The Ninth Yard

BackupMyMail is Offering Free Email Backups

2009-05-19T14:53:00.000-05:00

We're moving along with BackupMyMail, and are now offering free 1GB email backups to Hotmail and Gmail users (Google Apps and Windows Live users are also welcome!). We've simplified our process to the bare minimum:

Go to the signup page, input your email account info. Wait.
A while later you'll get an email with a link to your new backup, which will be valid for 7 days. Download it.
After 7 days, we'll delete your backup and email info from our servers.

Simple enough? Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

DemoCamp IV

2009-04-23T10:17:00.003-05:00

On Tuesday I demo'ed BackupMyMail at Bootstrap Austin's DemoCamp IV, and had a great time doing it.

DemoCamp is a quarterly(ish) event held by Bootstrap Austin that provides a forum for web developers and entrepreneurs to show off their new web applications. The rules are very simple: no powerpoint. This is for working (or sort of working) apps only. Sales and funding pitches are best left to other venues.

It's a great way to get feedback for that app you're developing. It's also a great way to see some of the really cool, under the radar stuff going on in Austin before it's ready for prime time.

For the 4th DemoCamp, five new or developing apps were demo'ed:

Prefinery: Prefinery takes the pain out of collecting emails on splash pages prior to a product launch. Sounds simple, but think about it a while and a world of opportunities open up. I have a feeling this product will not be about splash page management when all is said and done, but rather something much bigger.

CloudFire: CloudFire is a welcome twist on photo and video sharing. In a nutshell, CloudFire searched for photos on your computer, serves them up to share with your friends over the net, thus eliminating the hassle of uploading to middleman websites like Flickr. The state of the art of photo sharing still sucks, so I'm glad to see this kind of innovation going on.

BackupMyMail: My own product, BackupMyMail, does just that: it backs up your web based email into the cloud. We currently support Gmail and Hotmail, but more providers are coming soon. We will also be backing up Tweets and Blogs in the near future. Today is the last day you can sign up for a free 30 day trial, so get to it.

Gelato: Gelato is a dating site mixed with a social media aggregator. The premise is that your personality is reflected in your online behavior. Your profile consists of your Twitter account, Facebook status, Netflicks selections, and lots of other stuff available on the web. When combined, you get a picture of what sort of person you're looking at. I'm not doing the service justice in my description - check it out when it gets out of private beta. This is a real breakthrough in dating sites, not a me-too. There will be challenges, no doubt, but for the right kind of person (very active on the web and looking for a date), Gelato looks to be just the ticket.

Minutes Notice: Minutes Notice is a system that allows local businesses (coffee shops, bars, restaurants, anything really) to advertise across multiple outlets (Twitter, email, web widgets, RSS, etc) from one simple interface in real time. That last part is the most important. If a restaurant is having a slow period, they can blast out offers to customers in an effort to entice them to come in right now. Creating an offer is not much more complex than tweeting, and consumers can opt to receive these offers in a variety of ways through Youpons.net. You can choose to subscribe to a SMS feed of restaunart deals in the 78701 zip code, for example. It's a simple, flexible, permission-based system that has a lot of potential.

All in all, it was a good time, and I think we all got a lot of good feedback on our products. Check it out next time at DemoCamp V.

Fun With Government, Part 2

2009-04-17T09:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I took a look behind the curtain of government backed commercial real estate loans. Today, I have a story that comes from the "you can't make this up" category. It involves everyone's favorite branch of the federal government, the always watchful TSA.

Back in 2006, I took an plane trip to San Jose. I've always been suspicious of airport security, at least since they stole my cell phone and a handful of birthday gifts years ago. But this time TSA was on the job protecting me, my stuff, and the American Way. On the way back from San Jose, they even left me a gift!

And here it is, the Official TSA box cutter that a TSA agent left in my suitcase.

In case you don't believe, here's a close up of the sticker.

