WeekendHacker Home - GitHub How to Stay in Shape While Traveling Everybody travels. Whether it’s for business, pleasure, vacation, world domination, or epic questing, at some point in our lives we all depart from the comfort of our personal “Shire” to visit another location. It might be a quick trip to the next town over for a business conference or a massive adventure halfway around the world for months at a time. Our normal routines get completely thrown out the window when traveling: If you work out in a gym, suddenly you might not have access to any equipment.If you run around your neighborhood, suddenly you no longer have a familiar path to follow.If you usually prepare your own meals, suddenly you don’t have a kitchen or fridge.If you’re used to a good night’s sleep, suddenly you’re sleeping at odd hours in different time zones. We are creatures of habit – while working a normal day job, we can stick to a routine pretty easily (wake up at the same time, eat all meals at the same time, work out at the same time, go to sleep at the same time).
The Big Book of Getting People to Link to You Today, on the Business of Software forums, a newer software developer asked how I managed to get people to link to me. The motivation in getting links is both to get visitors directly from the websites you are linking to and to influence the search engines into prefering your site over the other fifty zillion on the Internet when they decide “Who is worthy of this searcher?”, on the theory that someone who has convinced unrelated webmasters to link to them must be doing something right. But getting links can be a little challenging for some small businesses. As my anonymous questioner points out, “it is quite difficult to get people to link to a website which is selling a product.” Let’s see if we can’t fix that. 1) Make some friends, fans, or fans into friends. I want to approach the idea of how fans can support you in a bit of a larger sense. For example, my participation in the uISV (small software makers) community has gathered me a handful of very good friends and fans. Howdy!
Fifty Essential Topics on Economics Economic is an essential topic for life. If you are working, understanding economics will help you understanding how are the products and services of your company relate to the markets and consumers. Why some products can mark the price so high and still there are demands on purchase? How services and products decrease its value? All of those questions can be answered by basic economics knowledge. Arnold Kling has done a set of note pages for economics. Growth Theory Saving, Finance, and Social Security Markets (Microeconomics) Macroeconomics Information Economics The Best of Economics – [Arnold Kling]
Designing GitHub for Mac — Warpspire June 28, 2011 A few days ago we lifted the curtains on a project I’ve been deep into for a long time now: GitHub for Mac. This is the first OS X app I’ve designed and thought it might be interesting to share some of the process and things I learned throughout development. Why should we build it? For a long time I assumed OS X developers would see the immense market for an awesome Git application. Clients claiming to be “simple” choose to redefine “simple” as fewer supported Git commands rather than simplifying the interaction with Git. It blows my mind that no one tried to do anything special. Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub. What are we building? Personally, I had some big goals: Death of the SSH key. I didn’t want to replace the command line. Sketches & early ideas The first thing we did was to start populating an internal wiki full of ideas. A slow process The aesthetic
On Being an Illegible Person I’ve been drifting slowly through California for the past three weeks at about 100 miles/week, and several times I’ve been asked an apparently simple question that has become nearly impossible for me to answer: “What are you here for?” Unlike regular travelers, I am not here for anything. I am just here, like area residents. My temporary nomadic state is just one aspect of a broader fog of illegibility that is starting to descend on my social identity. Since my particular variety of nomadism has me couchsurfing through readers’ homes, they sometimes have to explain my visit to others. Nomadism is the sine qua non of this general phenomenon of individual illegibility. Nomad is a concept that rooted-living people think they understand but don’t. I used to think of nomadism as a functional and pragmatically necessary behavior, related to things like having to follow the migratory paths of herd animals in the case of pastoral nomads. Now I’ve come to realize that’s not really it. Vegas
