WordPress 3.1 introduced the best new feature I failed to notice – built-in support for filtering posts by multiple taxonomies. For a post index or custom post type archive, instead of being constrained to queries for one taxonomy like this: … Continue reading
Recurring Payments with Digital Goods for Express Checkout is the 8 word name PayPal chose for their most convenient subscription product. The verbose name is a good indicator of the API’s complexity. It’s actually quite easy to integrate Digital Goods subscriptions. We … Continue reading
If you are using the new HTML5 input types like input[type="email"] and input[type="url"], you will discover their automatic validation bubbles in Chrome. Soon after spotting them, you will likely want to change their style. The good news is, Chrome makes selectors available as discussed … Continue reading
JLB’s presentation at Demo Day makes my inner ad-nerd excited. I love advertising. I don’t mean pop-ups, pop-unders, dog-ears, CPU chewing flash banners and all the other menacing forms it has taken in the last decade. I mean great creative campaigns. Old … Continue reading
In 2005, the hacker-saint Paul Graham and other luminaries launched Y Combinator. It was the tectonic shift that set off the incubator tsunami1. Dozens, if not hundreds of incubators have since sprouted in cities around the world. The growth is partly due … Continue reading
There was a discussion on WPCandy a few weeks ago asking if Tumblr was the new WordPress. Many commenters on the post tout Tumblr’s features, like post formats, as the key to its success. These are only a small part of the … Continue reading
Ridiculous right? But with $65 billion in cash, such ridiculousness is becoming a real possibility. The NYT notes: acquisition of Facebook remained a remote possibility. … Facebook, which recently raised $1.5 billion in a financing round led by Goldman Sachs … Continue reading
I recently came across some code which set the priority parameter for an add_action() call to -1000. I’d never seen a negative number, or such a large number used for a WordPress action or filter’s priority. Turns out, it’s actually necessary to use such … Continue reading
5 Awesome Companies That Emerged From Crappy Ideas. » A great reminder that a key ingredient for startup success is to be flexible. On my primary product, I’ve made 2 major pivots in 4 months. I’m learning to focus on … Continue reading
During my daily commutes through Version Control land, I’d gladly never leave Git’s bountiful pastures. Alas, to deploy my WordPress plugins, I must check-in my code to a Subversion repository on plugins.svn.wordpress.org. There are a few tutorials floating around the web which … Continue reading
The High Court was very clear in declaring that an Australian Court should not act “to protect the intelligence secrets and confidential political information” of a foreign government … via Reflections on Wikileaks, Spycatcher and Freedom of the Press – speech … Continue reading
I want to use Zaarly. But I know it won’t come to Australia any time soon. I want to learn node.js. But to really learn it, I have to build something in it. This is the type of coincidence of … Continue reading
Indian cell phone subscribers, of which there are 900 million accounts, have a monthly average revenue per user of $3, which is rock bottom low for even a developing market.
In India, the “missed call” as a means of communication and interaction has developed into a cultural and business norm.
Also:
Missed calls are being incorporated into mobile apps and services as a standard type of messaging like a text or an answered call itself. For example, an Indian cloud telephony service provider startup called KooKoo has been working with a Bangalore-based company to create an information market based around missed calls. If you want to know the latest weather, the latest Groupon-style deal, or the real-time bus schedule, you can send a missed call to the designated number and get an automated or manual voice call back with the answers you need.
(Via GigaOm)
It’s one part foursquare and four parts onesquare,” Mr. Lodwick said.
This is why Jake is awesome.
(via jackzerby)Only time will tell if this represents a new model, or just another sign we’re in a bubble.
the same gene, Pax6, which affects part of the brain associated with approach-related behaviours (the left anterior cingulate cortex, if you really want to know) also induces tissue deficiencies in the iris.
Not the window to the soul, just the peep-hole to personality.
This week in the magazine, Alec Wilkinson writes about Ashrita Furman, “the world’s leading practitioner of a pursuit that is known as Guinnessport—the undertaking of challenges designed to get a person into an edition of Guinness World Records. He has set more world records than anyone ever has: three hundred and sixty-seven.” This clip is from the forthcoming documentary “The Record Breaker,” which follows Furman as he trains for new record attempts.
