I am very pleased to announce Im rolling out trailers onto bitpick.org. So now when you view a page for a movie you can watch the trailer right there. Because we have such a large collection of movies and a small staff(myself) this will be rolled out over the next week or so. So far about 25% of the movies have trailers and every day I hope to add another hundred or so. Also just to remind everyone if you have any suggestions for features for any of my sites, or quesitons/comments/hate mail, you can email them to me at any time. Im usually pretty good about getting back to people.
Archive for July, 2009
Now that were getting Aralie.com back into full swing were looking to do alot more photo work, and get the community more involved with submissions. So on that note Im making a call out to any musicians who have photos of a show past or present to send them to Wyattf@gmail.com along with a little piece about the photos. Just some basic guide lines about submissions:
- please dont send raw images just dragged off your camera, edit them down if you can to a reasonable resolution and image size.
- a minimum of 8 photos and a max of 25 can be submitted per article.
- spell check your blurb.(unlike my blog posts)
- if your not the one who took the photos, send us the details (email, website..what ever) of the photographer who did so we can give them credit.
- you can send as many submissions as you want, we are looking to do at least one new posting per day.
All the photos will be uploaded to our flickr account, promoted on facebook, and on twitter. So its a nice way to get some coverage for your band, and help out a good cause.
So Ive been plunking away at a new project the past week and a bit and Im getting ready to launch it so I thought I should spill the beans as to what it is. TweetMgmt is a intelligent Twitter account manager. The site is built in two parts not that you will ever see what its doing but Ill explain. First Ive built a ‘spider’ that crawls through Twitter indexing every possible user it can by what they Tweet about most, and for each user it creates a profile of that person. Right now about 1.5 million users have been indexed, and once Twitter white lists my project that will quickly grow to around 15 million users in a matter of days. The yang to the spiders ying, is now with this gigantic database of twitter information we can match users together automatically. What this means for subscribers is we can follow the maximum number of users your account will allow on a daily basis, but we will select those users by how interested they will be in the content you create. So we add users based on a gradient of interested to not interested at all, then every other day we remove half the users who dont follow you back and add another batch of about a thousand or so.
To simply summaries TweetMgmt will get you thousands of new followers a month, who are engaged in the content or products you are creating. And we completely automate adding and removing users, so you focus on creating content and we handle the rest.
The site is going to operate on a subscription model,$10 a month, $100 a year, $200 for a life time subscription. But for the first month we are offering 50% off ie. $5 a month, $50 a year, $100 for a life time. Ill have more details about its full launch soon, and Im looking for a some beta testers so email me if you are interested in a free weeks membership to help test the site. You can goto TweetMgmt.com to check out our holder information site. The full site should be ready for launch early next week.
As a young person developing new start-ups, Ive come to learn a few things about development, design, and interaction through long hours, much ridicule, and more then a few books. Non of them are revelations or grand breakthroughs in design, but just simple pointers that I hope other young developers may find useful.
assume the worst of your users
My CIS teacher in high school used to say this to me, “assume your user is the dumbest most ignorant person you can imagine.” Users of your software as a hole are a simple minded fickle group, they dont read manuals, any errors are always the developers fault, and your software never runs fast enough. So make your programs the equivalent of a padded room, no one can get hurt, and its a controlled environment. Make everything painfully clear to your user and dont assume they have prior knowledge of how to use your program.
use design
This is something that the older Ive gotten the more I understand. Layouts, colors, consistency, and simplicity are just as important to the general user as your site itself. Good design makes your web app inviting for people to use and continue to use, they dont struggle with menus, hard to read content, and unclear navigation. You may have the fastest car in the world but if no-one knows how to drive it, no one will use it.
dont recode the wheel
This is a very old one for anyone whos taken any CIS, making your code portable. By keeping the coupling of your code low, you can reuse it for other projects with no hastle. This is a no-brainer for some, but by having a stock pile of general modules for functions you use alot makes your life so much simpler in the long run. I did this recently did this for nearly all my PHP projects, for the time it took me to extract code from these projects and make some general classes I have saved myself days and days of work on some new projects Im working on.
cleanse your input
This is a more security related item, but never trust user input, ever. Always sanitize any input you get, especially for anything SQL related. SQL injection attacks wouldn’t exist if more people did this. If you ask for a number the user will enter characters, ask for a user name they’ll enter a drop all tables argument. Just always clear the garbage out of input.
release early and release often
Google lives by this and thats worked out pretty well for them so far. Theres always one more feature you could ad, one more bug, and one more user gripe. Get something up people can use, and constantly be improving it. Take user feedback, roll out new features, and try a fresh design. Think of your project development more like a constant stream and not big chunks.
user criticism
This is one that cant really be taught, it comes more from getting used to dealing with upset customers. When you create a new site, product, whatever…generally the only time youll hear from users is when you have a problem. And you will get some of the most hateful emails you can imagine about your product. No matter what you cant make everyone happy, no matter how hard you try, its the internet and people love to get there hate on. So dont take any of there criticism personally, do your best to resolve users problems, but accept you just cant make everyone happy.
Some bad news, my first 2 iPhone apps were rejected because I used the UIWebView Class to you know…view the web. So needless to say Im a bit grumpy from the whole situation. Im gonna bust my ass and brush up on my objective-C and crank out new ‘compliant’ versions of my apps. This really sucks because I just finished making a mobile web version of GeoTwitter and was hoping to publish it on the iPhone store, but it looks like Im gonna have to recode it all in object-C.
For any developers who are wondering to them selves, “shouldnt your iPhone app already be in objective-c?, cause that is how you create iPhone apps isnt it?” Let me explain. I created a objective-C shell that would essentially load any specially crafted webpage to look just like a app but I could create it in PHP which I much prefer to development in because its fast and simple to develop. But Apple was not such a fun of my site wrapped in a objective-c wrapper. Ill let everyone know when I get my reworked versions of the apps together.