aaron bird's blog

Bizible raises cash for local marketing

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:35:53 -0800

Bizible raises cash for local marketing

Why Your Product Must be Social - My Guest Post on GeekWire

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:55:53 -0700

Why Your Product Must be Social - My Guest Post on GeekWire

Facebook (finally) launches Deals

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:20:58 -0700

Facebook (finally) launches Deals

Resource Fitness on Voice of America

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:08:33 -0700

Resource Fitness on Voice of America

How to move your blog to tumblr

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:00:08 -0700

I just moved my blog from Blogger to tumblr and the first thing I did was search for a site that gave me all the details on how to do this. I couldn’t find one, so here are the steps I went through for those of you that may want to do the same thing. If you know of a better way to do this, let me know!

At first this seems pretty straight forward, but there are few gotchas like moving your old posts over to your new blog and keeping your RSS subscribers. The later is particularly troublesoom if you use a custom domain like I do (aaronbird.net rather than aaron-bird.tumblr.com).

Create a tumblr blog.
Import your old posts from your old blog to tumblr - This way you migrate all your old content with you. This is specific to the blogging platform you are moving from. Since I moved from Blogger, a quick search yeilded this tool to import my old posts.
Add your analytics tracking to your tumblr blog - This ensures that you keep tracking data in the new blog. I use Google Analytics, so I followed these instructions. In addition, for those of you like me that use a customer domain for your blog, you will want to use analytics to track when people have mostly stopped going to your old blog.
If you don’t have one already, create a feedburner feed. This will enable you to keep your RSS subscribers during the move. Note that you will want to use your new tumblr rss as the “originial feed”. Below are my settings as an example.
Update your rss links on your tumblr blog to point to the new feedburner feed - This ensures that new subscribes use your feedburner feed and not your tumblr one. I’m assuming you want to use feedburner as your feed (rather than tumblr). I like this as it will make it much easier if I need to move my blog again, as my feed URL won’t change when my blog changes (the problem I ran into when moving from Blogger to tumblr). Feedburner also gives you a bunch of nice analytics features. Here are instructions for updaing the RSS links on your tumblr blog. Note that f you change you theme, you will need to do this again. Does anyone know how to edit the tumblr {RSS} variable? That would be an easier solution.
Redirect your old feed to the feedburner feed - Again, I moved from Blogger, so here is how I did it, your blog may be different. From the admin page in Blogger -> Setting tab -> Publishing -> Site Feed -> Post Publishing URL - set this to your new Feedburner URL. This is key as it will redirect all of the subscribers on your old blog to your new Feedburner feed. That way you won’t loose any subscribers, and the migration will be transparent to them.
Move your custom domain to tumblr - If you use a custom domain name (like I do), this becomes a little tricky as most of my subscribers are getting my old blogger feed with my custom domain (www.aaronbird.net/feeds/posts/default), which thanks to step (6) now redirects to feeds.feedburner.com/aaronbird. However, when I move my DNS record to point to tumblr (from Blogger), tumblr won’t serve a feed from /feeds/posts/default, in fact, they’ll serve a 404. So, here is my workaround:

Blog a post on both blogs telling people to update their feeds to the new feedburner url.
Wait some time to move the DNS over to tumblr (when you’re ready, here are the instructions). I’ll use feedburner’s analytics to tell me when most people are coming directly to the feed (rather than the redirect from Blogger). And when that is the case, I’ll move the DNS record over to tumblr (and complete the move).

Done!

2010 Goal Recap

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:30:07 -0700

Overall I’m happy with 2010. Below is a re-cap of my original 2010 goals as of the start of 2010. I hit all but 1 P0 and none of the P1s. I’m very happy with this considering I also left Microsoft and started a company which were not in my original 2010 plan and thus derailed some of the other goals. This was very much a a welcomed change to my plans. Soon to come, a post on my 2011 goals. It’s going to be an awesome year - by far my best yet.