For those of you who may have forgotten or are too young to remember, box cutters were precisely the implements used to hijack the airlines on 9/11/2001. TSA was formed in response to those attacks.

Today's threat level is orange.

Fun With Government, Part 1

2009-04-16T09:55:00.003-05:00

In honor of the horrifyingly complex documents otherwise known as my tax return, I bring to you this week some examples of some of the more interesting facets of our beloved US Government.

The background for today's story: Our real estate company recently purchased an assisted living property in Virginia. Since the debt markets have pretty well collapsed, we were thankful that our property qualified for a HUD-guaranteed loan (the HUD-backed loan market is alive and well). Sure, we thought, there will be a little more paperwork, but the terms are attractive (especially in this market).

I just got a package in the mail from our attorneys. Attached to a large stack of documents was a note containing the words, "unfortunately", "voluminous", "arcane", and "a few more documents". Apparently I had to sign a few more pages. In blue ink. (Don't you dare use black ink!) Not in duplicate or triplicate, but decicate, if that's a word. Scans and faxes aren't allowed. Only originals signed in blue ink, delivered the old fashioned way.

A picture is worth a thousand words (the tabs are required signatures):

And that is just the paperwork confirming that our company exists. We haven't even gotten to the loan documents.

Come back tomorrow for more Fun With Government.

Exploding Term Sheets and Entrepreneurship

2009-03-27T09:56:00.001-05:00

A pair of posts on TechCrunch got me to thinking about the concept of an exploding term sheet. Or more broadly, an exploding offer of any kind.

With the recent launch of Capital Factory, TechCrunch notes that the number of Y Combinator style incubators is increasing, and the niche is getting more competitive. So competitive, TechCrunch states, that some of the incubators are resorting to exploding term sheets to lock up good companies. Arrington thinks these term sheets are nasty beasts. I disagree - they're totally irrelevant.

The idea is that the incubator makes an offer with terms that are set to expire, sometimes very quickly. This puts a good deal of pressure on the entrepreneur to take the deal while they have the chance.

But here's the thing about exploding terms: they do absolutely nothing to change the dynamics of the marketplace - they are purely psychological tools and can be safely ignored.

I've seen them in real estate, for example. Such and such company will make an offer to buy a property, but the offer is only good for a week. Lets consider two cases to illustrate my point:

Case 1: It's 2007, and the real estate market is cranking at full throttle. The exploding term sheet is pure bullshit. The property owner has all the cards, and can react to an array of buyers in the time frame of his choosing. The exploding offer does nothing but make the purchaser seem flakey, because when push comes to shove, he'll wait.

Case 2: It's 2009, and nobody wants real estate. The buyer has all the power, because the seller wants out and there are no other buyers. If the seller delays too long, the buyer may find something else to buy. It's in the seller's interest to act as quickly as possible before the deal falls apart. The exploding offer again does nothing, since the market has already provided sufficient motivation to get things done quickly.

So when you get a term sheet with an expiration, ignore it. Act as quickly or as slowly as the realities of the market will allow.

And if you're on the other side of the table, don't make an exploding offer. At best you come off as pushy, and at worst, you'll be embarrassed when you don't follow through with a hollow threat. A better tactic is to simply state that the offer is good until it's not - which is really the truth of the matter.

FiveRuns Dash: Really Flexible Analytics

2009-03-20T10:26:00.001-05:00

We just installed Dash on BackupMyMail. Dash is a new product from FiveRuns that collects data from your Rails app and presents it in a form that Google Analytics users should be familiar with - charts, mainly.

Dash is great. The way it works is that you create simple "recipes" which monitor your rails app in real time. Setup is really easy, and the output is understandable by non-coders. You can track any sort of data that is important. It could be technical data (such as memory usage and performace information), or business data (such as signups or payments).

