• Have clear goals in mind, visualize success or failure
  • Concrete
  • Yes or No
• Define Success
  • What is  your end goal?
  • What is next after achieving success?
• Define Failure
  • When is it no longer feasible to continue?
  • Do the pros outweigh the cons?
  • Exit Strategy
  • Be prepared to fail, this is the difference between total failure and a graceful exit
• Things we learned
  • Creating 125 episodes of content is difficult
  • Giving  things out and getting a response is amazing

Thanks for everything
-Mark and Jade

News and Follow-Ups – 03:04

Geek Tools – 05:59

Webapps – 08:14

Increase Conversions – 14:15

News and Follow-Ups – 00:38

• Apple taking the cloud seriously, doing OS upgrades in the cloud
• Ninjabutton goes down, how much can you depend on web services?
• Ebay aquires Magento
• Jade’s iTunes account compromised
• Skype protocol reverse engineered

Geek Tools – 14:45

• Belkin Conserve Smart AV F7C007q Energy-Saving Power Strip

Webapps – 17:33

• TravelPod Traveler IQ Game – How well do you know your geography?
• Explorra Visual DNA – Visually select good vacations

Website Issue Monitoring – 22:01

• Website Issue Monitoring
  • Uptime
    • Browsermob – Multiple locations and adjust time
    • Uptimerobot – Totally free, includes SMS support
    • Pingdom – Response times, error analysis
      • Free account 1 website with 20 free SMS messages
  • Load Time
    • Browsermob – Multiple locations and adjust time
    • Pingdom – Response times, error analysis
    • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Error Tracking
    • Google webmaster tools, 404s unreachable to spider
    • You need to track when people hit errors, so you can fix them
    • Think about your error messages, ala Rails “Someone has been notified”
    • Methods
      • App Emails You
      • Exception Hub
      • Hoptoad
  • Traffic Jams
    • Google analytics traffic spike alerts via email/sms
      • Set for no traffic
      • Set for high traffic

News and Follow/Ups – 02:24

• Google Sunsets Translate API
  • “Why would anyone ever use your api’s again?” and Google is not your daddy
  • Could they have made it profitable though?
• Google Wallet

Geek Tools – 13:15

• Supergoop! SPF 30 Sunscreen Swipes with Zinc for Sensitive Skin
• Supergoop! SPF 30 Single-Application Individually Wrapped Sunscreen Swipes, 21-Count

Webapps – 15:22

• Kitten Image Bookmarklet – Replace a site’s images with Kittens (such as NSFW sites)
• Easy Bar Tricks – Cool tricks and sneaks to show your friends at the bar

NoSQL – 19:56

• What are they?
  • Usually don’t require fixed table structures
  • Usually used to scale horizontally
    • Add more commodity nodes as opposed to adding more resources and using expensive hardware
• Why would you use them?
  • Scalability
  • Performance
  • In certain use cases they are easier to implement
• When would you NOT use them?
  • If you don’t know ahead of time how you are going to query or data
    • Applies mainly to key-value type NoSQL
  • Usually arguments start because people think in terms of RDBMS vs NoSQL.  They are usually implemented side by side for difference use cases.  It is not an all or nothing.
• CAP Theorem
  • Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time)
  • Availability (node failures do not prevent survivors from continuing to operate)
  • Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss)
  • Cap Theorem says that a system can satisfy two of these but not all three.
• Popular DocDBs
  • CouchDB
    • Friendpaste
  • MongoDB
    • foursquare
    • intuit
    • shutterfly
• Key-value based
  • Redis
    • Blizzard
    • Stackoverflow
    • Github
    • Tweetdeck
  • Memcached
    • Just about everyone, although many people are moving to redis
  • Cassandra
    • Cisco
    • Cloudkick
• Column oriented
  • Google bigtable
  • Hbase
• Graphdb
  • neo4j
    • Good at multiple relationships
      • Think product categories
      • User friend follow relationships
    • Amazon

News and Follow/Ups – 01:40

• Microsoft buys Skype
• Google Docs split testing
• Split testing is like ground hog day

Geek Tools – 12:25

• StarTech.com ICUSBAUDIO USB 2.0 to Audio Adapter

Webapps – 16:43

• http://chopapp.com (via @manifestphil)
• http://www.cascader.co/ (via @manifestphil)

Web Do’s and Don’ts – 21:16

• Don’t use splash pages
• Specify HTML document’s language
• Write effective Loops
• Do Proofread
• Use the right DOCTYPE
• Keep content in a logical order in the source
• Don’t put block elements inside inline elements
• Use the CSS cascade
• Learn the box model
• Improve Your Web Typography

News and Follow/Ups – 00:39

• Penn State MacAdmins Conference

Geek Tools – 05:14

• Jump-N-Carry  JNC300XL 900 Peak Amp Ultraportable 12V Jump Starter with Light
• Coleman Cable 08660 20-Foot Heavy-Duty Auto Battery Booster Cables with Polar Glow Clamps, 4-Gauge

Webapps – 11:06

• Plastic Jungle - Buy and sell gift cards
• Famous Objects From Classic Movies -  Can you guess the object?

Mashing, Scraping, and APIs – 17:12

• Mashups
  • Hipmonk
  • Gist – just bought out by blackberry
  • http://opensignalmaps.com/
  • http://instalyrics.com/
  • http://www.checkinmania.com/deals
• Scraping
  • Computers reading data otherwise intended for end-users
  • The billion dollar scraping business
    • Google
    • Infochimps
  • Pitfalls
    • Copyright, Terms of Service
    • Fragile
  • Advantages
    • Access to data otherwise not available
  • Tools to make scraping less painful
    • http://scraperwiki.com/
    • http://www.junar.com/portal/HomeManager/actionQuery
• APIs
  • Data/operations made available to computer programs
  • XML/REST/SOAP/oauth
  • Top APIs
    • Payment Gateways
    • Google Maps
    • Twitter
    • Flickr
    • Shipping, UPS/FedEx
    • Facebook
    • Twilio
  • APIs as a strategy for business
    • Twitter
    • Google Maps
  • Successful businesses based on APIs
    • Tweetdeck
    • Twilio

News and Follow/Ups – 00:40

Geek Tools – 03:25

Webapps – 05:06

Full Text Search – 11:15

• As of March 16, 2011, CoffeeScript is on GitHub’s list of most-watched projects
• A Ruby/Python inspired language that compiles down to Readable/Lint compatible Javascript
• CoffeeScript claims to reduce the number of lines needed to be written to 1/3 of hand written JS
• Because CoffeeScript compiles predictably to JavaScript, programs can be written with less code (typically 1/3 fewer lines) with no effect on runtime performance.
• Who is using it?
  • Used in production by 37Signals
  • Used in the Ars Technica reader for iPad
• Some advantages
  • It is still compatible with Node.js, jquery, or any other framework
  • Removes noise
  • adds keywords, classes, and features like heredocs to make coding cleaner
  • It is said to be faster to code in CoffeeScript once you learn the ropes
• Some potential downsides
  • Debugging a coffeescript script still requires you read the generated Javascript code, which can be tedious, since you haven’t actually written it yourself.
• CoffeeScript – Compiler-for-Windows

Phillip Downer

• Phillip Downer
• Manifest Creative
• See Phil’s work on Dribbble

Thanks Phil!

Jeremy Linden from Mixpanel

• Jeremy Linden
• Mixpanel – Real-time event tracking and analytics
• Follow @Mixpanel on Twitter.

News and Follow/Ups – 01:00

Geek Tools – 14:13

Webapps – 16:12

Full Text Search – 22:11