MissingMethod

So, One Week Later, Is The Album Dead Yet? — The Seminal :: Independent Media and Politics

Check out the latest venture from Curbly, LLC (and MissingMethod): www.uncooped.com.

Uncooped is a place for outdoor lovers and adventure junkies to share pictures and experiences, review the latest gear, and get expert advice. If you love the outdoors, head on over and sign up for an Uncooped account!

Inspired by the cool sliding window thingy at Panic, I decided to whip something up that I could use on Curbly.

Slider.js depends on Prototype and effects.js (from the Scriptaculous library), and it’s available for download here.

Here’s what it looks like:

I’m at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport waiting for a connection, thrilled to discover there’s free WiFi throughout the building and ample access to electrical outlets. Those two things (especially the first) are not common at airports, and their availability here will definitely affect my travel plans in the future. If I’m choosing whether to connect through an airport where the WiFi is free, or one where they screw me with ridiculous T-Mobile or day-pass fees, I think the choice is obvious.

UPDATE: Now you can skip a lot of these steps and just use CommunityEngine, our instant social networking plugin for Ruby on Rails.
High-Level Process

1. Hire a good designer.
2. Iterate on the look and feel until it’s 80% complete.
3. Code it.
4. Deploy it once it’s 80% complete (80% of the features are 100% complete, not 100% of the features 80% complete).
5. Go back to step 1.

Plugins and other code-related items

• acts_as_commentable for comments on your user profiles and blog posts
• acts_as_attachment for uploading profile pictures
• acts_as_taggable for tagging users and blog posts
• tiny_mce so users who don’t get wikis can have formatted text
• learn how to do a self-referential friendship so your users can have friends
• ez_where
• resource_feeder for simple rss feeds
• resource_hacks
• restful_authentication to maintain the rigor of developing restfully
• white_list
• ffmpeg/mencoder for converting media
• obviously, from some of the plugins mentioned above, you should use edge-rails and embrace the CRUD-constrained approach

Deployment

• Get a dedicated box (we like Slingshot Hosting) - yes, a dedicated box is more expensive, but it’s worth it.
• Integrate tests into your deployment scripts. It’s nice to know your app won’t deploy unless your tests pass.
• Launch ASAP (and let WWIBAN guide your next features).
• Deploy something new everyday (or close to it) for the first couple weeks — don’t worry, it’s not a bad thing. It’ll get you used to your deployment scripts.

fast-forward a month…

Now that your site is launched*

• Read every Kathy Sierra article.
• Follow Mashable and Techcrunch to see which of your competitors get funding or fold.
• Make sure you aren’t making any SEO mistakes.
• Come up with features that are unique to your social networking niche.
• Learn how to make money off your site in ways other than adsense.

* if you’re having trouble getting your site developed, contact us. We’d be happy to develop it for you. Here are two social networking sites we built with Ruby on Rails:

Like this post?

Garrick does a nice profile on our latest project.  It was born on Monday.

There are plenty of posts telling you to just do it, plenty talking about how wonderful it is to free yourself from a big company, and lots of how-tos once you do, but let’s talk instead about your competition.

Let’s hope you’re competing against big companies. This may seem counterintuitive, but I fear an independent web developer with a sense of mission far more than a skilled developer in a big company, mostly because of this idea:

“You can only live in fear of large corporations if you have never worked in middle management for one of them.”

Now, I don’t want to come off completely dissing big companies. After all, they’re a great place to get experience from. They’re also good filters that teach you what you’re good at and what you’re not. And undoubtedly, there are loads of talented people working for big companies.

They can also be nice places to camp out and earn a nice wage. But beware, your spirit and desire to learn will atrophy. Your life might fill up with all sorts of the stuff (like mine did when I bought a fancy condo with a monthly mortgage payment that tripled my previous monthly rent). You won’t realize at first that you’re just working for the paycheck and then start asking existential questions like: “why did I ever get into programming in the first place? I’m not even sure I like it. Even real estate sounds more fun than my job.” Look, it’s not programming that’s boring, it’s the work, stupid!