As an example of what you can do with Dash, I'll show a simple, but very helpful piece of data that we collected from BackupMyMail. We wanted to be able to tell when someone signed up, or when they tried to sign up, but failed. Within minutes, we cranked out the following chart, which is visible from our Dash dashboard (the data in this chart is not real - it's just for testing):

The yellow line is signups. The red line is failed signups. As you can see, when we tested our signup page with bad info, we got a red spike. I can just sit back and watch this chart and it will tell me when someone fails at the signup process. If I see a problem, I can go check the logs to get more info. When they implement auto-refresh, a series of these charts will go up on a monitor all day long.

Granted, this is something that could be accomplished with a custom admin section. The value that Dash provides is the painless implementation, which saves your developers a lot of time and headaches. Dash also presents the data so well that it's much easier to track lots of these types of issues at the same time, which saves the business guys a lot of time and headaches. Everyone wins - visibility into your app increases without having to pay a high cost in development time.

I've only scratched the surface of what Dash can do. I highly recommend checking it out.

BackupMyMail is Here!

2009-03-16T14:33:00.003-05:00

For the last six weeks or so I've been working on a new startup. The company does exactly what it's name suggests: BackupMyMail backs up your email.

What we do a little differently than others is that we backup your online email account (Gmail or Hotmail, for example) and store it in the cloud, where we keep it available for you to download if you ever need it.

The reason we started the company is simple. More and more of our important data is being used by applications that are hosted on line. We've become used to the idea that we should backup our personal computers, but are just now becoming aware that our online data is also at risk.

We would hope that major email providers would have a good backup scheme. To be sure, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and the rest all do have reasonably good backup measures. But that doesn't necessarily keep your email safe. Gmail has lost entire accounts. Not many, but it does happen. All of the majors reserve the right to delete your account. (This happened to me with my old Hotmail account. I didn't log in for 30 days, and when I finally did, everything was gone.) But the most compelling reason to manage your own backups is that you control the data. With BackupMyMail, you can go back in time and extract your account as it was then - before you deleted that customer's email.

BackupMyMail is in beta, and will be giving away free 30 day trials for the next few weeks or so. Sign up for one now and let me know what you think!

Note: the beta version of BackupMyMail only works with Gmail (and Google Apps mail), and is limited to 1GB of mail. Both restrictions will eventually be lifted (sooner rather than later, we hope).

You can also follow us on Twitter at @backupmymail.

SXSW is Coming!

2009-03-11T16:12:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Austin!

It's that time of year again - SWSX Interactive is nearly upon us. For you out-of-towners in for the week, check out the guide to Austin written by my friend and fellow entrepreneur, Chris Treadaway (aka @ctreada). And be sure to check out his new site Youpons.net for discounts from local merchants during your stay.

Lessons from Y Combinator's AngelConf

2009-03-06T14:34:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending AngelConf at Y Combinator. It was a great event - if you couldn't attend, I highly recommend taking the time to watch (or at least listen to) the Justin.TV video. My comments on what I found to be the key points and issues raised at the conference (and how they relate to the startup world in Austin):

Angel investing is a full time job if done in a financially rational manner.
Some angels are perfectly content to knowingly act irrationally. Hey, it's their money.
Since angel investing is a hits-based business, deal volume matters. A portfolio approach is a requirement - the more deals the better. Getting great terms is less important than getting into great deals.
Getting into good angel deals is competitive. Only Angels who provide value - expertise or contacts - get to invest in the hot prospects. Naturally, this takes a lot of work.
Interestingly, since the most successful and prolific angels approach investing as a numbers game, negotiating terms is not very important. The process boils down to this: Find smart people that you like and trust working on big problems and give them money at fair terms quickly. Help them. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Nobody wants to do bad deals, but arguing over details is counterproductive. Again, the idea is not to make every deal a winner, but to make sure that some of your deals make it really big.
Good deals are very hard to recognize - that's why you need to do a lot of them. As soon as they are recognizable, VC's get into the game. You have to place your bets before that happens.
I don't think this works outside of Silicon Valley. There just aren't enough companies to develop a meaningful portfolio unless you're at ground zero. That doesn't mean angels outside of the Valley are wasting their time, but they are not likely acting in a financially rational way - they could make more money with less risk elsewhere.
If we want to see the same sort of explosive growth out of Austin companies that we do from Silicon Valley startups, we need more active, risk-tolerant angels looking at the region. That means we need more hyper-growth potential startups. Startups need investors who need startups who... It's a tough feedback cycle to start, which is why I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Capital Factory. Austin will never be Silicon Valley, but I'd sure like to see it get a good shove in that direction.