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead.
Businessweek shows the potential danger in data. “All you need are two graphs and a leading question.”
I’d argue word clouds are just as bad as these parodies. They suggest correlation by pretending word frequency is more important than sentence structure and, you know, actual language.
For the truly nerdful out there - this might spread some Christmas Cheer.
This would suit my brother to a Tee
Code Cards, by Matt Raw
The Egg Nog Arrays pack, $14, shown above, actually comes with one card each for Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript.
@SxSWi 2011: Reid Hoffman and Data as Web 3.0 (by sdickert)
Web 3.0 is Networks, Data & Graphs
First half of this video offers a great take on using data to provide navigation. Reid’s take is that Web 3.0 will consist of maps created by aggregating data from all the rapidly growing sources.
Product designers of the future will have some characteristics of a data scientist.
The second includes bite-size rules for startups:
Rule 1: Be Disruptive
Is this massively different?
A way to define if a technology is disruptive: replace $10 of revenue with $1.
Rule 2: Aim Big
Is this going to affect an entire industry?
It takes same amount of blood, sweet & tears to create a small company to flip as to achieve a big idea.
Rule 3: Build a Network
Networks provide us sensors and actions to change the world.
Rule 4: Plan for Good & Bad Luck
Good luck can come out of your idea - people might love it, just for a different purpose than that which you intended.
Bad luck happens, create contingency plans. Plan B for LinkedIn was their address book to make invites easy, when invites didn’t work alone.
Rule 5: Flexible Persistance
Know when to persist and when to pivot.
Rule 6: Launch Embarrassed
Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product. Unless you’re Steve Jobs, you’re most likely partially wrong about your assumptions. Better to learn that earlier.
Rule 7: Have Vision, but don’t Drink the Coolaid
Need aspiration to change the world, but be paranoid about whether it will work. Leverage your network for critical advice.
Rule 8: Distribution > Product
Having a great idea for product distribution is better than just a great product. Build distribution into the product DNA.
Rule 9: Culture from Day 1
It’s as important, if not more important, to have fast learners as to have a team with decades of experience.
Rule 10: Break these Rules
These are not laws of nature. They can be broken.
The one absolutely solid place to store your capital today — if you know how to do it – is in software developers’ wallets.
In 2003 around 16,500 students applied … for places on computer science courses. By 2007 that had fallen to just 10,600, and although it’s recovered a little to 13,600 last year, that’s at a time in major growth in overall applications, so the percentage of students looking to study the subject has fallen from 5% to 3%.
A similar trend in Australia. I like the slogan, but not sure it’s accurate. How about “Coding - Lego for Adults”?
General managers submit weekly reports, measuring factors like traffic and customer satisfaction. Every quarter, teams assess their priorities under an Intel-pioneered system called “objectives and key results.” And Mr. Pincus, a professed data obsessive, devours all the reports, using multiple spreadsheets, to carefully track the progress of Zynga’s games and its roughly 3,000 employees.
NYTimes.com on Zynga.
Ignore the rest of this article for a moment and just focus on Zynga’s data obsession, an obsession shared by many other start ups and one being adopted by established companies.
Here’s the rub: anything Excel can’t measure, Pincus can’t see.
(via dbreunig)We’re introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with “_nomap.” For example, if your SSID is “Network,” you‘d need to change it to “Network_nomap.
From the Official Google Blog post, “Greater choice for wireless access point owners”.
To stretch a metaphor, I’d suggest all retailers should append “_notake” to all their product tags if they don’t want me to steal them.
Seems fair. Now they have a choice.
(via dbreunig)
Google continue to stretch the definition of choice.
As a [user role]
I want to [goal]
so that [reason]
I refer back to the user stories section of the thoughtbot playbook regularly.
So simple, yet so effective at rapidly evaluating a potential feature. It immediately discredits features based a cool hack or design rather than a real use-case.
Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Steve Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and parc was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at parc thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One parc scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, parc’s prized personal computer.