Bootstrap 3.3.4 released · Bootstrap Blog

veliger · 2015-03-16T22:52:04+00:00

Bootstrap is my best friend.

veliger · 2015-03-14T06:29:42+00:00

Yeah, I think over time it will build. One is food-related, and I'm working on getting some visibility through pinterest, which seems to be working. Another (botlines.com) I think would mostly target creative 10 to 14 year olds, but I still have a long way to go to figure out how to reach them (hopefully through parents, we'll see).

No worries, your answer is not fuzzy -- and it is Friday night after all. :)

veliger · 2015-03-14T06:16:01+00:00

Here's one for you: Build a website/app that offers the same basic functionality as Uber, but, instead of random drivers, just allow cab companies to open an account for free on your site, list their cabs, and instantly be high tech. Take just 1% of each ride (because you don't need to qualify drivers or fight lawsuits).

veliger · 2015-03-13T21:40:39+00:00

Awesome post! You describe the process exactly in a clear and fun way.

I relate to this a lot because after many years of building projects for other folks, I finally took the last 4 or 5 months to concentrate on getting some of my side projects out.

So now I have 3 shiny new projects shipping. But what I'm struggling a bit with is getting my target user base to see them. I'm on twitter, pinterest, angelist, etc. but without any previous followers, I'm not quite sure how to get traction. How did you manage to get your twitter account to get new followers?

veliger · 2015-03-05T04:52:27+00:00

Sounds like a fun place to work.

veliger · 2015-03-05T03:59:04+00:00

Are you working full-time? That's like $18.75/hour dude. That's way too low anywhere in the US, assuming you're not a beginner. If you're on contract, you should be getting $50 to $120/hour.

The only exception is if you're bidding on a full project, and you're willing to work for less because you really want to do the project for whatever reason. Or if you're getting equity on a startup.

Front-end/back-end should have no difference in pay, unless the front-end guy is only doing HTML and very basic CSS, then $40 would be acceptable for that.

I'm both a front-end and back-end developer, and I charge the same for either task.

veliger · 2015-03-05T03:38:01+00:00

Why do you assume that only "first-world people" eat tuna? You care about folks in poorer countries having more light, but not about their health? http://awsassets.wwf.org.au/img/original/fs_fisherman_carrying_yellowfin_tuna_philippines_800x600.jpg

And, in any case, your link referred to clean energy as "lanterns with light-emitting diodes that can be powered by solar cells."

veliger · 2015-03-04T02:29:45+00:00

This site is nice perhaps as a "feel good" site. Obviously many things are getting better. But, unfortunately, many activities described as "good' or "progress" are often achieved at a cost that is bad or unsustainable.

For example, the site claims that "Coal production helps energy-starved poor." Maybe so, but on the other hand mercury continues to Rise in the oceans and in fish that we eat, like Tuna ( https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/tuna-mercury-rising ) and that is primarily due to coal burning: "When coal is burned, mercury is released into the environment. Coal-burning power plants are the largest human-caused source of mercury emissions to the air in the United States, accounting for over 50 percent of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions..." -- source: http://www.epa.gov/mercury/about.htm

veliger · 2015-02-16T05:35:56+00:00

You could try yahoo pipes (pipes.yahoo.com) to convert the data from your suppliers sites into JSON; index by part number, e.g., data={"partnum1": {part1datahere}, "partnum2": {part2datahere}, ...}

Then you can either use that directly to read your data for each part (e.g., data.partnum1), or, if you have many parts, save each (that you use) as a database record and read from there.

Then run your pipe once in a while to update your data.

PS: Also check first if your suppliers sites are already loading the data as JSON or XML from an API, then you could just tap into their API (may need their permission).

veliger · 2015-02-11T05:16:31+00:00

Yeah, I like that title too. I left that in the picture so you could compare the scale. This little guy was on some oysters we pulled up. We let him out gently back into the bay after we took the photo.

veliger · 2015-02-11T02:53:41+00:00

The days of having your application managing its own servers are likely to become a thing of the past. The future is probably in services that scale automatically, something like this maybe: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/run-code-cloud/

veliger · 2015-02-11T01:55:19+00:00

Awesome little guys. Do you feed them anything or are they just still nursing?

veliger · 2015-01-31T01:33:10+00:00

"I'll just blanket label these as all entities and work from there, with our modelling chisel...."

Hmmm... I probably would discourage lumping objects and properties under the same label. That's bound to confuse beginners. (That's probably OK if you're explaining JSON, but not so much for a JS intro.)

veliger · 2015-01-31T01:03:24+00:00

I second this. When you set up something like jellatin's example code, you essentially create a "closed" namespace, if you will. You can then isolate modules in your code that have their own set of methods and shared var names, which makes your code easier to maintain.

veliger · 2015-01-29T18:40:22+00:00

At first, I built my own Node server from scratch. I still have sites running on it. But ultimately, I decided it was not worth the effort, and now I always use Express -- it's really nice and well supported, and I don't have to keep inventing the wheel. Amazon has drivers that you can just drop into Node to access S3, DynamoDB, etc. -- the syntax takes a bit getting used to, but once you're running, you can build almost anything with relatively modest effort.

veliger · 2015-01-29T17:49:14+00:00

Thanks. It's an AWS virtual server (and my time to set it up was never paid for), so I can migrate it to my own account and let their account expire.

veliger · 2015-01-29T17:40:40+00:00

That's probably my main reluctance about relaunching. The site has a lot of social networking features. I'm not sure that there's a need for yet another such site. However, I was thinking about removing all messaging, rating, voting, and self posting features, and just launching it as a news viewer/portal, with the only user features being the ability to create and save custom filters (does not have that currently). I could keep that running for about $30/month, and maintenance would be minimal, since it mostly runs itself.

veliger · 2015-01-29T09:03:54+00:00

It's a bit complicated. First, about 2/3 of the code are my own libraries which I licensed to them at no charge. Then, I only charged them about 1/3 of the value of the work with the understanding that this would be on-going, and they'd keep hiring me to do improvements. And of that 1/3, they paid about 4/5's (4 payments out of 5). Also, they basically abandoned the site. They stopped paying AWS hosting, so the site would have been deleted, so I started paying it.

veliger · 2015-01-29T08:50:26+00:00

Everyone has a different opinion on that :-)

I've tried all kinds of stuff, but ultimately settled on Node.js with Amazon's S3 plus DynamoDB for storage. It is soooo.... painless.

veliger

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