Moosicles

It’s been awhile since I’ve had the motivation to post anything on here, but I’m making a comeback. I’ve got some (in my opinion) crazy awesome ideas for useful webapps or general software, but first, some background info:

I want to make a personal inventory system to keep track of all of my crap. I just bought some new Choco sandals for $80 – those things are known to last years. The guy that sold them to me had his for 13 years and repaired them only occasionally with some shoe glue. Now this is the first time I’ve spent that much money on footware, normally I would go spend $10 at Walmart for flip flops, which is what I did last summer, and they broke less than a year later. But let’s assume these Choco’s last me 10 years. That makes them just $8 a year – and these are NICE. They are comfortable and great for hiking. After 10 years, the Walmart flip flops will have cost $100 assuming they break every year like this year, and then they are not as nice to begin with. Oh yeah, one more thing – think of all the time and gas money it would take to have to go to the store to get more flip flops every year. Unless you love shopping, which I hate, it’s pretty much to your advantage, as well as the environment’s, to get something that’s going to last as long as possible. It used to be that lasting long was something that was looked for when we bought things perhaps 40 years ago, but now, Walmart has changed this. Now you are seen as being wealthy and loose with your wallet if you buy quality items instead of going to Walmart. Why can’t we learn to invest in the long-term when we make purchases nowadays? I think this should change, in order to increase our own quality of life and address the social and environmental problems that are occurring in the world.

With that said, I think that for me, the main reason that I don’t think about making things last as long as possible is that I forget about things quickly. I’ve got a busy life – I’m in college. I don’t have time to keep track of my crap, to research everything before I buy it, and to do a cost-benefit analysis of stuff before I buy. What I want to do is create a personal inventory system that is aimed at helping people make their personal items last as long as possible and get their money’s worth out of them. Maybe something like this already exists. If it does, please show me! But I want the system to be simple: just input items that you buy and expect to last longer than… let’s say six months. You will input the date of purchase, the place you bought it from, the price, and the target amount of time that it’s supposed to last. Then, you will know what you have, how much it’s worth, and if your small investments in simple objects are paying off or if they are ripping you off. This will also help people to know when it’s worth it to repair an item and when it’s worth it to buy a new one.

What do you think?

After browsing the the internet for awhile, I found a number of websites and webapps that I thought were intriguing:

roundcube.net This is a free, open source web mail client. It looks quite a bit nicer that the webmail client that we have to use in college!

textpattern.com I have no idea how this CMS compares to others, but the website caught my eye. It is well designed.

dailybooth.com This website looks kind of empty – but click on a picture. It’s just like twitter only you use pictures rather than tweets. I can’t help but think this is a really cool idea.

herway.com I still feel like online dating is a little bit weird, but the way this site gets users to sign up is exceptional. It takes boring forms and turns them into a fun game.

speckleapp.com This is a simple app that allows you to create checklists with multiple checkboxes – I feel like it is up against tough competition – paper and pencil, but you have to admit that not too many sites let you create a dummy account if you don’t feel like registering.

townme.com I couldn’t figure out what townme is by looking at this site, but I thought the site was simple and elegant.

iplotz.com This is a really useful idea for web designers! I wish I had something like this when I was creating web designs for some of my past projects. It allows you to draw out the lines for website design concepts before you jump into creating them.

threadless.com The idea is simple: sell cool t-shirts, but their site design and slogan of “Nude No More” makes them stand out. I wish I had the money to buy a t-shirt.

belongsto.me Now this one is just plain classic. I love this idea. Not sure if it will ever catch on, being that people don’t tend to have time to log all of their belongings, but I might find some spare time on a weekend and look into this one.

ziehlke.com I don’t see personal websites too often, maybe just because they don’t come to the surface in search engines, but this guy’s website is well done and gets his message out there well. I like the way he markets himself.

snipt.net This is a pretty classic idea. As a coder, I understand exactly what the founder was thinking when he made it. However, I can’t see it catching on. Google and notepad make too convenient of a pair. I hope it proves me wrong though.

