Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
Who doesn’t want to improve his or her knowledge of money, investment, and financial planning? Okay, there may be some, but for the rest of us who don’t want to grow old impoverished, anything you can learn is welcome.
Moneychimp.com has quite an array of interesting articles about finance, business, and investment; worth checking out if you have any interest in any of these things. If you don’t know where to start, you can just click a convenient button to learn something random.
Like a lot of things in the world of computing, I think it may have been Apple who did it first.
At least, they were the first to be well-known for it.
I’m talking, of course, about product evangelists. Evangelism is a word borrowed from Christianity, who got it from the Greeks, to whom it simply meant a bearer of good news. Of course, after centuries of this word being associated with The Good News, using it in any other context is bound to grab someone’s attention. Even now, close to two decades after the original "Mac evangelists", people still chuckle a little at the phrase "product evangelist."
I think that incongruity is why it continues to be used….
Enlightenment is an alternate window manager for linux. Tried it out yesterday, and will probably keep using it for awhile. Here are some screenshots…
Something I’ve been churning around lately is the whole concept of paid content on the web. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about this site…
But I mean, in general, all over the web. Does anyone really pay for content? Yes, clearly some do, as examples of this proliferate the internet. Newspapers, academic journals, magazines, and just content heavy sites, many of them have adopted paid-content models.
Myself, there is only one site I’ve ever been willing to pay to access, and that’s O’Reilly’s Safari website. That’s a great resource. You can click the link for a more detailed description of it’s business model, but in a nutshell you can pay to get full access to the text of thousands of technical books (virtually the whole O’Reilly catalog, and a half-dozen other publishers as well). Well, IMHO this works mainly because any one of those books costs between $30-$60 USD, and the monthly subscription for 10 books at a time is less than the lower of that bound. Not a bad deal.
So, does anyone reading this pay for content anywhere on the internet?
As an employee of a large church and an amatuer afficionado of business and marketing concepts, I guess it was only a matter of time before I wrote about churchmarketingsucks.com.
I like the concept of what it seems like they’re trying to do; their tagline is "Frustrate. Educate. Motivate." Great, I suppose. Of course, you can’t please everyone, and I certainly found a lot of ideas that I didn’t care for…
…and it may be contagious.
I was all over map24.com when it came out, because it was the slickest online map site I had seen so far.
The other day I read that Seth Godin was saying that Google maps blows everything else away In fact, the phrase he used was, "So much better that it doesn’t make sense to use anything else." I have to admit, as much as I like Seth, and as much as I like Google, I didn’t really believe, at first.
Just took a moment to check out Google’s maps.
Wow!
If Google ever decides to release an operating system (Google Linux, anyone?), I think they would take over the desktop that same year. How come everything they do rocks?
Okay, end of the Google-love-fest. Check out the maps.
OSNews has a listing of all the projects (that they know of) being developed for Mono right now. (Link courtesy of slashdot… again) It’s encouraging to see how this project is taking off.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Mono is an open source development platform based on .NET; it uses C#, has bindings for the gtk widgets in the form of a gtk# library, and is gaining steam steadily. A lot of people are nervous because it’s based on a Microsoft product, and they don’t want to admit that Microsoft could have come up with anything worth emulating. Well, blanket generalizations like that, while entertaining, are not the best way to order one’s life.
I’m currently taking two history classes at night. I’ve been blogging (albeit irregularly) related to this, so feel free to check that out if history floats your boat.
I think part of the reason that I’ve been updating so irregularly is that these classes often border on the ridiculous.
Everytime I come, now, I routinely see that there are three or four, or six, or eight, sometimes even more, visitors. Who are all you people? Is Joel just logging onto seven different computers? :-) Leave a comment, it isn’t hard. You don’t need to sign up for an account, though it only takes a moment.
While you’re at it, let me know why you came here in the first place, and what would make you come back again. Hey, I’m just curious; I know this site isn’t that exciting, so there must be something that brought you all here and keeps a few coming back. Let us know!
Today, I am creating technical documentation.
If you have ever developed software, or been part of a software development team, hopefully you’ve been involved in the creation of useful, helpful, documentation. If you haven’t, shame on you! Software needs documentation; it prevents hundreds of calls to the developers asking, "How does this work, again….?" There’s nothing wrong with having questions, but every (foreseeable) question a user could have should have an answer; in the documentation.