God, what was the name of this post again? Oh yeah, why corporations aren’t scary. So, how about some data on why this is true:

“Since 2001, the global economy has added the equivalent of the whole U.S. economy,” Rich said, as he opened his talk with reference to macro trends. But, though the fundamentals are good, experts don’t agree that it’s a good economy, he said. And, when experts differ so much, something is up.

“That something is we’re living in the greatest period of business model change — ever! Companies can come out of nowhere and knock out big players,” Karlgaard said. He referred to what McKinsey & Company calls the “topple rate” of established industry leaders, which tripled over a 20-year period according to their research.

One industry where this is happening is newspapers, with the stock of the New York Times, for example, at half what it was in 2002. Why is the industry in trouble? “Craig’s List is one reason,” he said, “a company with 23 employees.” He noted that McKinsey said the topple rate will triple again, and he gave some reasons why this volatility will stay with us. “The backside of Moore’s Law is the part that’s important. As performance increases, prices drop 30% a year. Suddenly, hundreds of millions more people can afford technology every year.”

“Creative destruction,” “topple rate,” I don’t care what you call it, but I love that shit. Essentially, any big company competitor you can think of stands a really good chance of falling to pieces in the near future. Big companies simply can’t adjust as quickly (especially in anything web related) as you can by yourself or with a couple business partners, regardless of how much they middle manage.

Not only are big companies nothing to fear, and potentially easy competitors, but their deteriorating products and services should signal you to what could be done better.
Chances are your big company competitor is charging an arm and a leg, delivers new releases evermore slowly, and has bet the farm on 5 to 10 year old technology. CFOs will not like the cost of change, and that’s your ticket.

Let big, slow, and evil corporations point your idea-generating brain in the right direction.

Some of you may be seeing double posts in your blog aggregators; that’s because I had a technical glitch today and lost my last few days worth of posts. My hosting provider’s most recent database backup left me with some posts missing,  but Google Reader stepped in and saved the day (even had cached versions of my images so I could re-upload them). Thanks, Google.

Tell your friends, tell your blog aggregator: Timberwolves sign F Baker, Two Others. Two others! Is this all the recognition Paul Shirley gets for devoting himself nearly part-time to writing the funniest, smartest basketball blog ever?

I can’t tell you how excited I am to see this guy warm up before games and sit on our bench and maybe even play a little. This is the kind of thing that gives you hope for the coming season.

OK, so the picture doesn’t do him justice. Check out these pearls of Shirley-isdom:

“Most of my colleagues are quite tall. I am no exception at 6’10”. When in captivity, on the basketball court, I am able to easily forget the fact that my bones are stretched to an extraordinary length because I am surrounded by other members of the freak show. Not so when I am released into the wild. Then, I am forced to remember… by stupid people.

After one of a recent session of the basketball camp … I picked up my staples (cereal and yogurt figuring prominently among my selections), and headed out the door. As I was leaving, a man searching for a nearby accountant’s office accosted me when he observed my heightful frame and said, “Hey man, you should have played basketball. You’re really tall.”

What, basketball? You’re kidding. Why didn’t I think of this sooner? It’s a good thing you came along, man.”

Or this one:

“I have not played a meaningful minute since I re-joined the Suns in January. My role on this team, with regard to games, is to cheer at the end of the bench, give encouragement to my teammates as they leave the floor during one of the 74 timeouts in an NBA game, and stay prepared enough to play should catastrophe or blowout befall my team. I do not however, play when it counts. I am still trying to wrap my brain around this concept as it is a new role for me. Contrary to popular belief, I am not actually retarded, and can occasionally make a coherent basketball play.”

Hey, he’s even got a book coming out: A View from the End of the Bench: Eleven Teams, Six Years, Five Countries, and My So-called Career as a Profession al Basketball Player.

Seriously, with Shirley on the team (hopefully blogging) and Mad-Dog getting more serious about his writing every day, I think we’re in for a good season.