P0 - Compete in BJJ tournament in competition fighting shape

I totally failed on this one. If anything, I’m in worse shape than I was at the start of 2010. I’m definitely going to change that in 2011.

P0 - Get promoted at work

Achieved in March/April (although I have since left Microsoft :-))

P0 - Get Megan’s company off the ground

We really nailed this one. Megan did about 20 events last year, and she has already booked more that that for 2011. She is off to the races and doesn’t need as much of my help anymore. She has a first page ranking for “Seattle wedding planner” and “Seattle event planner” on Google, and has the top spot on Yelp for both “Seattle wedding planner” and “Seattle event planner”.

P0 - Get SeattleAccountantGuide online and generating revenue

We nailed this. Thanks mostly to Andy Turman, my sales extraordinaire.

P0 - Study up on C#, ASP.NET MVC, and Windows Azure cloud services

Very much done. The soon to be launched Givedend.com social media company is based entirely on ASP.NET MVC and Windows & SQL Azure.

P1 - Win a BJJ tournament
P1 - Train for an MMA fight
P1 - Learn some Portuguese
P1 - Go to Brazil

I made no progress on my P1 goals :-(

"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘Faster Horses’"

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:18:55 -0700

“If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘Faster Horses’”

- Henry Ford (via mjking)

Interview on NPR

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:05:00 -0700

I was interviewed for All Things Considered about Resource Fitness and our electricity producing fitness equipment a few weeks ago. It aired on Thur March 10th. You can listen to it online here (it’s a quick 3 min segment). I’m really happy with the outcome and we have seen a big spike in traffic and calls since (as expected).

If you know anyone interested in investing in Resource Fitness, contact me.

Moving my blog to tumblr - UPDATE YOUR RSS FEEDS

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:57:23 -0700

I’m moving my blog to tumblr, so you will need to update your rss feeds. The new feed will be.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/aaronbird

Please update your RSS feed ASAP, so I can move my blog over.

Note for those of you that blog: I’ve been with blogger for 3 years and never thought about how (or what would happen) when I move my blog (obviously, it breaks all your RSS subscribers unless your new RSS feed just so happens to be at the same URL as your old - very unlikely). Using Feedburner is a no-brainer, as it gives you a level of indirection between your blog URL and your RSS feed URL (as well as some cool analytics).

Running Python Cron Jobs in Windows Azure

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 19:05:00 -0800

I have some python scripts that store some data in my SQL Azure database and I want them run daily from my web role. Why my web role? Because I only have a web tier and it’s not worth dedicating a worker for this task. It took about 5 hours today getting this just right, so here is what I did in case anyone else needs to do something similar. First, thanks to Steve Marx for some very helpful posts on the topic of Azure startup task.

First, I included the python installer and pyodbc.pyd (for the SQL connection) in my web role project, as well as my python scripts themselves. I marked the scripts as Content so that I can reference them in the approot directory. I also marked the python installer and pyodbc as “Copy to Output directory” : “Copy always” so I can run them from my bat file on startup.

I then create the installcrawler.cmd bat file that contains the following:

1: install python 2.7

2: copy pyodbc to the python directory

3: start the task scheduler - this is not started by default on Azure

4-7: setup my scheduled tasks to run when needed. Note that in my case, the timezone on the VM is GMT

Then kick-off a deployment, get a cup of coffee, write a blog post, and then RDP into the VM to make sure all is well. If you need a refresher course on “at” and scheduled tasks as I did, here is a good reference.

UPDATE 10/13: As Steve Marx pointed out when he read this post, this will only work on a single instance web role. If we add more instances, then the tasks will run in each instance, which in my case is not what I want to happen. So, here is a fix to allow for multi-instance:

Rather than running installcrawler.cmd (shown above) at startup, run a powershell file that only installs the python scripts if we are on the first instance. See that below.