I've purposely not commented on the non-financial motivations for angel investing. That's a personal matter that will be different for every investor. There is a definite pay-it-forward element in the Silicon Valley angel community that was well communicated, even celebrated, at AngelConf. I don't want to discount that, as it's tremendously valuable.

It was a great event. I hope to attend next year as well.

UPDATE: Paul Graham has posted a great article on angel investing.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Capistrano!

2009-02-26T09:30:00.000-06:00

Jamis Buck has stopped development of Capistrano. I wish I could say I'm saddened by this, but I'm not. Let me explain.

Capistrano works. For me, it works perfectly. Perhaps I have simple deployment needs, but I can do damn near anything I want by typing the words "cap deploy". Deploying all kinds of web projects cannot get any easier. That is pretty damn cool.

So frankly, I'm glad Jamis gave it up. It's done, and I'm sure that he'll be on to more cool stuff in the future. Meanwhile, Capistrano is as useful as it ever was. So thanks, Jamis. And keep the good stuff coming.

Monitoring Your Brand on the Internet

2009-02-24T11:31:00.000-06:00

Jeremy Bencken has done it again - he's come up with another innovative use of common tools. If you're looking for a cheap (free) way to monitor what people are saying about your business (or anything else for that matter), this is exactly what you're looking for. It covers all the major "Social Media" outlets and is infinitely customizable.

Jeremy has pieced together several free web services into what amounts to a pretty slick system. It requires a little work to set up, but you can't beat the price. This is bootstrapping at it's finest.

He's even included a screen cast. Check it out.

Why $20,000 from Capital Factory is a Good Deal

2009-02-01T14:18:00.099-06:00

Last week, a group of successful entrepreneurs launched Capital Factory here in Austin. It's a program that is similar to Y Combinator (out of Silicon Valley) and TechStars (in Boulder - where I went to college).

Programs like these are great deals for young web entrepreneurs. Oddly, I hear the following complaint most often from these same young entrepreneurs:

"They want 5% of my company for $20,000. That's a valuation of $400,000 and I think that's a lousy deal. Angels are giving money out at $2-3 million pre-money."

The thinking behind this objection is all wrong. Yes, that 5% does imply a value of $400,000. But lets look at what makes up that value: an idea and the willingness of a few smart people to follow up on it. No traction required. No customers, no revenue, no actual proof of anything. Those $3M angel deals are very different animals - they have money, products, and often customers.

As one of my colleagues put it, it's $400,000 more than you had yesterday.

Second - the money that Capital Factory invests is not really an investment. At least, that's not how you should think about it. It's a vote of confidence. It's a signal to other investors that you and Capital Factory are serious. It's a test. What can you do with $20,000 of someone else's money? Can you create tangible value when given the chance? It's a way to convince your family that you're not off on some wild goose chase.

You are not trading 5% of your company for $20,000. Any motivated group of young entrepreneurs can come up with $20,000 very easily without giving up any equity.

No, you are giving up 5% of your company to engage a group of people who have an interest in your success and who have the ability to impact your chances for success. That's worth a lot more than $20,000. Not only to your current venture, but to your future endeavors. This is the stuff that makes ventures work. It's not about the money - it's about the people.

So why offer the money at all? When it comes down to it, the money is just a tangible symbol of seriousness - a way to communicate a sense of urgency and a glue to keep all the parties interested and involved.

