In my life as a full-time employee, I ran a membership management system for an international non-profit that organized over 40,000 volunteers at the local, state, and national levels in almost 30 countries. It coordinated physical material deliveries (part of the system was a full shopping cart installation), managed electronic documents, and delivered news to all those volunteers. I built the system myself from scratch (minus said shopping cart), and ran it on my own for almost three years.
Living in a Philly suburb, I never thought my Philly proximity would have any effect on my startup, Fwd:Vault. However that was before I discovered the Philly Startup Leaders. Comprised of small businesses at all stages, manned by people of all experience levels and backgrounds, the mailing list we share alone is invaluable. When you add in access to startup events and conferences in the area, not mention original events like “Entrepreneurs Unplugged” and the totally unique “Fishbowl” event, and you’ve got a must-have tool for any bootstrapper who considers Philly the closest major city.
With all the fancy cURL-based API’s out there these days (Facebook and Twitter immediately come to mind), using cURL to directly access and manipulate data is becoming quite common. However like all programming, there’s always the chance for an error to occur, and thus these calls must be immediately followed by error checks to ensure everything went as planned.
Most decent API’s will return their own custom errors when an internal problem occurs, but that does not account for issues dealing directly with the connection.
I just posted a new article over at the Fwd:Vault Blog discussing the antivirus software I use for myself and my customers’ computers…
I learned long ago that every type of utility software — spyware/virus protection, disk defrag, firewalls, system optimizers, etc. — has a decent free version available somewhere on the web. Back in my tech support days, people were always pleasantly surprised when I told them I could install a needed utility and it wouldn’t cost them a cent to keep.
The best part of playing Valve’s Portal was listening to GLaDOS “encourage” you throughout the game. The lines she delivers are just fantastic. Recently I found a site plugin containing all her memorable gems, which I have plugged into this post. Enjoy.
With the untimely and unfortunate death of beloved Logitech G5, I was forced to quickly find a replacement. While I know I could simply get a replacement, I figured it might be time to look for newer gear. So after a thorough Google consultation and some in-store browsing, I purchased a Logitech G9 through Amazon.
Let’s just say this is the first and last time I will ever purchase a mouse without getting my hands on it.
So I was testing some updates to Fwd:Vault’s mail processing logic today, and I was using a billing message I received from 1&1. While tracking down a bug, I noticed a fantastic header line in the raw message:
[...] Message-Id: <357619014-200908300000M9422000.7395000$357600000@GB.billing.1and1.com> X-Billing-Backreference: 357619014-200908300000@@9420000.7395000.357600000 X-Binford: 6100 (more power) [...] Let’s hope it’s more stable than Tim Taylor’s usual fare of Binford 6100 tools.
As an email-based backup service, Fwd:Vault ran into spam filters pretty quickly. Most of this can be mitigated with proper server configuration and getting records in the right places (i.e. abuse.net). From there it’s simply a matter of reminding users to check the spam folder when things are missing. However through the tribulations of one of my testers, I found out that Comcast goes the extra mile for users of their comcast.
I was recently quoted in an article over at IT World, discussing underused developer tools (e.g. security testers). My quote is on page 2: http://www.itworld.com/development/74088/developer-tools-you-dont-use-and-why-you-dont-use-them Also FYI I am on vacation the rest of this week; return to our regular schedule next Monday.
My code for displaying Twitter posts on your site is pretty handy, but it does have drawbacks. Each page load involves calling a remote URL, downloading a resulting XML file, and parsing the results, increasing your load times and using bandwidth. To minimize the impact, you can really only display a handful of the most recent posts. Plus, the downloaded stream is never saved. Google does index Twitter, but the thoroughness and benefit to you are subject to much speculation.
