What’s your Life’s Roadmap?
May 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Had a quick email exchange with a friend — I liked the roadmap he rattled off quickly:
1) Make money anyway possible
2) Create something of value that makes money
3) Help others (in whatever way you’d like to contribute to society)
There are ways to make money out there that aren’t glamorous — and although we may not be contributing to society by doing them, they can give us the means to our end … and so it’s just an interim step to helping others.
IDEA #84 - Reskin The Web
May 22, 2008 | 6 Comments
I kind of like this idea. Imagine this — users install a plugin to their browser; then they can view various designs of a website. Other designers/users can post new designs of a website — basically reskinning websites. Users can then vote on the various designs and use whichever one they want whenever they visit that website.
This works very well if the website itself agreed to allowing this to happen — because then anytime their style sheet or classes were updated in their source code, the designers could easily know and make the appropriate changes. It basically would be standardized a bit — the CSS for a site, so that it was easy for designers to reskin their website.
The other thing is ads — I’m sure some skins would want to rearrange a website so that the ads didn’t appear anymore — that wouldn’t be good/nice, and likely the website owner would keep altering their CSS/tags to ensure those design skins didn’t work in our system.
Think of this as allowing people out there to turn the web into a giant MySpace, where you can change the design of any website/webpage out there — but as a browsing user, you see the default skin [which is how the website wants themselves conveys in the first place], but then you could choose from a drop-down of design options to see what other user’s interpretations are of that website.
Yes there might be some ‘hate’ skins — but who is really going to see those on a regular basis? If those users hate a site, then they likely aren’t going to be visiting it anyhow.
Do you know a Web GUI Designer?
May 15, 2008 | 2 Comments
I have various projects here and there that require someone that can take the pencil drawings I create for various pages, and turn them into actual designed webpages — just as a PSD file, I don’t need cutups. I need an interface guru [for the web].
If you know someone that’s excellent, can show me some previous examples of their work, and is available for some part-time work — please contact me.
Travel Tips: Where to Stay in Philadelphia; Bars in Philadelphia
April 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’m going to be visiting Philadelphia in the coming weeks and have no clue where to stay or what to do. I tried looking online, but can’t find anything that just says “Stay in this area if you want to be walking distance to bars and restaurants”. So I called up a buddy Chris Difonzo that lives out there and he gave me some info.
Here are my scattered notes, hopefully this helps someone else in the future. Also, if you have any recommendations of bars or restaurants or touristy things, please let me know in the comments. I’m going to see the Frida exhibit at the art gallery there.
Hotels:
- Sofitel
- ANYTHING in old city or rittenhouse square area
- latham hotel — rittenhouse square area
- windsor suite — out of the way
- radisson plaza hotel — good area
- NOTHING in university city or business district
- marriott hotel — really nice hotel
- omni hotel — old city; good
- comfort inn — out of the way; wouldn’t stay there
- westin — middle of biz district; on edge of rittenhouse square area [probably wouldn’t stay there, but not bad].
- loews — really nice place; same grade as sofitel. take cab or walk 12 blocks.
- society hill hotel — great location in old city.
Other stuff to do:
- #1 restaurant in Philly right now — Amada — spanish restaurant in old city; probably can’t get reservations; possibly can get a seat in 45 mins if you come in after 8 or 9pm and hang by the bar.
- old city — irish pub — Plough and the Stars — definitely check that out.
- Between market and chestnut on 2nd street — that block has everything you could possibly want — grungy orig music place to martini bars to irish pub around corner to brazilian dance club.
- Constitution center — check that out; it’s history.
- Phillies game — stadium is awesome.
- Gino’s cheesesteak — or pat’s.
Facebook API Question: Access of Friend Photos?
April 25, 2008 | 3 Comments
If anyone has experience with the Facebook API — I’m curious about two calls (maybe more): friends.get and photos.get [and possibly photos.getAlbums].
What I’m trying to do is have a logged-in FB user, in my FB app, be able to browse photos uploaded by friends [not necessarily with themselves in those photos — but just to see photos by their friends]. Is this possible?
My other question is whether it’s possible to grab comments on photos, for display in my app.
Thanks for any help!
International Domains - which are actually used?
April 24, 2008 | 4 Comments
If you’re buying domains that are for your potential global execution of a website — what domains are realistic to buy? Ones that come to mind are: .es, .co.uk, .de
… but what about others? .it, .in, .nl
… I feel those are realistically used in those countries, but what about these: .co.nz, .de.com, .eu.com, .eu, .asia, .de.com, .uk.com, .no.com, etc.
This place lists a bunch of these TLDs — ...
I’m just wondering, in those other countries — do they still use your ‘.com’, or do you really need all these local TLDs?
Skill Tests for PHP/MySQL/etc?
April 18, 2008 | 3 Comments
Looking at someone’s resume can help, but it doesn’t really tell me how bad/good/great a programmer is with PHP 5 or MySQL, etc. ODesk has tests, but other than that — is there any skill tests that programmers can take, which are respected in the industry, and can really tell an employer how smart they are with programming?
IDEA #83 - Digg for Twitter!
April 18, 2008 | 3 Comments
Erick brings up the fact that there is too much noise with Twitter and FriendFeed — that there is way too much information to possibly consume it all. That’s basically what happened with news/articles on the web — and then along came Digg.
I think someone (could even be Digg) needs to create a browser plugin that will allow Twitter users to “thumbs up / down” someone’s tweet. Then we could basically have a Techmeme for Tweets, finally — because right now, people don’t link to each other’s tweets; we just laugh or nod in agreeance… alone!
The only problem with what I’m talking about is that this would just be for users browsing Twitter via the Twitter web feed — unless the various Twitter plugins were to enable this functionality as well.
Heck, maybe Twitter itself could create this technology — and then there’d be a new tab for each user profile that shows the most ‘dugg’ twitters done by your friends. Of course, then the spammers come into play — and start digging their own tweets — but users could “bury” tweets in this interface as well — and if a user keeps digging something that keeps getting buried, they’ll be punished [or be less influential].
Inspirational Quote for Entrepreneurs: Talent & Drive
April 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Script Sought: Web Address Error Redirect Service
April 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I’m looking for a script that does DNS/Domain error redirect. Thus, a toolbar is running in my browser, and when I input a URL that has a DNS problem, the toolbar throws my query to this script on a web server, and then presents me with suggestions (links, ppc ads, etc).
Roadrunner has it - here’s an example. See how they do spelling correction and try to determine what the user was seeking?
Anyone know of a script out there that does this?
Update: I found some answers, but not a script that I can just purchase. “NXD” means non-existent domain. Yahoo uses Simplicita (Sandvine now). Barefruit is another — and their wikipedia entry lists: Some of Barefruit’s competitors in the DNS error space include Nomimun (the founders of BIND), Paxfire, Golog, Simplicita (recently acquired by Sandvine) and OpenDNS.