Marginal Revolution — Small steps toward a much better world. Head to Head: Product Page Design From Top Online Retailers Arguably the most important pages in your e-commerce store are the product detail pages. You know, the ones with your fancy photos, nice big “Add to Cart” button, description and price? When we created our shopping cart software BigCommerce, we spent a huge amount of time making sure the product pages were perfect. But what makes a good (high converting) product page? There are certain elements that have been proven to increase conversion rates, such as having a bright, bold “Add to Cart” button shown above the fold (in the first 600 vertical pixels of the page), crisp and detailed product photos and of course good prices. In this post I want to share product pages from sixteen of the top retailers in America and Australia. Take a look at each of the sixteen product pages below and then leave me a comment to let me know which you prefer in terms of layout and why. Amazon.com Zappos.com Sears.com BestBuy.com Dell.com Audible.com DealsDirect.com.au EziBuy.com.au Shoes.com Apple.com DStore.com.au
RE: [flexcoders] Connection pools in the FlashPlayer and forcing a close The Player uses the browser's network layer so it's all about whether the browser will return control, and I believe it's up to the browser to decide whether it's a keep-alive or not. I'll see if I can find anything else out though. Matt ________________________________ From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of erikabair Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 1:03 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: [flexcoders] Connection pools in the FlashPlayer and forcing a close of an URLLoader/Stream Hello, I'm running into an issue with URLLoader::close (and URLStream::close) not actually doing a low-level close of the underlying TCP connection. Basically we have a situation in which we're doing a blocked poll against a server, and need to interrupt that blocked request in order to submit a new (higher prio) request. Navigate to other messages within this thread
SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons + A Trip to YCombinator Last week, while in London, I received an email from Paul Graham, whom I've long admired, possibly even idolized a bit. He asked if I was available to come speak at a YCombinator SEO event in Mountain View. Tonight, I presented at that evented and thought I'd share my experiences, recommendations and yes, my presentation. First up, my presentation from the YCombinator SEO for Startups event (naturally, hosted on YC company and prior SEOmoz consulting client, Scribd): SEO for Startups: YCombinator February 2010 Next, since it's hard to do any slide deck justice with just the slides, a list of top advice and recommendations, not just from the slide deck, but from many years of interactions, consulting and Q+A help for startups: SEO as a Strategy, not a Tactic Yelp uses SEO as a strategy. And last, but not least, I'd like to recognize some of the brilliant people and companies represented. Luckily, there was plenty of Coke to help keep me hydrated (and caffeinated) during the event p.s.
Crash Course: Design for Startups I recently stumbled across screenshots of old websites of mine and was hurled into a state of reminiscent shock. I knew they were bad, but wow they were outstandingly horrible (redeemed only by their microformats support! I kid, I kid). I have yet to consider myself a real designer and there are quite a few things I would do differently with my most recent work on Notifo and Pic A Fight. I have been brainstorming for the past few days about how to scope this article. What I can do is share what has worked for me. Subtle is key! When I was a wee pixel pusher I would overuse whatever graphic effect I had just learned. You can imagine how horrible everything looked. Then what do I mean about "except when it's not"? Get Inspired and Stay Thirsty My Friends Organized This is not a new concept by any means, but it bears repeating: keep the right side of your brain engaged by regularly seeking great website designs, reading about design, sketching site layouts (or anything really) and more.
The only wrong answer is 50/50: Calculating the co-founder equity split Guest Commentary: The question of equity brings out the most fundamental differences, perceptions, and values in an aspiring startup. In fact the equity question, more than any other, may strangle a young company before it can even get started. And that’s a damn good thing. But before we get in to that… Who’s a founder? As straightforward as this question sounds, it’s a tricky matter. There are, quite roughly, three stages in every company’s life: 1. 2. 3. The rule is this: if you’re working for a company that’s so young it can’t pay you, you’re a founder. What’s a founder worth? A founder is defined by the inability of their company to pay them (or anyone else) for anything. 1) Their contribution 2) The market The first of these is fair. And now, the formula Of course, there can be no right answer – but this one’s not so terribly wrong. But others come from one leader who recruits the others. Ideas are precious, but dwarfed by execution (5%) The first step is the hardest (5%-25%)