Again, thanks to Steve Marx for some great blog posts on the topics of running powershell scripts at startup. Note that the $role.Id.Contains(“_0”) test is what limits the installation to the first instance. Obviously, if this instance is down for the monthly OS upgrade (or anything else), your scripts won’t run. This is fine for us, as this is a background task that doesn’t need to happen exactly on schedule 100% of the time.

Moving my blog to tumblr

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:52:17 -0800

Here is my first post on tumblr, I’ll set up dns for aaronbird.net and hopefully import my old posts soon.

Google Integrating Local Results in Main SERP

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:04:00 -0700

It looks like Google is experimenting with integrating the local results interspersed with non-local results in main SERP page. See an example below, with a comparison to the previous version of keeping local results on top.

This should have a very interesting impact on local SEO if these changes are made everywhere.

Perspective from Class of 2014

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:32:00 -0700

Every year the administrators at Wisconsin’s Beloit College put together a list of information about incoming freshmen to explain the perspective of the new class, here are some highlights:
- Rarely use email as it’s too slow
- Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.
- Never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day
- Never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone
- There have always been “hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch

From AdCenter to Windows Azure

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:33:00 -0700

Yesterday was my first day working in Windows Azure. I’m really excited to be building the platform that will enable the next generation of online services. More soon on the exciting stuff we are working on…

Subsidized Wages Rather Than Unemployment

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:38:00 -0700

My first observation in this post is that sites like eLance and the lower wage, on-demand workers they provide are critical to boostrapped startups these days. I’ve used eLance a ton over the past year and a half and I can say for sure that The Accountant Guide wouldn’t be were it is today with that source of labor. So, my first premise is that low wage on-demand labor significantly helps foster startups in the early stages when capital, revenue, and earnings are sparse.

Washington (DC) has been giving a lot of unemployment benefits lately. The argument is that we need to in order to help rebound the economy. Here is my proposal: Instead of giving someone unemployment benefits, create a market for labor in which the demand is met by small companies and startups and the government matches the pay of the employer. So, for instance if I normally make 40/hr, the government will match a startups 20/hr on this market. The benefit is that we help startups get off the ground (which is critical to a rebound in the economy), get people back to work, and the government’s money incentivizes working rather than “looking for a job”. In short, the government’s money helps create jobs that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, people get to work rather than sit at home, and startups are created that otherwise would not have been able to get off the ground.

Thoughts?

Starbucks Startups

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:37:00 -0700

I’m taking 2 weeks off, during which time I’ve been doing some work for 2 startups I’m helping with (www.seattleaccountantguide.com and www.resourcefitness.net) and I’ve been doing a lot of it from coffee shops. This is a familiar situation for me as I was involved in a startup in the past, and the 4 of us would meet in coffee shops in Santa Barbara and work for hours on end from them. I love this idea, that coffee shops across the country are the home for startups and entrepreneurs fuelled by $3 coffee and free wifi. There is really something empowering and American about this idea. All you need to start the next Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, or Google is a laptop, a local coffee shop, a dream, and most importantly the belief that you can. HP and Apple were started in (now famous) garages in Silicon Valley. In the current world of the internet, free wifi, and the ever present local coffee shop, the resource requirements to start the next billion dollar company, have fallen below even the need for a garage. I believe the next generation of startups will likely be started out of coffee shops across the country, and I’m doing my best to prove this.

Entrepreneurship and the “Math Isn’t There”

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:34:00 -0700

I was meeting with Adam last week and he was talking about the early days of TheGreenMicroGym – when it was nothing more than a concept on paper, when he pitched the idea to people, he often got the feedback on the business model that, “the math isn’t there”. The truth is, those people were right, given the current paradigm, the math isn’t there. Adam didn’t see the math, and he didn’t care about the current paradigm. Because even though he may not have articulated it to the VCs and potential investors, his idea wasn’t about the math being there for the current paradigm of gyms, it was about changing the paradigm to a world where the math was there.
This is the foundation of entrepreneurship. The definition of entrepreneurship is to take the same set of resources (land, labor, capital, energy) and create more value than was created by those resources before you. The only way to do this, is to change the paradigm. If you look at the problem the same way everyone else is looking at it, you will draw the same conclusions as everyone else. You will all agree on when the math ads up and when it doesn’t. The key to innovation and entrepreneurship is to change the way you look at the problem.
Adam believes that people will be inspired by a gym that does more than help you burn calories and believes in more than getting you to %8 body fat. 24hr fitness, LA Fitness, Precor, and Life Fitness don’t believe this. Adam has a different paradigm and we’ll see if it’s the right one.