So if you think you have what it takes to make a company from nothing, come to Austin - and let Capital Factory help.

Balsamiq Mockups is very good.

2009-01-29T09:47:00.025-06:00

At my new gig, I spend a good bit of time mocking up wireframes for a new web app. I tried Omnigraffle, Powerpoint, Keynote, and finally settled on Balsamiq Mockups. It really is a great program. It's simple and hyper-focused on one task - software mockups.

The user interface is trivial (you drag and drop screen elements onto the page and move them around). The learning curve is zero. But the best part is that the mockups are styled to look like hand drawings. At first I thought it was an unnecessary gimmick, but as I began to use it, I really appreciate the feature.

Seeing the mockups with their rough, hand-drawn look reinforces that they are mockups, not cast-in-stone specs. That is a very powerful communication tool when dealing with clients or bosses who want progress updates. You don't have to preface everything with "this is a mockup, not real software", or "this is a crude alpha" (how crude?). It's really great - people instinctively understand the stage of development just by looking at the mockups.

Balsamiq is a little buggy, but not in a way that stops you from working. And I wonder if that has more to do with Adobe Air than Balsamiq. In any case, I highly recommend it.

Note: The makers of Balsamiq give a way free copies to bloggers who write honest reviews of the product. I did not take advantage of that program - I paid for my copy and liked it enough to tell the world about it. I also have a selfish interest in that I want to be able to share Balsamiq files with others, which won't be possible until everyone has Balsamiq...

Changes

2009-01-16T21:22:00.002-06:00

My free time just took a nose dive. I've just started working on a new web business - a properly funded one with other people involved. So between that and my current gig in the real estate investment business I won't have much time to muck about with the ins and outs of my beloved web experiments.

The new business is a web company based here in Austin, and hopefully we'll have something to show for it in the coming months.

Onward!

Protect your Online Data

2009-01-06T09:33:00.002-06:00

Not a week goes by after my rant about online app security and Twitter gets hacked. Just days after Twitter users were tricked into divulging their passwords to a fake Twitter site, the company's developer tools were breached. Take a second to think about how bad this could have been. Or how bad it could still get.

Another case this week: Journalspace no longer exists. The company is gone forever, along with thousands of blogs. The company hinted that it might have been due to sabotage by a former employee. Obviously, it also took a healthy dose of complacency on the part of the company, but it happened.

Now, nobody is going to lose a whole lot of sleep if Twitter evaporates in a puff of smoke. (Well, most people won't). But losing a 6 year old blog can be pretty painful, especially if the author was using its SEO mojo to drive a consulting business.

What has me really freaked out is what would happen if it wasn't Twitter that got hacked, but Mint or Wesabe.

The interconnection of web apps is a great, but frightening trend. Make sure you protect yourself - and your data. This is an area of tech that is racing ahead, perhaps a little too quickly.

Web Security

2008-12-30T10:46:00.003-06:00

I've been noticing a trend among web apps for the past couple years. They want you to be very trusting.

As the new year rolls in, I thought I would take a look at some personal finance apps. Specifically, Mint and Wesabe. I saw a panel discussion at South By Southwest a couple years ago that included one of the founders of Wesabe. I was interested in the concept at the time, but thought I'd give them a little time to get their house in order. Finances are frustrating enough without dealing with "beta" software.

About the same time I heard about Wesabe's competitor, Mint. And Twitter was just beginning to explode.

In any case, I didn't make it past the second screen of the Mint or Wesabe signup process.

I love that there are new great things to be done on the web, but what I don't like is that all three of these apps ask me to trust them with an awful lot. Twitter asks me for my email password. You know, the same one that allows me to reset my password on just about every account I have. Wesabe and Mint take it a step further. They want my bank account password. I was blown away. They want access to the password that would allow people to withdraw cash or close my accounts.

