Archive for March, 2008
Life after LifeHacker.com – What to do when your Alpha leaks
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on March 29th, 2008
Wow. It’s not every day that, suddenly and without warning, thousands upon thousands of strangers descend upon your happy little world, and start playing with it. But such is the power of LifeHacker.com.
They decided to run a story on my happy little bot this morning. I didn’t know about it, came back from lunch – and I had 100 users. (For the last week, that number has been stubbornly stuck at 8).
I poked a little further, and realized that only 20 of those 100 users had twitter accounts. Hmm – I guess I better get email notifications working, eh?
The Contractors Holy Grail – Time Tracking
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on March 25th, 2008
Everyone has a system. Here’s mine: http://timetrack.cognition.ca/
It doesn’t matter how good you are, or how many hours you work – if you don’t bill for it, you ain’t gonna get paid. Now I’ve put together a little tool that will allow you to keep track of how you’re spending your time (and BILL for it, if that’s your thing) – no matter where you are, or what you’re doing.
It’s a Twitter app, you see. So you can talk to it from:
- A webpage
- An instant-messaging client, or
- Your phone (via text-messaging)
You don’t even have to set up an account first – just follow http://twitter.com/timetrack, wait a minute or two for the bot to start following you back, and then send simple messages like this:
d timetrack start washingfloors
d timetrack stop washingfloors
If you match up the start and stop commands, the bot will total up the time for you. (Don’t worry, we’ll give you the exact times of every action regardless, so you can clean things up later if you forget something.)
Now, here’s my question for you – what sort of reports and exports would you like to see? Here are a few I’m considering:
- SalesForce.com export
- Blinksale (Invoicing) data
- CSV / Excel spreadsheet data
- XML / JSON
- Quickbooks payroll data
What have I missed?
I Wrote A MashUp, Just for You
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on March 22nd, 2008
If you’re one of those people who stood in “The Line”, then this isn’t for you.
If you get a strange, visceral pleasure in wasting hours, even days, of your life, waiting for your local WalMart to get more Beanie Babies in stock – then you should stop reading right now.
If you like to revisit your local grocery store every night, just to see if they’ve dropped the price on those great donuts in aisle 4… then hit the Back Button, and read something else.
But – if you have a life, and you still want to try and buy something online – I might have something that can help.
It’s called BuyLater, and that’s exactly what it’s for – buying Amazon products, later on.
Later can be: When it’s back “In Stock” (can someone say Wii?), or simply when it’s a little cheaper (or even on sale).
Unlike many of my ideas (which are unique, innovative, and incomprehensible), this one actually isn’t mine. My buddy Jesse Andrews did it first, with a Wii-only bot called WiiMe. I just took the idea, and strreeettched it a little.
My New Favorite Wordpress Plugin
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on March 20th, 2008
At NothernVoice last month, Mark Lise and I led an unconference session on “PowerBlogging“, which was intended to be an open discussion of everyone’s favorite tips and tricks. While I think we fell a little short on actionable content, everyone in the room got a great feeling about the level of expertise available to them (surprisingly HIGH) in the Canadian Blogging community. Here were some of the big surprises:
- In a room of around 50 people, more than 3 had written their own plugins
- More than 5 were pro-bloggers
- Over half had customized their themes
- More than 10 wrote their OWN themes from scratch
- NO one agreed on the most important Wordpress Plugin
IE 8 Beta Released – A First Look
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on March 6th, 2008
According to PC Magazine, Microsoft has just released the newest edition of Internet Explorer, in a Beta at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. You can grab yourself a copy.
In a nod to the trend of “backgrading” Vista machines to Windows XP, the IE beta will run on XP SP2 or newer – although it seems to require a different download for every possible flavour of OS. At 14.4 Mb, it weighs in a little heavy, but not unusual for a Microsoft product.
I’ll admit right off that I haven’t bothered to fire up Parallels to try it out – so what you’ll be getting here is purely jaded commentary. Read the rest of this entry »
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