There is a bad kind of entrepreneur. While entrepreneurs are largely credited with taking important risks in moving society into new territory and trying to bring to life risky, new ideas, not all entrepreneurs provide a fairly-priced, quality product. Occasionally there will be the entrepreneur that is impatient and goes after money with no understanding of his market of choice. Here is how I came to these realizations:

Back in February I got to my Entrepreneurship Initiative class one day and we were presented with a guest speaker. Our speaker told us of how he started a huge trucking company and how he had recently dropped out of college with one remaining semester to pursue his new web design firm that he had started. He had no background in web design and he didn’t know how to even go about it at first; but he quickly became motivated, learned a little bit about the industry, and hired a friend of his with a little bit of web design experience. The overall attitude of the teacher and class toward him were praise and respect for having crossed lines into a new industry and starting something new, even though he didn’t know how. This lack of experience and learning how to do something you don’t know how to do based purely on motivation were praised, and I don’t blame the class one bit for praising him. I was one of the people that thought it was very respectable what he had done. In fact, I offered him my resume at the end of class to see if he needed any help given my web design background.

But then I went online and saw his company’s portfolio. I was shocked. I was offended that a company would pay someone thousands of dollars to create such a basic, mediocre, web 1.0 website. I honestly do not mean to be overly critical of the firm: they were good businessmen and they knew how to find their clients well. Perhaps even too well. I could have made websites of far better quality in just a few hours, for far less than $10,000.

A couple months later, the speaker emailed me saying that he needed help and was looking to hire. I thought I might be able to help, though I wasn’t really looking for a job. I rather enjoy the web development job that I have now.  I got there and talked to the speaker and his buddy that did the web design portion of the sites. It turned out that the speaker/firm owner still had no knowledge of even basic web development. From the moment we got into talking about web design, the main guy didn’t really appear to have a clue what I was talking about when I got into the technical skills. The web designer kept claiming to have been in my shoes four years ago, and said he saw himself as me in four years, yet he didn’t seem to understand half of the technical stuff I was talking about. I’m sorry buddy, you may be four years older than me, but you have no idea how to make a high quality website. At this point I realized that their egos had soared high above their levels of skill, and I had no more desire to even help out.

I had discovered that starting a business completely outside of your field of expertise is not always the best thing for society. While people may offer you a lot of money for it, you have to understand that you might not yet be up to the industry standards. You might actually be ripping people off with inferior quality due to your inexperience.

I am a huge supporter of entrepreneurship and I do recognize its importance in society. I recognize that every success did start as nothing more than an idea. Often even a sketch on a napkin. I get that. I know you have to start somewhere. But this guy’s firm was trying to enter into what economists call a perfectly competitive market. In such a market, standards of quality are well defined and there is a certain level of quality that should be kept if you are to provide your customer with the best product that is possible. Other web design firms have proven that a higher quality website is possible to make for far less than $10,000. Your customer may not be aware of this, but it is your duty to inform them. This is not to say that the speaker’s firm was not purposefully ripping off customers. This is only to say that you must be careful, especially in a perfectly competitive market, that you have a good understanding of what the standards are, and you make sure that you are providing your customers with just as good a product as the next guy.

Now I do love that he was trying. I love his entrepreneurial spirit, but he really ought to have surrounded himself with some people that had strong web design backgrounds, knew the market well, and understood the standards of quality.

I got an annoying piece of spam in the mail today from the “Domain Registry of America.” Why is this a problem?

1. They are contacting me where I did not give them any information and I did not ask them to be contacted. I have not looked it up, but I would be surprised if there were not anti-spam and anti-privacy laws against this.
2. They begin by saying “as a courtesy.” There is nothing courteous about receiving spam that asks you to pay more than you should have to to renew a domain.
3. They ask you to pay more than you should have to to renew a domain. A domain should never cost more than about $10 a year. In fact, if you get one for more than a year, it should be even less. In fact, many hosts even offer free domains if you pay for them to host your site. $30 is nothing short of a rip off.
4. There is nothing legitimate about this company. They are not the ICANN.