If I walked up to you and asked you for your bank credentials and told you I just wanted to show you something cool, you'd probably want to punch me in the throat. But that is exactly what all of these sites are doing. They're saying "trust us - we know what we're doing."

And I want to trust. Heck, the guy from Wesabe seemed like a nice man. I practically met him at SXSW! But what about the guy he hires? What about the hundreds of hackers throughout the world who see a startup collecting bank info. I bet it's a lot easier to hack a startup than an actual bank... So why, again, should I trust?

I've been called paranoid for not allowing 3rd parties to have my email password. I suppose I am a little. After all, Google has it. I've even written a test app that asks for an email password myself (I never released it, however). But my bank account? The only ones who have that are the banks. And they're on the hook for my money.

So sorry, Mint & Wesabe. I want to use your products, but I just can't do it if you're going to ask me for the keys to my life savings.

How do we fix this? It kills me that I'd probably be just fine using all this stuff but I still can't bring myself to pull the trigger. The consequences of a breach, no matter how remote, are truly dire.

This strikes me as a huge business opportunity, but I haven't the foggiest idea how to solve the problem.

Starting with Nothing

2008-11-12T15:22:00.003-06:00

The internet is a small place. Out of the blue from across the Atlantic, I received an email from a gentleman named Peter Harris who makes films on the cheap. Turns out he used to own the domain 9thyard.com and was looking around for it. When he saw that the subject matter of my blog is starting a company on a shoestring budget, he chimed in with a show of support.

He also provided me with a teaser film he made for a total of £25. Check it out:

Equinox

No, it's not going to give Peter Jackson a run for his money. And some will say that such an effort requires a lot of "charity" from all of folks involved. True on both accounts. But to quibble with the true cost of such an effort is to miss the point.

Nobody smart will till you that you can sustain a business on pennies and dreams. I've said before that all great businesses will at some point take advantage of external financing. I still believe that. The message here is that you can produce something "good enough" one time for practically nothing. In fact, in order to get started, you will probably have to.

That "good enough" start just may turn out to be what it takes to begin a much bigger project that transforms into greatness over time.

If you have an example of a project that began from nothing and can show me how it all began, please let me know and I'll write it up.

Happy Birthday, USMC!

2008-11-10T10:10:00.000-06:00

And thanks for all you do for us.

Introduce Yourself

2008-10-09T09:17:00.000-05:00

It's been about two months since I've started this blog, and lo and behold, I have subscribers. Who knew?

I've also been contacted by three entrepreneurs who found me though this blog. All three have been great contacts that may be helpful to all of us some day. Which makes me wonder - what about the rest of you? There are quite a bit more that three people subscribed to this blog, and I'd like to get to know each of you. No matter how slight the contact, I have learned over the years that it's always a good thing to reach out.

So if you've subscribed to this blog, let me know. Tell me what you're up to and what you think of my project. There just might be some overlap where we can help each other.

PR Slugs

2008-09-26T14:35:00.002-05:00

Anyone with a blog knows that there is a terrible place out there somewhere. A place that must be dark and horrible, where the inhabitants long to cry out in pain but can't muster the courage or energy.

That place, is of course, is the offices of PR firms. Judging by the volume of crappy suggestions I get from them, they must be filled with low-earning, life-hating people just begging for something useful to do. I have gotten emails from poor, helpless PR lackeys asking me to write posts about Trident gum, Clorox, and many other captivating products. All in exchange for.... NOTHING! Yes, Corporate America expects me to fill my website with garbage benefitting them for free. I wonder what the hit rate is. How many people really got so excited about that Trident flavor that they just had to share their feelings with the world? My guess: exactly zero*.

Which is why it is so important that cold emails do not come from PR people. Send them directly. You'll get a much better response.

For example, I got an email from Widgetbox asking me to sign up for their blog network. I didn't know they had one. I gave it a shot - the widget is in the bottom right of this blog right now. I don't know if it will work, but I appreciate the fact that they took the time to blast these emails out themselves rather than via some PR flack. I also appreciate that the offer somehow benefits me (in theory, at least).

