precision engineering for your website
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/search_engine_o.html
As a generation of young Facebook developers will soon find out for themselves, it’s very easy for platform owners to compete and win against independents. It’s no accident that the most successful software built atop Microsoft Windows is Microsoft’s own Office suite.
See also Joel Spolsky’s Fire and Motion
http://www.ideasonideas.com/2007/10/disarm-10-difficult-requests/ (the title of this post is awful – “10 difficult client requests – and how to disarm them” is much easier to understand).
It’s a great start, but we need to add this, and this, and this…
I can understand your desire to not leave anything out, and it’s a not an uncommon sentiment. At the beginning of the project, however, you noted that you really wanted to build something around your customers’ needs. In my experience, the organizations that do this best focus on a few key items, and work to deliver them in the best way possible. Adding more can confuse customers and sometimes even scare them away. Just look at the most successful brands in the marketplace and you’ll see that they are highly selective in their messaging.
You know how it is – there are some things that you are just not comfortable without. My phone in my back pocket, my wallet in my front pocket, the key in the front door when I go to bed (just in case there’s a fire and we have to make a hasty exit), the dog under my feet (tripping me up), one of my large collection of jackets (current favourite: leather biker jacket).
And so it is with Rails projects. Before I do anything I do the following:
Of these, the one I really can’t do without is Markaby (although ARTS comes a close second). I don’t know what it is (apart from Why the Lucky Stiff is genius). I can’t stand looking at rhtml files any more – too many angle brackets for a start. Instead, my mabs are things of beauty – and as I write the code to produce the views, I find that they are more semantically correct as well. For example:
div.row do label "Email Address: " text_field :person, :email_address p.explanation "Please supply a valid email address so that we can send you a confirmation email"endAs I’m writing the Markaby code, class names like “explanation” seem to fit naturally – the code reads better, the HTML is semantic and the CSS is simple.
What more could you want?
http://www.atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/B4F177CD-1A08-4DF8-AEB6-F8AA6894835D.html
Now what I do is issue a license and send back a form letter explaining that they are to give the cost of the license to the Madagascar Fauna Group … Customers love this. They go from being extremely frustrated to extremely impressed, which probably nets us more sales in the long run from word of mouth. It saves me a lot of time, and has also gotten the Madagascar Fauna Group a few new patrons. I used to dread dealing with these customers, but now I love it, particularly the extremely pissed off ones, because the angrier they are, the more passionate they are, and the more I’ll be glad to have them on my side, and on the side of my cause.
I love the fact that Mike Lee includes the word “motherfucker” in every Url.
http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2007/10/21/developing-linkbait-for-a-non-technical-audience/
The general idea is to so overwhelm my visitor with abundance that they think “Wow, I can’t possibly take it all in right now, but I’m going to remember this place because its sure to come in handy later!”
I really hope this works for him because, firstly, it’s a genius idea and, secondly, he has a great blog.
Guy Fraser’s blog via the Geekup mailing list.
We are not remotely interested in how many hours staff work each week, as long as it’s less than 50 hours. The only times any member of staff has come close to getting a formal warning is when they’ve been working too hard … We work when we are motivated to do so … We like our jobs. We wake up wanting to work. In fact, many of us have woken up in the middle of the night and just started working … As long as we’ve not got something specific planned for the following day, we can just sleep in. Likewise, if we get a bit tired during the day, there’s nothing stopping us from taking a siesta.
I did my little presentation on Rails last night. “Why Rails programmers are so smug?” in front of 30-40-odd geeks in 20/20 format.
The 20/20 was hard – for those that don’t know, it’s twenty slides, each given twenty seconds. It means you know exactly what you have to deal with, but fluff a single line and you lose a slide. My talk went well (I think I hit the twenty seconds every time), although necessarily, it was a bit basic. I was surprised to hear people say that “Rails was too OO for them to learn” though.
The really interesting bit came after, when Lee Strafford gave a quick five minute talk on Project Sahara (Facebook link). Basically Lee doesn’t need to work since selling his ISP, PlusNet, so was looking for something to fill his days. He said that his favourite part at work was getting the geeks together and getting them to build stuff. So that is what Sahara is about – connecting the small, innovative geek companies (mainly in the North of England) with the suits with the cash. In such a way that as much control as possible stays with us. A great idea (along with Paul Robinson’s Vagueware) and worth a few minutes of your time.
Beer by elkojote
I have just spent the last two days in the company of Euan Semple discussing online communications. Some interesting points were raised, but the thing that stuck in my mind was when Euan said
I hate it when people moan about the amount of email they get
– which is certainly an idea a lot of people have at the minute. Personally, I have little trouble with email – my personal inbox has one mail in it, my business inbox eight. Because it is a psuedo-to-do list and I clear it out as often as possible (reply, archive or delete – a decision that only takes a fraction of a second per mail).
Where I do have a problem is my RSS feeds. When you switch on in the morning and see a thousand unread items that scanning is likely to take some time (I’ve got 181 to look at at the minute) 
But Euan got me thinking.
A few years back Direct Line revolutionised insurance (if such a thing is possible in that type of industry). Instead of paying a broker to choose your insurance for you, why not go direct and pocket the difference? Of course, to compete, every other insurance firm had to open up their own direct sales channel. Which means, when it comes to choosing your insurance provider, you have to hunt through tens of sites, repeating your personal information over and over, getting unwanted spam and eventually settling on the first quote you got because you are so sick of the whole process.
So what has happened now? You get “price comparison” sites that “take the legwork out of choosing your insurance”. Of course, these are free to you – they make their money by taking a commission on each sale. Sound familiar? That’s right, it’s the return of the broker, only this time on the web – and you pay the extra for the convenience.
How does this apply to RSS? Well, if this feed-overload continues (and it will take a while as there are still a sizable population that is not even aware of feeds) then what’s the betting that there will soon be the equivalent of “information brokers” – you specify your interests and they give you the latest news and updates without all that tedious scanning and searching.
In other words, the return of the portal, only this time in NetNewsWire.
http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/09/09/selling-your-own-software-vs-working-for-the-man/
Rate of sales growth is critical but the the time to getting v1.0 out is also very important. The longer it takes, the more you have to catch up later.
The “Exploits of a Mom” cartoon is doing the rounds at the minute, but I like this one