Continuous Deployment at Digg

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:42:00 -0700

Interesting article on continuous deployment. I like some of the concepts but I’m not convinced this would work for an online system like AdCenter that operates a service people actually pay for. It would be interesting to know the number of bugs found in production, mean time to detection, and mean time to a fix with this system as compared to a more traditional release cycle.

Get Distance Between 2 Cities in Ruby

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:06:00 -0700

I had to find the distance between 2 cities using Ruby, here is my code. Note that you can find out about the Yahoo REST API and the geocoder.us service by following those links. You will need to sign up for a Yahoo developer key (it’s free and a quick form). I’ve included the default Yahoo API key below so the sample will work.

I know, I’m not parsing the XML response the right way, but it works, I needed to hack something together for my Seattle Accountant Site and I didn’t want to deal with XML parsing.

You will also notice that I added a retry for the HTTP request. I need this as this script is run many times in a row and occasionally the request fails. So much for TCP being a “reliable” protocol.


def get_url2(url)
  retry_count = 0
  while true    
    begin
      return resp = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url))
    rescue
      retry_count+=1
      puts "retrying " + retry_count.to_s() + ":" + url
    end
  end
end

def get_city_distance(city1, state1, city2, state2)
  url = "http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=BswRHq7V34F6vFQJHH_PH29zDy9AkdHq7TGuUk8jPYCPq9QfILVzoZIOi1Mu7Bp_hQ--&city=" + city1.gsub(' ','+') + "&state=" + state1
  resp = get_url2(url)
  long1 = resp.body.split('')[1].split('')[0]
  lat1 = resp.body.split('')[1].split('')[0]

  url = "http://local.yahooapis.com/MapsService/V1/geocode?appid=BswRHq7V34F6vFQJHH_PH29zDy9AkdHq7TGuUk8jPYCPq9QfILVzoZIOi1Mu7Bp_hQ--&city=" + city2.gsub(' ','+') + "&state=" + state2
  resp = get_url2(url)
  long2 = resp.body.split('')[1].split('')[0]
  lat2 = resp.body.split('')[1].split('')[0]

  url = "http://geocoder.us/service/distance?lat1=" + lat1 + "&lat2=" + lat2 + "&lng1=" + long1 + "&lng2=" + long2
  resp = get_url2(url)

  distance = resp.body.split("=")[1].split('miles')[0].strip.to_f

  #puts lat1 + "," + long1 + "," + lat1 + "," +lat2 + ": '" + distance.to_s + "'"

  return distance
end

Hello CondoInternet.net, Later Comcast

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 14:57:00 -0700

I just signed up for internet from CondoInternet.net and it rocks. When I first read about it getting 100 mbs, I was VERY skeptical. However, after doing some research and realizing that their primary business is commercial internet for companies in downtown Seattle (like Real Networks) I realized that they may actually live up to the promise.

I’ve been dying for a Comcast alternative, and this was it. I totally got rid of TV/internet from Comcast, and I’m now on internet from CondoInternet.net, I use Boxee and Hulu for internet TV and Amazon and Netflix for internet movies. Getting rid of the ancient, monopolistic cable company felt good.

So, how fast is it? I did a speed test and here are the results. Summary: Fucking Fast! So fast in fact, that my wireless router can’t keep up (not even when I’m hardwired into the LAN). So I have to buy a new wireless router.

Download: 104 mbs
Upload: 44 mbs
Ping: 6 ms

Comcast:

CondoInternet.net (no router in the picture):