Not sure when this was released or how I missed it. But this is pretty much the ultimate color/theme tool.

FREE at http://kuler.adobe.com/

Simply wow.

Keep You Safe offers a distributed and encrypted method of stashing your important and critical information online. Should you lose your wallet and account information and/or should something happen to you find an internet cafe and viola, you can start rebuilding.

Who hasn’t lost their wallet? After doing a little digging I’m not 100% sure about KeepYouSafe as an organization just yet. There is no company information on the website and no contact information other than email. When things get really tough, you need someone to call.

While having a distributed online, encrypted place to store this information is a great idea. The site looks good, but…

Check the who is information for the domain… It’s all masked and held private. That’s not a good thing. At this stage of the game I’d like to see something that gives me more confidence in KeepYouSafe than just the little ‘hacker safe’ badge.

But I have no doubt this will be a success with a number of folks out there.

Online Safe Deposit Box

We have COLORS COLORS COLORS COLORS COLORS COLORS

Support for Tables?

Find and REplace, as well as spell check…

Looks Like Linked Images ONLY though.

Very well done… Ad-hock posting from afar. Just provide your credentials at the time you need to post.

I like.

http://writetomyblog.com/

If that doesn’t work, option 2, sell to Google or Yahoo.

Now we have Option 3:

The company recently became talk of the blogs, when the founders decided to cut their losses, and put the company on sale on eBay. Niall and I devoted a big portion of our latest podcast, Snakes on a Business Plan to the Kiko affair. Well, the auction just closed and brought in $258,100. A tidy sum! This explains why Paul was smiling today at The FOO Camp Apparently, Kiko’s angel round was $50,000 in convertible debt, and this sale should cover that. Graham’s YCombinator which did the seed round could come out ahead as well. Kiko founders’ new idea has already been funded by YCombinator. Greg says eBay makes close to $3800 on the deal. A new floor for the ibanker fees? Just kidding… nevertheless, it makes you wonder despite all the hand-wringing about too many calendar companies, and presence of Google, there was after all a sucker buyer. Especially is you look at Skobee’s slow lingering slide to nowhere.

The conversation covered mostly the scalability of web applications, and start-ups and Matt’s philosophy towards that.

The following were basically his rules:

“Premature optimization is the root of all Evil”
“Machines are always going to be cheaper than humans”
“Get out of the ‘One-Box Mentality’”
“Go with what you’re happiest working with (Language Wise)”

First, I’m not here to bash Matt, obviously WordPress.com is successful. But lets look at a few of these things and I’ll toss my views into the mix too. Where are these views coming from? I have participated in a few startups, consulted for and/or in few as well. Some web based and some not web based. Some commercial applications and some not, all at some point all seemed to have had or suffered unforeseen scalability issues that the engineers (read developers) didn’t think to engineer or optimize for.

Byrne references his unsung heros of scalability are their network engineers. The Network Engineering staff that always comes to the rescue, is the part that I happen to come from, so it’s kind of funny that he recognizes and appreciates the cavalry but doesn’t see a need to reduce his reliance upon them. Which I guess is good for their job security but they shouldn’t have to put out his scalability fires.

So with respect to “Premature optimization is the root of all Evil”

I do agree with Byrne that you don’t need to solve scalability issues before you have them, but damnit you better plan for them, design for them, recognize then when it’s needed, then execute. This may then be premature optimization that is needed and that is NOT evil it’s critical for success that it be dealt with properly.

If you think your product has a chance of getting large, sit back with a cold one and spend some time thinking “What if?” Brainstorm how you’re going to handle that. You don’t necessarily have to implement it but have a plan. I’ve seen a few too many almost get successful, but hit brick walls because nobody bothered to stop and think “What if the customer really likes this?” How will we give them what they want without turning them off or bankrupting us in the process, or ruining their experience trying to make it work or keep it alive?

Coming to the realization that your product was never designed to handle X and can’t scale properly to Y really sucks.

“Machines are always going to be cheaper than humans”

True, but… machines can’t solve all your scalability issues or all your problems.

Especially those spawn from poorly written and designed applications, those tend to be more common in reality. Hardware can often mask that for a period of time and help you limp along but the problems tend to only get worse.

The public will forgive Google (in the case of Google Pages) but if you’re a new born startup with VC funding, don’t bet on it.

Growth problems are good problems to have when you have a revenue stream attached with them. When you don’t though, they aren’t really good problems.

Byrne hits the nail on the head here, but I’d go further. Yes, the first engineers you hire do set the tone. They do create the base, and form the mold all others will fill. But ever engineer after that must also be as good, if not better. I’m not saying you can’t hire and train. You can, but you need to keep your talent pool rich with talent and not let it become diluted.

