Knaddison.com - We're always having a family reunion.

Health Care Choices for Web Developers

greggles — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:18:41 +0000

I’m taking the a list apart 2008 survey of web folks and got to a question about where do I get my health-care.

For the record, I have a high deductible plan through Anthem and an HSA account through 1st Bank (Colorado bank…) and I love it.

So, apparently you can get health care from a lot of places, but you can’t get health care from a health care company. And we wonder why health care is so bad in America…the feedback loop is how big these days? Bad feedback loop! Feedback loop goes to it’s room without dinner until it can learn to be smaller!

Herman Miller Chairs in Denver - Expensive Chair, Cheap Tables

greggles — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:01:34 +0000

So, I’m outfitting my office which has me thinking back to all the great articles I’ve read over the years about offices. There’s Joel on Software’s 12 Steps to Better Code which is largely just common sense of developer types explained using traditional business language. And Jason Calacanis about how to save money running a startup which is largely more of the same.

Cheap tables and Expensive Chairs (like… Aeron chairs)

Jason’s tip that really resonated with me was this one:

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon[sic] chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters… invest in it.

The desk I’m using now was $20 and it was from a used furniture store so there’s a bonus environmental feeling of warmth in my heart - instead of me buying “yet another dead tree” while this thing went to a landfill. The chair…was $450 from Craigslist. Increasingly when we need something for the office we get the rss feed (this one’s for herman miller chairs in denver) and wait a week and the perfect solution comes to the rss feed reader.

I still need to get some better monitors, but we already got a fridge, coffee machine and microwave.

DrupalCamp Colorado - 4 Days to Go - My Drupal Camp Phone

greggles — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:29:57 +0000

We’re just a few days away from DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 and things are becoming more and more tangible by the minute. Just now I got a package in the mail at the new offices.

The stickers just happen to be 2”x4” which is exactly the right size to emblazon them on the back of your iPhone. Ever since lijit gave it to me my phone has rocked a lijit sticker:

but now…at least for the next week…it’s a DrupalCamp phone:

About quarter of the calls I get are organizing the camp so it seems only fitting.

If you’re not convinced by these stickers that this will be a rocking weekend, here are the sessions.

Also, my best to the sticker’s designer Don Hajicek and to the other logo designer amytremper.

July Denver/Boulder New Tech Meetup Overview

greggles — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:00:34 +0000

This was the first “New Tech Meetup” that I’ve attended. It was quite interesting. Perhaps more interesting was the before the session I was at “The Cup” in Boulder talking to a VC/Consultant/Entrepreneur type and comparing Boulder to Denver he said something like “The thing about Boulder is that there’s more VCs up here so the Entrepreneurs from Denver have to come here.”

At that exact moment, sitting in the Cup working on their presentation was Dandyid. Point proven?

Without further ado - my notes on the sessions.

Gnip (Guh - nip)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and Ubuntu.

Basically they want to go from the “polling” model (think of all the rss requests that your rss reader makes in a day) to a push model. But it has to be polling, so they will do the polling in one big poll and then share the resulting data with you either by polling or pushing. Their model seems to be like Facebook, but in a B2B way. I’m not sure that I see the problem that they are solving, but they already have several big name partners which means that those big name partners see a business model which is really all that they need.

I like them more now that I see their website: “We got $h*t to pop”. Ok, fair enough. They had a real demo - well done. The demo didn’t 100% work. Oh well.

Question from the audience: Who saves money? Who spends money? What’s the revenue module?
Answer: Uh, this is the new _tech meetup. I’m not a business guy….Let’s say for now we’re doing this for public benefit._

mobileXware (nice site!)

Used OpenOffice.org Impress and WindowsXP and they couldn’t get the presentation to work. Whoops.

All presentation, no demo (it’s hard to demo handheld stuff). Basically it’s a fitness guide via cell phone that’s for sale now.

Hiring “people across the board” interested in fitness.

DizGo

Used a Mac, Keynote, and Firefox, with a Verizon card to provide network access.

“Mobile discounts on-the-go.” “mobile … on-the-go” ? “redundant … and repetitive”

However - This was probably my favorite “business” of the night.

They had basically no slides - straight to demo. For businesses they can provide instant business. Create an ad, set a budget, get real time analytics on viewers, leads, and redemption.

