There’s no reason why the person collecting money should be the only asshole. In many situations, everyone involved wants people to pay. For example, if the event is a paintballing trip, the whole group is affected if someone doesn’t pay their share. Everyone has to pay more themselves, or the event is not as fun, or the event is cancelled completely. That’s why we have Nudge. Nudge enables all of the group members to remind people that they need to pay.

This is just our MVP- we’re working on more features as I’m writing this. The Nudge is just the beginning of our social accountability. Stay tuned for more, but for now, check out PayWithMe!

These projects will provide a few examples of what I can do right but also a few of what I can do completely wrong. Especially in clanfade: this was my first ever PHP project. It’s cool to look back through it and see how I thought when I was first starting.

I’m doing this because I don’t really see a reason not to. Someone may find my code and find it helpful, or they may not, either way, it’s out there.

My first plan on creating a company blog was to make it development focused. It would be more of a programming blog than a company one. If it generated any sales, great, but the focus would be to give back to the programming community and contribute ideas, code snippets, and so on. Many company blogs follow this model, although a lot are probably at least somewhat detached from the company and come from the point of view of a specific developer rather than representing the company as a whole.

Would this be effective, though? What is the purpose of a company blog? I’m not entirely sure. This would attract developers, presumably, but is that what we want to do in order to make the company successful? Is the point of running a company blog to contribute to the success of the company?

Another approach would be to generate content that is relevant to the interests of the company. This could mean anything, so let me be more specific. The blog could include recent news about the company’s products, creative ways to use the company’s products, or the top features of the products based on user feedback. This blog would be valuable for all users rather than just programmers and could also generate sales for the company.

That seems like a good idea! But I’m wondering if a blog could be created that would have value to the company as well as the users. Because of my English classes, I have begun to see writing as a tool for organizing thoughts as well as a tool for conveying ideas. I remember back a long time about when I was working on a project involving the intelligence cycle (which I still don’t understand but the man in charge seemed to) that had a completely internal blog for communication among developers. That’s a pretty cool idea. I wonder if any other organizations have internal blogs? The project wasn’t successful but it helped me to understand that blogging was a tool in the same way that writing is since, without a doubt, blogging is writing.

Once we get the company started back up, if we ever do, these are just some things that we will have to think about.

The new version of Mint also includes MATE, but from my brief experience with it on Ubuntu it is a degraded GNOME 2 experience. It is a fork from a previous version of GNOME 2 before it included GNOME Shell. It doesn’t include all of the features that were present in GNOME 2. It was also pretty buggy when I used it. Overall, it didn’t feel like a stable or well crafted piece of software just yet. I may give it another shot.

I read through the Gentoo installation manual and it includes some pretty cool stuff. I’m thinking about learning more about how a Linux system works so that my choices of distributions will greatly increase. I’m sure that I could handle more than just Ubuntu and Linux Mint now but if I were to really learn how things were working I could have a lot more control over what software is being ran. I’m not sure if I have the time to get into this stuff, though, so I’m not doing anything big yet.

My first complaint is in the upgrading process itself. Whenever I upgrade my desktop, something always goes wrong. I can’t remember a single upgrade that went smoothly. When I upgrade, that entire day because an “upgrade day”, where I spend the rest of the day trying to fix my computer so that I can use it again. This time, the issue was related to the login process. I had to uninstall lightdm (which uninstalled ubuntu-desktop as well but I guess I don’t need that) and install gdm in order to get it work. I’m not really sure why that made it work, though. lightdm was pretty, but I guess I can’t use it.

I didn’t realize that upgrading to 11.10 would require me to use GNOME 3 rather than GNOME 2. And even though I remember reading something about that, I didn’t realize that GNOME 3 was going to be so radically different than GNOME 3. All of this Unity stuff has always gotten on my nerves. I feel like Ubuntu is straying away from providing a solid user experience and focusing more on the extras. I suppose that many noticed this a lot earlier, though.

Overall, I just don’t feel like GNOME 3 is a polished experience in the same ways that GNOME 2 was. It feels thrown together, almost amateur. I would be more specific in how it doesn’t feel like but that will be another post.

This is just my initial reactions from using things for a good half an hour (although I spent a lot of that getting the login to work.) I’ll be talking about this more in the future, so stay tuned.

The project is complete as of now but I may not be done with it. I’m not really sure what else I will do with it. Development-wise, there are still a few features that I could build on to make it really solid. Or, I could try and monetize it, but I’m not sure how far that would get. I was thinking about trying to get as much math as I could in it as possible and trying out some statistical analysis. We’ll see.

Here’s the link: TweetReel. Check it out if you get a chance!

1. tweetreel.net: This one is pretty much done. The idea stemmed from a similar site that I did in the past called TweetTunes. I sold that site, but I plan on keeping this one. Or maybe I will sell it, I’m not sure. I want to keep it up and running to have in my portfolio. I’ll go in to more detail about this when I do a post about it, so stay tuned for that.
2. redditorschoice.com: Similar to the first project, this one is just about done. I’ll be doing a site release post on this soon as well. I have a lot more ideas for it, but those are on hold since the site was relatively unsuccessful financially. C’mon Redditors, buy more stuff! It still got positive feedback, though, which is good.
3. GitHub WordPress Plugin: My first formal open source contribution. I forked it from an older project that hadn’t been updated since 2009. I plan on using it on this blog as soon as it is functional (and as soon as I have enough stuff on GitHub to show off). You’ll be hearing more about this soon as I approach finishing what I have planned for it.
4. Fresh Store Builder: I’m currently a support person and developer for Fresh Store Builder. It’s a cool project, the guy in charge has really done a good job in building a good script. I’m not really a fan of doing support, though, but it has helped me learn about how the script works. Hopefully I’ll be able to dig into the development aspect more in the future.
5. BeanKounter: No link for this one. I can’t really say much about this, but it’s also a cool project. It’s getting me into Ruby on Rails which is really awesome if you’ve been working with PHP all of your life.

That’s it. My current goals are to finish up on everything except for the bottom two and then focus on them. I have a few more ideas for personal projects, some small ideas and some large, but I don’t anticipate starting any of them in the near future. Stay tuned for the site releases and more posts.

I’m going to try and use blogging as a tool rather than as work. It’s a tool that I will use to get my thoughts organized and keep on track. I used to use http://750words.com/ for this (which is a really good site that I recommend you check out) but I had trouble sticking to that. I also found that the ability to write about anything and have it be secure and totally personal wasn’t as good as it should be. I eventually ran out of stuff to write about and again it started to seem more like work than something that was helpful.

One thing that I am actually planning out to write on this blog is new site releases. At the moment, I have two that I have to write up. It’s a good way to sum up a project. So, stick around for those two site releases, and whatever else I decide to write about (if anything) in the next few days.

I don’t intend on driving any traffic to the site, but rather to have it for my portfolio. I’ll be very surprised if it even gets a post from someone other than me, but we’ll see.

You can find Aliens Invade here. If you do happen to check it out, sign up and post! Also, if you like it, please comment here!