Last night I attended the first Entrepreneur Unplugged event sponsored by Philly Startup Leaders. I think it’s a great idea; people from the front lines sharing war stories. Insights and advice abounds. From their description of the event:
Entrepreneur Unplugged will extend the spirit of Founder Factory by bringing successful Entrepreneurs "on stage" to share their personal stories of risk taking and decision making. The format will be a 30 minute presentation followed by question and answer.
One of the best sites I’ve come across in a while that wasn’t in StumbleUpon (but is now).
http://www.howtonailaninterview.com
If you’re looking for really good interview advice coupled with hidden video of people absolutely botching them, this site is for you.
I recently discovered an issue with the mailing list signup on the Fwd:Vault placeholder site. [Aside: It was perfect when I set it up, I swear there are gremlins in my code sometimes. If you tried to sign up and were unable to, I apologize, try it one more time.] After fixing the issue, I naturally tested it in every browser, and Opera was simply hanging at the page load. The page would visually come up fully, but the Javascript effects wouldn’t fire, making the signup form unresponsive.
This is the kind of “usability fail” that drives me nuts, especially from a company of Google’s caliber. When you add a new site to Google Analytics, they present you with the Javascript code block you need during the setup process. But what if you need to look up that code block again? What if Google updates the Analytics code block (they just did it in Dec 2008)? Naturally you go back to the Analytics site to get the code…
Want to know how well your software is doing? Look for the absence of complaints. Compliments are always fantastic to receive, but are not consistently delivered, and hence not representative of your software’s ecosystem. Things working great is status quo; it’s expected. On the other hand, people are negative by nature — Murphy’s Law comes to mind — which means that a good percentage of your users won’t hesitate to complain when things do not go as expected.
The Fwd:Vault website has a new placeholder page! With Fwd:Vault claiming victory in the Elevator Pitch Contest, and thus imminent global domination, I thought it was high time we give that dusty old page a major tune-up. The new look represents how the site will look and feel when we launch later this year, and was put together by Kim over at Stranger Studios. I simply love it, and I hope you all do as well.
The winners for StartupNation’s 2009 Elevator Pitch Competition were announced today, and no one was more surprised than I to find out that Fwd:Vault was selected as one of them! That link will take you to a page showing the top 5, along with 10 runner-ups. There were some really great ideas submitted — just look at the other four winners — so to be selected is simply mind-blowing. I may have to check the results later to make sure there wasn’t a mistake.
I posted a few weeks back describing an issue I was experiencing with logging into Gmail from Firefox. Firefox was corrupting Gmail cookies whenever the browser started, so I had to clear cookies each time I started up in order to use Gmail. Today I found the full solution, and it ain’t pretty. The problem is somewhere in the Firefox profile, and you have to blow the whole thing away to get it running normal again.
Core PHP does not include a define_once() function to complement functions like require_once() and include_once(), which is pretty silly in my opinion. While I am generally not a fan of using *_once statements due to the performance penalty (and incurred laziness), define_once is the exception. There are ways to look for a loaded/missing file, but a define is not a define until you define it, so you really have no choice.
I was recently discussing Fwd:Vault with a typical end user, specifically how our service is completely oriented towards people who simply cannot or will not bother with anything technical. She whole-heartedly agreed, and expressed her mindset as follows:
Just make it work. Don’t frustrate me. Don’t break on me. I think those three sentences are the best litmus test for usability and user interface design that I’ve ever seen. They apply to software in any state, planning to released, and always provide an honest assessment (as long as you’re honest with yourself).