As a consumer, you pick a keyword and send it via SMS to their system. Their “patented ontology” then maps it to one of the active offers and send you back useful information. Example: I SMS in “Sushi” and it sends back “1 Free Beer at Hapa”. This seems really compelling to me. When my favorite restaurants offer happy hours I will almost always go there that night of the week. If a business notices that they are slow, can’t send home employees, and has food that will perish this is a way to create demand on the fly. So, it’s great for products or services that have an “expiration” - things like food, bars, music events, etc. They said that their next step is to move into services - “A store which has extra adidas might need us”. Well, there’s nothing compelling to me about an instantaneous need to sell sneakers - that’s just a bad match for the solution. I hope their business model is based on the quick expiration items and not the more durable goods…

dandyid.org

Used Mac and Firefox. Real Live Demo!

They let you Store all of your “identities” with them (i.e. your URL on various sites). Other sites can send in an md5 of your email and get back the identities that are associated with that email in the dandyid system. Currently have 300 sites, 20 more per month.

Creates a single profile for all of your profiles available as a “dandyid” page or as a ball of “chicklets”. I think I’m too old for this - I’ve only ever entered my big list of “identities” on one site and it wasn’t that hard. So, either I’m too old or the limited functionality means it’s not enough to pull me in. I think I’ll just wait for the OAuth/OpenID Attribute Exchange stuff to get good enough and will use that.

mShopper

Used Vista, Powerpoint.

“Largest mobile commerce provider.” Which, I want to know, are there any other mobile commerce providers?

Let’s you browse/buy products from your WAP enabled phone. WAP is like the internet from back in 1994. I personally place more stock in bigger/more capable phones with real browsers. The browse seems powerful to comparison shop while you’re in a store, but buying via phone seems dumb.

They are also doing some stuff with sending text messages kind of like DizGo is, but that appears to be a lower priority.

lijit

First, they demo’d their current stuff. This was nothing new to me. Then, they said, ok, so how do we make money? Well, “we hired David Fero to figure out how to make money. Now he gets to talk.” Pretty funny.

Basically they have built an easy way to use the Google Custom Search Engine. They kept google ads on the side and they kept the revenue from those ads. Now they are going to open those ads up to more ad providers and start sharing the revenue with you. I’m optimistically skeptical (you’ll note that I added the lijit widget back to my sidebar after a …um… brief hiatus).

bilitzlocal

Mac, Firefox (couldn’t get the network to work so they stole Vista/IE from Robert).

Gave tips about advertising on FaceBook - in aggregate across all their customers, they spend $10,000 per day on Facebook ads. Wow.

Claim that the CPC and conversion rates on FaceBook right now are such that it is competitive with Google ads. This is basically true because nobody else is using FaceBook yet. So, you should start using FaceBook ads to target your niche (depending on the niche…) and test it out.

Wrapup - Good Event, but Mediocre Tech/Businesses

I wasn’t overly impressed with the businesses nor the technology in use. It’s hard to show off really good technology stuff in 5 minutes. But, I did like the event overall and definitely plan on making it part of my routine. Also, they have beer down front so you should show up early if you do go.

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Spanish Accents

nikki — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:11:11 +0000

I (well really, Greg) recently figured out how to use accents and punctuation elements in Spanish, which has made my life much easier!

Go to System Preferences, click International and then choose US-Extended. Once you’re set up with that, the keyboard shortcuts are as follows:

option+e+vowel = accented vowel (lower case)
option+e+shift+vowel = accented vowel (upper case)
option+1 = upside down exclamation ¡
option+shift+? = upside down question ¿
option+n+letter = tilde over letter ñ

You can also experiment by holding down option and pressing random keys.

¡Allí está, suerte!

Back in Denver - Spanish Classes and Drupalooop

greggles — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:51:52 +0000

So…we’re back in Denver. Of course, our house is rented out to some Democrats until September (they’re throwing a party you may have heard about) so we’re not 100% “back home” but it sure feels close to that.