Two lessons here:

Don't outsource your relationships.
If you're boring, you must also be helpful. Boring and useless gets you nowhere.

*I am well aware of the illogic of me writing about me not writing about Trident, et al. Consistency is overrated.

Financial Chaos

2008-09-22T13:57:00.007-05:00

I don't write much about my day job here, but I can't let these days pass without at least a comment on what will turn out to be a remarkable time in the financial and political history of the US. If you don't pay attention to the financial markets, do yourself a favor and start now. You don't want to miss this.

As much fun as web apps have been to hack away on, commercial real estate investment is how I earn my real living. After watching the ups and downs of leveraged real estate, I've learned to respect to the wonder of leverage and the horrors it conjures when mistreated.

Here's the short version of what has come to pass:

Everyone thought home ownership was good, no matter what.
People borrowed lots of money to have those good homes, no matter what.
Loan originators took those loans, packed 'em up and sold them as securities to ensure that they would profit, no matter what.
Wall Street ate those securities up and leveraged them heavily. Surely the government could not let them fail, no matter what.
'What' happened and it mattered.

What happened is that the sheer size of the wad of shaky financial instruments is so massive that nobody can make it go away, not even Unlce Sam. Someone has to take some big losses. The way it's shaking out, those losses will be shared by pretty much everyone. That's life in the big city, I suppose.

I'll leave you with two dubious but often repeated quotations (if anyone can confirm these, it'd be much appreciated). I think that the entrepreneurs out there will appreciate the sentiment, and the timing seems appropriate.

"Bear markets return stocks to their rightful owners." - J.P. Morgan

"The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets." - John D. Rockefeller

PS: We are looking to acquire retail properties in Austin. If you know of a good one for sale, let me know.

Changing attachment_fu Thumbnail Sizes

2008-09-12T14:44:00.037-05:00

One of my side project involves photo uploads. Users were giving me feedback that the pictures were too small. No big deal, I thought, I'll just make them bigger. That's easy with attachment_fu; you just set up another thumbnail size in the photo model.

But how do you deal with all the other photos that have already been uploaded? A quick google search turned up this technique on Curtis Edmond's blog. Curtis left out a good bit of the implementation, so I'll spell it out here.

First, you need to create a folder called "attachment_fu_thumbnails" in the vendor/plugins directory. It's important to start the name of the folder with attachment_fu so that you will remember that you were monkeying around with the attachment_fu code later on. (I currently have four attachment_fu hacks in my vendor directory via this method).

Then create a file called init.rb in the new folder. It should contain the following code, which I adapted from Curtis's blog:

# in vendor/plugins/attachment_fu_thumbnails/init.rb
Technoweenie::AttachmentFu::InstanceMethods.module_eval do
def create_thumbnail_size(target_size)
actual_size = self.attachment_options[:thumbnails][target_size]
raise "this class doesn't have a thubnail size for #{target_size}" if actual_size.nil?
tmp = self.create_temp_file
self.create_or_update_thumbnail(tmp, target_size.to_s, actual_size)
FileUtils.rm_rf(Dir.glob(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'tmp', 'attachment_fu', '*')))
end
end

That code allows you to call the method

create_thumbnail_size(:size)

on any object which has attachment_fu attachments.

The easiest way to do that is via a rake task. This code goes in a file called thumbnails.rake, which should be placed in /lib/tasks (this version creates two new thumbnails per object - :medium and :bigger).

#in /lib/tasks/thumbnails.rake
namespace :utils do
desc "Generates :medium and :bigger thumbnails for all Pictures"
task (:thumb => :environment) do
images = Picture.find(:all)
images.each do |i|
if i.parent_id == nil # only create thumbs for base images
i.create_thumbnail_size(:medium)
i.create_thumbnail_size(:bigger)
puts "Generated thumbs for Picture.id == #{i.id}"
end
end
end
end

To create your new thumbnails, add the geometry string(s) to your image model and run

rake utils:thumb

from your app's home directory. Presto - all your old photos now have new thumbnail objects with corresponding files.

