of the hijack.
Continue reading Nasty PHP Exploit Rears Its Ugly Head (RFI Attack)…
Lately the internets have been aflutter with rumors and speculations pertaining to the next revolution of the iPhone. Since the SDK was announced, developers have been noting that the current capabilities of the hardware would have to significantly improve in order to fully maximize the device’s potential.
There I was, minding my own business doing our taxes, when out of nowhere I get a text message, email, and Twitterific notice. I’ve been singled-out, selected, chosen by a someone or something from atop that Mount Olympus we call Corporate. H&R Block sent me an @tweet. For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, wise up.
After being online for only a few short days, I started to really hate the design of this website. It was too dark or something. I wanted it to feel more open and easy-going and it just plain didn’t. I promised to stop messing with it for a while now though.
I also added Gravatar integration for comments. A Gravatar is a “globally recognizable avatar”. It’s a central server for avatars. My website calls out to the Gravatar server and looks a commenter up by their email address. If they’ve registered with Gravatar, their photo will be returned and placed neatly next to their comment. If they haven’t registered they’ll get an ugly Gravatar logo next to their comment. Neat, huh? Registering is easy and fast, and more and more sites are starting to use the service. So go register.
I’m trying to name a social online merch application geared toward bands and clothing companies. The project has been nameless for going on 3 months now. Here is a list of some reject names. They were rejected because either (a.) the urls are taken or (b.) the name is too dumb to ever speak aloud ever again. Enjoy.
After a bloody battle to the death with SliceHost and Media Temple, I’ve gotten the new site up. There are a few enhancements I’d like to make along the way, but the basic structure of the site is here. I’m not sure I intended the front page to basically look like a Facebook profile, but I suppose that’s what we wound up with.
I already have the first two blog entries planned so look for those within the next few days. Check out the bookmarks or links in the footer for further reading.
Talk soon.
!jon
My name is Jon. I live in Kansas City, MO. I'm married to Janette. We have a little white dog named Stella. I'm the co-owner and developer of Storenvy.com, an online store system and marketplace for bands, clothing companies and everyone else. Follow me on Twitter as @NewMonarch.