Knaddison Spanish Tour

We were gone for a little while. 9 months. Where were we? See, we went to Spain and then Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Denver, California, Denver. We even wrote a ton about our trip if you like to read about those places. But, now we’re back in Denver and are excited to be home. In fact, a large part of the trip was learning about the Spanish Language and Culture. We did really fun stuff like take this video of winemaking in Argentina and then cut it together into this movie:

Spanish School - Denver Spanish House

We also spent a lot of time discussing, planning, and getting excited about Nikki’s business: The Denver Spanish House. All that planning and research into language theories is finally coming together since she is offering classes in Spanish (English classes coming soon…). I may be a little biased, but I’m really excited about this new chapter in her life. The work she did at non-profits was good and all, but starting a business doing something like this that she really loves is pretty amazing. And, the final plan for the Denver Spanish House goes beyond classes into some slightly more fun stuff. _Edit: Also, we are doing our best to review wines of Spanish speaking world.

Drupalaloop, Baby

Me, I’m getting back into working with Drupal. I’ve got a lot of great opportunities that I’m chasing down - more to come as the deals solidify and get released to the world (astute readers have a hint of part of what I’ll be doing). If you’ve got a great project using Drupal, particularly related to the publishing industry or in the Denver/Colorado area please do let me know if I can help you with it.

So, thanks for indulging a navel-gazing-I-love-my-wife-and-I’m-excited-to-get-back-to-work post. We spent 9 years planning our trip to South America and while we were down there we spent more than half the time getting ready for the next 10 years of our life back here in Colorado. It’s nice to get back to it!

Hillary Clinton - The Market Predicts She's Done

greggles — Sat, 24 May 2008 20:55:50 +0000

As we flew home from our trip to South America we changed planes in Washington DC and saw this scene:

I’d say that this is a pretty clear indication that, at least in the opinion of this airport shop owner, Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming president are pretty low. That’s what you might describe as a general market indicator that Hillary is done.

And, of course there’s the prediction markets…

Prediction Markets - HubDub Says Hillary Clinton to Withdraw Before the Convention

According to the HubDub market there is an 82% chance she’ll withdraw prior to the convention.

qmwztlxb1

what is this?

Will Hillary Clinton withdraw from the nomination race before the Democratic Convention?

% chance over time

Get this widget

Hubdub - The News Prediction Game

At least this prediction, at the time I’m writing this, says there’s about an 80% chance that Hillary will leave prior to the convention.

If you’re on HubDub, you can become my “friend” and then we can compete in predictions. When starting at my HubDub profile you should be able to click a button at “add as friend”.

Some Research Before You Write That (Technical) Book

greggles — Fri, 16 May 2008 15:50:13 +0000

It appears that the costs of publishing have really fallen, otherwise how can I explain that there’s a good chance I’m going to be writing a book that might actually get published. In the last week two referrals came my way and I’m sitting here thinking “Should I do it?”

The major questions in my mind are: Is it profitable on its own? If not, can I do it in a manner which will be profitable (i.e. write about a niche that somehow brings in future business)? Should I partner with a publisher? Write it myself? Or perhaps “dead-tree” books are just “dead” and I should make it an e-book?

Oh yeah, and will I maintain the motivation to get it done? And done to a level that doesn’t suck?

John Resig Writes about Writing For a Publisher

In his post about Programming Book Profits (which, I’m not going to be writing about “programming” but it’s probably a useful comparison to what I would be writing) John Resig lays out exactly what his profits were 1 year after publishing. He also lays out some of the pros and cons and surprises that he found. In short: the paycheck from the publisher doesn’t seem like it will be worth it.

Note: he recommends pretty strongly against the e-book route.

Go It (mostly) On Your Own With Lulu.com or the Kindle

ProBlogger’s How to Be a Rockstar eBook Seller [Interview] mentions the use of Lulu.com for sales of their book. It appears that they’ve made a decent profit. Sadly though, while he gives revenue numbers he doesn’t give “books sold” numbers and the sales $ depends on several factors so you don’t really know how many copies they sold.

Note: they love the e-book.

Amazon has a program for authors called the Digital Text Platform where authors can sell their books. Amazon keeps 65% of the revenue (for what they provide - that seems a little high).

The “Writing the Book” Part

An hour a day? I think I can do that. Good enough to be happy with it? Hmmm…

Summer Concerts in Denver 2008

greggles — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:26:27 +0000

Ah, it’s that time again. Time to plan for summer concerts. A quick review of all the craptastic concert calendar sites shows me too many artists coming to town this summer. Who should I see?