WARNING: This code, while it worked for me, is basically untested. Make sure you test it thoroughly before using in a production environment.

PS: Safari users, I can't for the life of me figure out why overflow: auto doesn't work. Try Firefox - the code looks better.

Link Building Tactics

2008-09-08T09:47:00.001-05:00

As I began this blog a couple months back, I was having a hard time coming up with concrete, useful techniques that I could use to help build links to my various web projects.

Thankfully, another Austin entrepreneur, Jeremy Bencken, has done this work for me. If you are in need of web promotion mojo, subscribe to his BuzzStream Blog. Two gems to check out right away:

Link Jujitsu - A technique that uses your competitors' success to find relevant conversations that are happening right now elsewhere on the web. It takes me about 5 minutes to do this each day, and it works. All you need is a close competitor to stalk.

Lazy Reporters - That's not what Jeremy calls this technique, but what he's describing is basically a way to make life easy for reporters. In a nutshell, you provide data in a format that's easily accessible and useful to reporters. They can then link to you or quote you without ever leaving their browser. This one is really only useful if you have user generated content and you can provide some sort of insight via the data you collect.

I can't wait for Jeremy's next idea. Good stuff.

Need To Get Out of the House? Try Conjunctured

2008-09-05T13:36:00.001-05:00

The idea of coworking is starting to pop up a lot here in Austin. Basically, what the term means is that people can go to an office and rent space by the day in an environment that encourages interaction. For people like me who work out of their homes, the desire to get out of the house and actually see some people can be pretty appealing.

With that in mind, I took a trip over to Conjunctured, located on 7th street in east Austin. It's basically an old house that's been converted for use as an office. It's being run by a small group of young entrepreneurs who are pretty fired up about the concept. At first I was a little concerned that it would be a "startup frat house" complete with beer cans and dirty couches, but that fear turned out to be completely unfounded. The space in well-lit, clean and generally very usable. They have a coffee/espresso machine, kitchen area and a conference room. A stream of entrepreneurs and sole proprietors flows through the place at all times, which provides for a nice opportunity to get out and meet like-minded folks while also getting some work done.

Of course, as a real estate guy, I had to check it out just because it's such an off-the-wall business model. The jury's still out on how this trend plays out financially, but I think they've latched onto a good thing, and I hope it continues.

All in all, well done, guys. I anticipate stopping by now and then for a break from the home office blues.

Note: This post may sound like an advertisement, but I assure you, it's not. It's just my perspective after stopping by to work at Conjunctured for a day.

Directory Experiment: Not Entirely Worthless

2008-09-03T11:59:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a while since I began the directory submission experiment. I sorted through a couple hundred potential blog and RSS directories, picked the best ones and submitted this blog to them. I wish I could say it was a smashing success, but that would make me a worthless liar.

Out of all of the directories that I screened and then took the time to submit to, only 2 have provided any traffic. And the traffic they did provide was a trickle.

www.blogcatalog.com was the clear winner, providing me with 14 new visits.
www.blogged.com came in 2nd with 4.

The rest? A big fat zero, or maybe an employee verifying that my blog isn't spam.

Now, I don't have any way of verifying that I'm not getting SEO help just by having the links out there, but many of them are nofollow links, so I doubt it. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the search engines catalog these sites and devalue their links. (Although I did try to stick with human-edited sites to minimize this.)

Is it worth the time to submit? I don't think so. If I do it again, I'll do the two I mentioned above and forget about the rest. Commenting on blogs and leaving a link is an order of magnitude more effective - I have hundreds of visits from other blogs. Alltop is working out well, but I wonder if that will continue as it gets more crowded.