Archive for April, 2008
Get a Tweet with the latest DVD releases using MovieScout
Posted by toddicus in entrepreneurs on April 16th, 2008
(Guest Post by Todd Khozein:)
I am proud to say that I have written my first, yes my first, web app ever in the form of a tool to proliferate the growing and widespread impulsive want-it-NOW shopper’s need to be the first to know in the form of a Twitter Bot that will, indeed, tell you what the latest DVD releases are with a link to buy it NOW! Thanks to Joshua for holding my tender little virgin hacker’s hand through the intricacies of building something that actually works in a world where run-on sentences are acceptable, nay encouraged.
I think I have officially taken a significant step towards geekdom and feel that I should commemorate this occasion of the alpha release by inviting you, the reader, to make this app wildly successful and dedicating the remainder of your waking hours tonight and possibly tomorrow in telling all of your people how sexy this app really is.
How I Built a Free Grid Computer, In Less Than a Week
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 11th, 2008
By now you’ve all heard about BuyLater, my happy little firefox extension that (thanks to an unexpected LifeHacker.com article) is rapidly climbing towards 1000 users and world domination. Without getting TOO technical, I thought I would share with you how I saved BuyLater from becoming an infrastructure nightmare – one that would have either killed the value of the application (real-time updates), or sucked tons of money and hardware into a technology backwash.
This will be a little controversial, I think – simply because the technique I used, (grid computing), is most often used for less… legitimate… purposes. So much so, that it is almost synonymous with “Bot Nets”.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
Screencast of the BuyLater Service (Beta Product, Alpha Video)
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 8th, 2008
Middle-of-the-night hacking on live server == BAD
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 8th, 2008
For those of you trying out my price-watching service, BuyLater, and especially for those of you using the SMS-messaging feature of twitter – I’m very sorry.
I’ve been trying to get this new feature online over the past two days – let users elect to watch just Amazon-supplied price changes, rather than all vendors. This is handy because, when combined with free shipping, Amazon is often cheaper overall – even when they have a higher price.
So I thought I had it working, by about 1 am last night. Pushed it into production, and let it rip.
Ooops.
Every. Single. Item. In the database. Began sending announcements of “Initial Price: $X” to every user.
I caught it, of course – after about 60 seconds. Which was enough time to send announcements for the first 600 items or so.
If you got one in an email, you can probably safely discard it. If your cell phone woke you up in the middle of the night with a text message (yes, I’ve already got a few bug reports about that) – what can I say? I promise I won’t do it again.
BuyLater 0.7 Released, Support for Canada and UK Users
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 3rd, 2008
After the deluge of new users from last week’s Lifehacker.com article, followed by a full day on the front page of delicious, I ended up with an inbox full of bug reports. While there were a few pernicious actual “bugs” in there (sorry to everyone who ended up with the ‘can’t delete items’ bug, that’s fixed too), most of them fell into two buckets:
-
-
You are currently browsing the archives for April, 2008