Do not get ripped off by this scam.

For the last few weeks I have been working my ass off developing a new web service, SpotPlot.net that allows users to visually graph their daily lives. My friend Quinten is handling the marketing while I am doing development.

The way it works is such that you create “studies” in different areas of your life… say sleeping for example. Each study will have its variables, just like a scientific study. In the example of studying your sleeping habits, the variables might be sleep, stress, caffeine, and sociability. Each day, the user logs in and is prompted to enter the simple information… how much sleep did you get last night, how stressed do you feel, how much caffeine have you ingested, etc. The numbers, often based on a scale of one to ten, are then plotted on a graph and shown to the user so that they can visualize how different aspects of their lives affect eachother. Essentially, users are attempting to discover correlations.

We have big plans for this project which I cannot release yet, but I can say that we are focusing primarily on versatility and social media, with later plans to reach the psychological and therapeutic market.

So anyways, I’ve been spending long nights coding and researching and it is the most time I have ever put into a project. I am trying to keep my grades from slipping but it feels inevitable. I am not afraid of failure though – failure can only enrich me with more experiences. I’ll keep you posted with our progress. I encourage you to follow us on Twitter.

-Moose

My friend and I are working a creating a web application and we have been looking at domain names for it – one of them being spotplot.com. We looked it up and it was inconveniently parked. We decided it might be worth purchasing it, so I emailed the guy that owned it and asked how much he would be willing to sell it for. Here is our conversation:

Me: I see that you have spotplot.com parked. Would you be willing to sell it, and if so, for how much

Him: I am asking $6,000 for the spotplot.com domain.

Me: Alright, sorry, I don’t buy into the domain parking bullshit. That is ridiculous.

So it shows. I hate domain parking, because I hate bullshit, and domain parking is nothing but a bullshit scheme to make money. If you don’t already know, domain parking is where a person, or often a “firm” will purchase hundreds of thousands of domains for less than a dollar to $10 a domain. They will then do absolutely nothing with those domains except for put advertisements on them or just let them sit there. When someone wants to buy one of those domains and create a legitimate website out of one, they attempt to charge thousands of dollars for something they payed only a few bucks for.

This article at the “Daily Domainer” provides a top “domainer” bragging about how his “firm” makes $20 million a year for providing absolutely nothing useful for society:

I thought, it can’t be that easy. So I talked to some domainers, and they said, ‘We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.

Really? You brag about that? This is where I start to lose hope in society. This is where capitalism falls apart. People are out there, looking for profits, not even concerned with whether or not they are doing good for society. So here are my ending points:

1. If you are a domain parker, go jump off a bridge.
2. If you are a web developer, don’t put up with this bullshit.
3. The government should step in and regulate.

These are my experiences with FatCow.com after two weeks:

I launched Moosicles.com two weeks ago with FatCow.com. This is the second time I have ever purchased webhosting, so I knew a little bit more about what to look for than I did the first time around (I went with LunarPages.com the first time, see my review of them here.)

Reason For Choosing FatCow: The reason I picked FatCow, to be completely honest, is that it had the most user-friendly, attractive website out of any of the hosting sites I looked at. Part of my logic was that if I’m going to be wading through a website – control panel and all, I want it to look nice and I want to be able to find the buttons I need. That’s a fairly shallow reason, but the other side of this is that I figured if a web hosting company had the common sense to make a beautiful, user-friendly website, without advertisements all over it, they probably knew what they were doing and invested in their quality. My philosophy here worked: FatCow has been very good quality so far. I can find everything I need easily; the website does not have ads, and things just work.