“Get out of the ‘One-Box Mentality”

This is pretty standard, solid strategy for both scalability and security. If you don’t design your application in mind for this from the get go though (that premature optimization thing?) you’ll have issues down the road. Though since we’re speaking mainly web applications, this architecture is pretty broadly supported across all the major technologies. You just have to support it in your application.

“Go with what you’re happiest working with (Language Wise)”

Meaning, let the Engineers pick the language. I have no problem with this as long as they consider the things Byrne talks about either:

But be cautious, make sure your engineers consider:

• the maturity of the language – does it support everything you will need it to for the foreseeable future?
• the third party libraries available to that language – are their a sufficient number of libraries already developed for the language to augment what it may lack in the language’s core?
• the size and maturity of the language’s developer community – is the community active and enthusiastic? Is it capable of providing the support you may need should your engineers need to turn to it for help?

And he’s right, it’s NOT the language that makes the application, it’s the use of the language and supporting tools and utilities. The language may contribute to; time to deliver, quality of code, and quality of life. But it’s not what makes or breaks an application in itself. It’s the engineers, engineering, and passion of those involved.

Oh and it better start with a good idea.

Tags: Startups, start-ups, dos, donts, WordPress, podcast, podsessions

We’ve rolled out the current release 2.0.3 which so far seems pretty good. We’ll play with and continue to test the latest and greatest release(s) of WordPress, but we’re done playing with the Alpha pre-releases, at least here.

Of course that’s not what they are meant for so this isn’t a slam on anyone.

We’ve just had a number of errors on our site and they were mostly the result of pre-pre-release versions we were playing with.

DP needs to be more stable than that and we don’t have the time right now to fook with it.

Datapoohah.com/tech/ as a graph:

Click here, to check out just about any website as a graph.

Tags: website, plot, graph

• It’s clean
• It’s simple
• It’s easy to tweak
• It has dedicated ad spaces sure, but that’s really not what this site is about, nope, but it helps pay the bills (yeah right).
• It’s just a really sweet, sweet theme.

Kudos to author(s). 

Technorati Tags: MW, Monetizing, WordPress, Theme, Clean Theme

They've added spell check, but it doesn't work worth a damn if you're hosted on the Windows Platform for what ever reason. I've been unable to figure that out.

[tag]Performancing[/tag] as a Firefox extension is pretty damn nifty in an of itself, but it lacks spell check and if you're not careful the formatting that it preserves from copy paste can also bite you where the sun don't shine.

I've looked at a few stand alone packages including [tag]ecto[/tag] which I understand if you run on the MacOS X platform is pretty nice. But it simply blows chunks on Windows.

So far the best I've found is [tag]BlogDesk[/tag]. It's free (donation encouraged) and other than the fact that I still can't tell how it picks it's 'Technorati' tags, it work just swell.

BlogDesk handles images, and thumbnail creation and uploads really, really well. It gets an A+ so far as the best option I've looked at.

This is awesome:

For those of you who haven't upgraded to Web 2.0 yet, today's submission from Daniel is a perfect example of what you're missing out on. Since the beginning of the Web (the "1.0 days"), website owners have always wanted to know who was visiting their website, how often, and when. Back then, this was accomplished by recording each website "hit" in a log file and running a report on the log later.
But the problem with this method in Web 2.0 is that people don't use logs anymore; they use blogs, and everyone knows that blogs are a pretty stupid way of tracking web traffic. Fortunately, Daniel's colleagues developed an elegant, clever, and — most importantly — "AJAX" way of solving this problem. Instead of being coded in HTML pages, all hyperlinks are assigned a numeric identifier and kept in a database table. This identifier is then used on the HTML pages within an anchor tag:

<a href="Javascript: followLink(124);">View Products</a>

When the user clicks on the hyperlink, the followLink() Javascript function is executed and the following occur:

• a translucent layer (DIV) is placed over the entire page, causing it to appear "grayed out", and …
• a "please wait" layer is placed on top of that, with an animated pendulum swinging back and forth, then …
• the XmlHttpRequest object is used to call the "GetHyperlink" web service which, in turn …
• opens a connection to the database server to …
• log the request in the RequestedHyperlinks table and …
• retrieves the URL from the Hyperlinks table, then …
• returns it to the client script, which then …
• sets the window.location property to the URL retrieved, which causes …
• the user to be redirected to the appropriate page

Now that's two-point-ohey.

Page is here.

Read about it here.  Some big names are getting out of the blogging business.

In order to blog you have to have something to say and that’s not always easy. It takes time, effort and creativity.  There are too many people tossing up blogs, throwing on adwords and other ad mediums trying to make a buck.  They read about the few great successes here and there and want their 15 minutes of fame and a $1200 monthly check from Google.

It’s not that easy and that’s not what blogging is about.

This too shall pass.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, dummies, dead, oh well