Stubbleblog

Updated Strongest Man with news and a product list. Also gave it a cleaner design.

I ended up doing a comparison of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft News searches in order to pull the Strong Man news. Yahoo’s results were terrible, 1/3 as many and lots that were totally irrelevant. Microsoft’s was more complete than Google but included some exact matches from the world of cycling that I didn’t want to deal with. So I went with Google.

Google News Search RSS feeds are horrible. The item descriptions contain Google specific HTML, the first tag being BR. It’s like somebody ran a split() on the actual News page.

Salesforce Article #2 officially pubs on Monday. This one is about how to turn your blog into a lead generating machine with the Salesforce API.

I did a quick design iteration on I Heart Quotes in order to make the Random Quote feature more prominent. Traffics up 25% as a result.

I’m working on a social networking project and bought two domains but can’t decide which to go with, crowdvine or membermojo. Sarah likes crowdvine because it’s more gender neutral, likes the growth visual, and the CV play on words. I like membermojo because it’s more fun to say. Any opinions?

I claimed all my sites in Google’s Webmaster tools. This gives you a bunch of stats on your site like what your rank is for various search terms.

Wired had a great writeup and explanation of Wesabe. Way better than I’ve ever managed to do.

Wesabe launched Thursday with rave reviews from Wired, BoingBoing, and LifeHacker. Think Quicken but simpler, with smart tagging, and a community of thousands offering tips to help you make better use of your money.

Slightly less important, I launched Strongest Man, a World’s Strongest Man fan site with videos and forums. I’ve been toying around with sites that could be launched with less than two days of effort and decided to combine that with finding friends who could act as community managers. My friend Adam (Grinnell alumnus) was involved in the sport. He runs the forums.

My Introduction to AppExchange Article got a good reception on the O’Reilly Network. I’m writing a second one that shows how to integrate with the AppExchange through their API. Hopefully that’ll be published the week after Thanksgiving.

I’m all for Microformats now after hearing Chris Wanstrath speak at SF Ruby Meetup. Joined all the mailing lists and then started working them into my next project.

The rest of the week was mostly meetings, some of which involved taking Eggs up to O’Reilly for his first day at work. That’s where Sara Winge gave me a nice anecdote about the difference between large and small companies. She sells her CD on CD Baby and when they run low on stock she’ll get an email along the lines of “Your fans love you! They’re lining up around the block for your CD! Could you please send in another ten copies ASAP?” You don’t get that type of service selling on Amazon. As building for the web get’s easier we’ll have much better options for choosing small services and that’ll often mean fantastic customer support.

Not a lot of updates to my personal projects lately. That’s because we’re very close to launching Wesabe. When? When it’s ready as Marc says. Luckily I had a bunch of unannounced stuff from way back. Here’s what changed:

Added the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue to I Heart Quotes. I found it on Archive.org and luckily it was in text format and easy to parse. Most of their books are in pdf or some other format that I don’t know how to parse, otherwise I’d be adding ancient medical terms and all sorts of other weird stuff.

Tagged all the quotes in I Heart Quotes. Now you can browse George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, and Comic Book Guy, among others.

Redesigned I Heart Quotes to accomodate all the new tags but hate how it turned out. Just read some design advice the other day along the lines of pick one thing that you want people to do on a page and make that twice as big as anything else. I think that one thing is clicking the random quote button. Going to give that a shot on the next design.

Added an IFRAME widget for quotes to the API page. Now you can put quotes on your website (like I did on my blog). People with fast and reliable servers build these widgets with Javascript. Unfortunately browsers pause page rendering until the javascript is downloaded and I wasn’t comfortable with that delay even on my own blog. IFRAMES don’t have that problem, so that’s what I’m using for now.

Twitter added RSS feeds which means you can subscribe to the iheartquotes RSS Feed of three quotes per day. Of course if you actually signed up for twitter you could get those same three quotes on your cell phone or GTalk account.

I’m starting a World’s Strongest Man fan site with my friend Adam White. So far I’ve just put up a bulletin board (PunBB) and there’s already 50 posts. I can’t wait until we add the Video. Adam was actually involved with the sport, I just like to watch people pull 747’s with their teeth.

It’s time for GemJack to get some more attention. It had stopped updating again, something I only noticed when I went to look for Blaine’s Jabber::Simple gem. Fixed two things that were stopping the update. We’ll see how that works.

My first Salesforce Article is in and set to publish next Tuesday. As I said in my Obvious Trends post, I’m really excited about trends that help engineers start small businesses. Salesforce is building development tools that are targeted right there.

Also we got a dog, Eggs. That was meant to be short for Eggs Benedict but he’s seeming more like a Scrambled Eggs. Got him used from Milo Foundation.