ColoradoInfo.com which is pretty disorganized…but seems decent.
Westwords Concert Search which is just plain overwhelming
DenverPost.com Summer Concert Calendar
Boulder Daily Camera less complete, easier to digest, not Boulder focused (odd, that last bit)
Denver Botanic Gardens Concerts which are, at least somewhat, already sold out!
KBCO Concert List which should be awesome but, is kind of hard to navigate. What’s up with the website, guys, 3 clicks to get to the concert list?

So, who am I going to? After enjoying Leo Kottke at the Denver Botanic Gardens last summer, this summer I’m thinking of seeing Leo Kottke and Lyle Lovett rock out Red Rocks Ampitheatre on July 18th. There’s also Soul Stew Revival, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks at Chautauqua Auditorium on the very next day which could get a little hectic to try to go to both in one weekend.

I’d kind of like to see Al Green at the Botanic Gardens, but $75 is a little steep! Since I won’t be in Denver until June 18th or so I’ll be missing lots of good shows. Hopefully I can still get some good shows (and photos) this summer, though.

Interview With Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com About Migrating to Drupal and SEO

greggles — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:14:01 +0000

Aaron is a relatively famous SEM/SEO and has obviously built a lot of sites. After he migrated his main site, SEOBook.com to Drupal and then even made a optimistic prediction about the future of Drupal I was curious about Aaron’s experiences and wanted to see what he had to say about the process and why he likes Drupal. He was kind enough to respond with these answers.

1. What initially motivated you to migrate seobook.com from MovableType to Drupal?

I originally used MovableType, but I wanted to create a site with premium content and permissions based access. The Drupal premium module facilitated that quite well. Plus my developer really liked Drupal and saw it as being extensible enough to do everything I wanted (integrate with our affiliate program, create a structured online training program , offer page by page control of premium or regular access, allow me to offer free snippets on some of the premium content, integrate with vBulletin forums, and integrate with the Paypal IPN).

2. What CMS (or mix of CMS) do you use as the basis for new projects?

Honestly most of my projects usually come in a couple waves. A small mini-site using flat files or server side incles, put up so I can start promoting it right away, and then as I decide to grow it out I typically switch off to Drupal or Wordpress on most sites. The really easy small and bloggy type projects get Wordpress, but Drupal is used on the more complex ones.

3. Was anything about Drupal particularly hard to get used to? Hard to migrate to? Anything particularly easy and beneficial?

Honestly my programmers did a lot of the work and I could not have done it all without them (I am no good at programming)! I have used Drupal for years though…I ran a site called Threadwatch which was powered by Drupal.

The things that I have found cool about using Drupal recently are how easy it is to install most modules. And I love being able to use conditional blocks. It is kinda addictive thinking of things to add to the site.

4. What features surprised you the most after the migration?

I think the database load was a bit surprising. The site was on a really weak server, and MovableType was flat file. Once the site was live with Drupal it was much more database intensive. With our decent traffic load we needed to upgrade to a real server.

5. What do you feel is the best CMS for SEO? Is there such a thing or does it depend on how you use it?

I think strategy is important, but a bad CMS can hold even the brightest person back. Drupal is my favorite CMS, but I am probably biased towards it since my main site is powered by Drupal. :)

For small sites I like just rolling them by hand for optimal control over every small issue, but for larger sites I like Drupal and Wordpress a lot. Some of the plugins that allow you to use different page titles and h1 tags, and other related tweaks help boost traffic.

6. Any tips for improving Drupal and specifically SEO of Drupal?

Make sure you enable clean URLs. Nodewords is good for page specific meta description tags. Make sure to redirect example.com to www.example.com (or the other way around)…you don’t want 2 versions of your site getting indexed.

If you use Drupal for a blog I think careful consideration of categories and promotion of featured content are important. Using a custom homepage that introduces people to your topic can help convert passer-byers into subscribers and later buyers. Our Blogger’s Guide to SEO http://www.seobook.com/bloggers (now available in 20 languages - if you count Pig Latin) can help offer some tips here as well.

If you want to have a rather broad and diverse site it helps to map it out ahead of time so you can put things in logical locations. For example, it makes sense to put a forum on a subdomain, especially if it is not monitored as well as your blog or news channel is.