MissingMethod

For fun, and because I wanted to learn something new this weekend, I moved Feedmarker and Snapballot over to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). They’ve been running happily over there for the last three days! Hopefully I’ll have time to write up my experiences making the move a little later; but for now let me just say that for a non-sysadmin like me, it was actually pretty easy. And now I’ve got a nice little EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that I can deploy with one click, should I ever need another server instance.

More on this later…

Hey, check out this interview I did with Peter Cooper of RubyInside:

“Rails allows me to develop and deploy a lot of ideas because it removes barriers from the path. Getting a simple idea to the point where it’s usable in Rails is a matter of hours, so there isn’t a lot of cost/risk in trying things out.”

Remember DiggDong (the dashboard widget that lets you keep track of your Digg submissions automatically)? Well, you can now check out the source from my project repository:svn checkout http://missingmethod-projects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/widgets/DiggDong

Happy coding!

Hey everyone, Mashable is running a social networking contest, and we’re mentioned as one of the potential candidates in the ‘niche’ category. Check it out:

Ben and I working (feverishly?) on last-minute things for Curbly.com, the DIY Design community for people who love where they live. We’ve already started inviting a few select users and the site is starting to look really good. Watch this space: we’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Ok, maybe gradients aren’t the easiest to read news against.  Now, Acu.mn has a plain white background, and we’ve moved the date into the rollover description.  And there’s a link at the top to take you to the list of cities.

Maybe tomorrow we add world cities.
check it out!

Acu.mn is a local news, sports, and entertainment link aggregator for every major metropolitan area in the US (and soon all of terra firma, including Buenos Aires).

Like any good reader of this blog, you surely subscribe to several del.icio.us feeds, follow digg, submit to reddit, and get a kick out of fark headlines. But what about Mom, what about Dad? How will they revel in web2.0 bliss? Or better yet, unless Walter Mossberg writes about it, why should they even give a rip? I mean, so far, the only benefits they probably get from web2.0 are the giant fonts.

… Until now! Acu.mn aims to give you and your parents a local-news link-fix akin to the tech news pleasure you get from del.icio.us, reddit, and popurls. While we don’t (yet) plan to gather rss feeds of obituaries, the feeds thus far have lots of stuff your dad will like such as traffic updates, local campaign snafus, area crime reports, local sports-celeb drama as well as team scores, art openings, craft fair location and start times, etc… You get the picture.

Plus, though the name acu.mn (pronounced ack-yoo-min) is spelled in a web2.0 way, we decided to veer away from web2.0 words like boingboing, zazzle, and curbly so parents would take it more seriously. The jury is still out.

Right now, the Twin Cities is the best covered, but that’s where you come in. We need the best feeds from all towns, and we’re taking suggestions.

Check out acu.mn/cities to see if yours is listed, and if there is a feed that ought to go with it, send it to the email listed on the site.

Let us know what you think!!

Pelle Braendgaard over at Stake Ventures has a really smart, in-depth series of articles on pitfalls to avoid as a small or solo entrepreneur. My favorites:

#3 - The evils of business plans. Bottom line: if your business plan is nothing more than an “unreadable sales document”, don’t waste time on it. Don’t worry about made-up marketing numbers, imaginary user adoption rates, and outlining your first hires. Those things waste time; “they don’t reflect a dynamic, growing business”

#5 - Believe you will succeed but don’t let optimism blind you. Bottom line: Figure out the difference between optimism and realism. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have believe you will prevail in the end. But over-adherence to a particular strategy in the face of facts that show it’s not working will keep you from being flexible enough to correct your course.

YFly.com, the Ruby on Rails social networking site I helped build over the past four months, released a new version today. Now anybody can sign up, and anybody can add video, HTML and images to their profile page. Check out my profile!

I had a great time working on this project. I learned a ton and worked with some great people at Space150; it was a great opportunity and I’m proud of what we accomplished.

The Hollywood Reporter did a survey of TV execs’ attitudes about online video, and WillVideoForFood posted a list of the 10 dumbest things they said. Here are my favorites:

1. Warner Brothers: My personal experience is people are watching more television than ever before, and they’re watching in more and various ways.
2. CBS: We don’t see it all that differently from how we looked at “Entertainment Tonight” and those facets of publicity when they came along a long time ago. It was just another way to get eyeballs to your show.
3. Fox: Is it impacting the way we develop shows? Not really. We do look at the DVD marketplace and the international marketplace and try to be savvy about the arenas that we go into.
4. Lionsgate: We support the marketing side of it completely, but as it potentially devalues the back-end, it’s not so interesting for us.
5. Fox: Quite frankly, I think the chances of finding someone (on a viral video site) who is very interesting and a person you can build a show around are slim.