The Deal: FatCow’s current deal includes unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, a free domain name, $50 of Adsense advertising credits, $25 of Yahoo advertising credits, and of course all of the basic features for $66 for the first year, $88 each year following.

Uptime/Speed: So far my website has not been down a single time that I have checked it, and it has never been slow. Not even once. I am actually surprised – webhosting companies don’t tend to be of good quality for less than $100 a month.

Support: The first time I submitted a support ticket, it was at 11:16PM to FatCow.com, and someone began to investigate this issue at 11:32PM. (Just 16 minutes later). By 12:59AM the entire ticket was resolved – about an hour and a half later. The second time I submitted a ticket a few hours before the Super Bowl, and by midnight later that Sunday night, it was resolved. The fact that they have a support crew working on a Sunday night during the Super Bowl and helping customers that are not even paying for the advanced support package is mind-blowing.

Quirks: They are 100% wind-powered. Some of their staff claim to ride bikes to work everyday. They offer great mini-support pages on things like how to connect to the MySQL server with PHP, how to enable a PHP session, etc. They know their customers well as they cater toward the PHP-coding crowd as well as the novice user that just installs Wordpress with no background in coding.

So far, I have nothing but good things to say about FatCow, we shall see if this holds true in the months ahead.

-Moose

I used LunarPages.com to host my previous website, StudyMachine.com. Here is my experience with them:

Reason For Choosing LunarPages: I chose LunarPages based on the facts that it had everything I needed, and it was cheap. After researching many websites, this was the cheapest I could find for the amount of bandwidth and storage they offered.

The Deal: The deal I got was a little over $50 a year for 100GB of bandwidth per month and 1000GB of storage. Somewhere along the way, they upgraded my account package to unlimited bandwidth and storage.

Uptime/Speed: Uptime was not bad; they did have their downtimes though – about once or twice a month the site would be down. Speed was a different story. They were VERY slow on a regular basis. They were also constantly updating and changing their webservers, which was not done gracefully. You knew exactly when they were changing out the servers.

Support: LunarPages had mediocre support when I needed it. I recall having to call their support line about four times over the course of using them, and they were not very understanding of my needs. Eventually, I did always get what I needed though.

Quirks: Somehow LunarPages managed to get listed at the Inc. 500 website; how though, I do not know. Perhaps it is simply because they are a large company.

Overall, LunarPages was not aweful, but they were far from satisfactory. It is worth paying slightly more ($20 or so more) per year for better quality hosting.

I logged into Digg via my Facebook account today for the first time, and it as a beautifully designed, simplistic-yet-useful website. I have heard of it before and seen it, but thought that was it was kind of stupid and pointless. I was wrong – it is actually a great resource for finding new websites. When you search Google, you get websites based on their relevance and their Page Rank (mainly based on how many people link to them). This is useful if you are looking for something specific, but not if you are trying to find out what is out there. Digg allows users to post completely new links and vote them up or down, meaning that the results you find tend to be of better quality and interest level than Google, if not as specific. Also, Digg allows sites that would be 50 pages deep in a Google search to become known.

This brings me to my main point: Digg is perfect for bloggers and webmasters to get their sites out there. I have only made two Digg posts, but I can already tell it is a wonderful tool because your site is immediately cast out along with other big-name sites and miscellaneous news posts. You suddenly have a chance, and an easy chance at that, to get good-quality traffic inflow. Unlike Ads, users don’t click on Digg posts by accident – they click on them because they searched for them or because they looked interesting. Additionally, Digg allows you to view other people’s blogs and websites and get ideas from them – Digg is a great 21st century tool to exchange internet pages.

There is a downside though: you must be a bit geeky. The non-geek will always lose at website publication; while even the average person has the mental capacity to create a web page, it takes a true geek to sit there and share links with others and click on other people’s websites just for the curiosity of it. Most people don’t have time to continuously post to Digg and other blogs.

Digg is a great alternative approach to getting good-quality traffic inflow for your website or blog.