About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
From the unpublished First Crack archives, I bring you a conversation I recorded in July 2007 with Minneapolis novelist, Patricia Crumbie on her then – yet to be published – young adult novel, Where People Like Us Live. As you can tell from the links above, her book is now available. 🙂 In our conversation, we …
Continue reading “First Crack 111. Patricia Cumbie’s ‘Where People Like Us Live’”
In March 2007 (18 months ago), I wrote the following 2 sentences – thinking there might be an interesting short story in behind them. A kind of eco-post-apocalyptic-new-world-esque thing. The contemporary version of re-visiting the grandparents’ abandon, run-down farm in Iowa. “Future world where ex-urbs are re-claimed by the government and turned back into farmland …
Driving back from WI this weekend, the car had alerted us a number of times we were running low on fuel. We didn’t stop. Until we reached the station closest to home (albeit one a few cents higher than the one we passed a few minutes earlier). The car has a 14 gallon tank. 14 …
“Skydeck is now focusing on building features that it can charge for, instead of free services that attract users but not revenue.” – Brad Stone, New York Times Thank [your-preferred-deity-here]. You know I have a pet peeve with ‘businesses’ where the metric of success doesn’t start with a $. Perhaps Web 2.0 will end the …
After proving that it’s autumn – or more specifically – fall, the Universe is now sending me a very different message. A message of opportunity, of motivation, of determination, of persistence, of personal happiness. “I think we may be on the verge of the greatest days of the United States in my adult life…” – …
This weekend, I popped by my alma mater for a few hours to briefly catch up with some people that went through the same foreign exchange program I did. Of the few (of hundreds) that brought themselves to a small, rural Wisconsin town from the far reaches of the globe – there are a handful …
I just got word one of the projects I’m involved with at Best Buy launched today: Best Buy Forums The team that pulled it together really ‘gets’ online communities and was a pleasure to work with. Add this to Remix.BestBuy.com, Giftag, and Blue Shirt Nation, and yeah, there’s a stack of very cool work happening …
Back a few years ago, I was setting up some web apps for a friend and needed his password.. “Oh, try my non-sensitive password: ‘basketball’” Sure enough, ‘basketball’ got me in. That exchange was a reminder that there are different degrees of security and different comfort levels of risk associated with each of those degrees. …
As a reminder on perspective and complexity, here’s the ongoing list of systems I’ve configured for Cullect that aren’t Ruby on Rails: DNS Web Server: robots.txt Web Server: .htaccess Web Server: Virtual Domains Database Server: MySQL Caching Servers: Memcached, distributed across 2 boxes And this doesn’t even crack the surface of the systems Joyent’s Jason …
Continue reading “Everything Else You Need to Run a Web App”
Back in Part 1 of Building a Wiki with Ruby on Rails, we built the core wiki engine. Time to add some syntax formatting. These days, I’m pretty enamored of Haml, it’s more like HTML (unlike many other formatting engines) and it’s fast to write (unlike many other formatting engines). 1. Install Haml Haml installs …
Continue reading “How To: Build a Wiki with Ruby on Rails – Part 2”