Blog

Speaking of Kickstarter (I’ve mentioned it many times). gTar, a guitar-playing learning tool that uses an iPhone to teach you how to play, is a new project on Kickstarter that seems to be a smash-hit right out of the gate. It hassurpassedits stated goal of raising $100,000 in less than 24 hours. Who knows where […]

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Justin Kan about his first experience using programming on the job: A couple more hours of applied effort and I had a macro that looped through all the images in a directory tree and laid them out in Excel. I spent the next four days surfing the web and handing out files. The first time […]

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Om Malik sat down with Perry Chen for a really great and in-depth interview about the success of Kickstarter. I think, we’re able to offer people the ability to overcome that one core roadblock — the funding — and then additionally allow people to build this community and nurture an audience around a project. I […]

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A great short film about Pete Rose day-to-day. I hired Pete Rose in Atlantic City in 2003 when I worked for a sports memorabilia company to sign autographs. Out of the 45 or so athletes I worked with during my time there, including many hall of famers and still-working athletes, Pete Rose was one of […]

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An excellent point by Alex Payne on something that always bothered him about TechCrunch: For a publication with “tech” in the name, technology only ever seemed ambiently present in TechCrunch’s reporting. Software and hardware are background music for the site’s real interests: money and power, success and failure, who’s up and who’s down. TechCrunch often […]

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Not-so-hot on the heels of my interview with Panic in September 2009comes Coda 2 and its sister? iPad app Diet Coda – both available on May 24th. Coda 2 looks like an amazingly big update.

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Like Mahdi Yusuf’s month-long foray using DuckDuckGo Farhad Manjoo spends a week with Bing. His first impressions were good: The new Bing is like the old Google—your results are presented on a clean, uncluttered page consisting of a lot of links and a few unobtrusive ads. But, like so many others, he realized how trapped […]

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GitHub just released GitHub for Windows. Remember what I said about GitHub for Mac? And about git getting easier? It goes ditto for this application.

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Fellow Viddler team member Jeff Johns explains how to use the Viddler API to generate Open Graph tags. One possible use case? Making your video thumbnail, and playable video, appear on Facebook’s News Feed whenever someone links to your website.

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Interesting project by Adobe – Shadow is a way to share your current browser’s location with a bunch of different devices. In the demo embedded here it shows how easily it would make testing a site layout or web app on all of your devices at once. Pretty slick.

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Matt Honan of Gizmodo: The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. […]

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Justin Kan pontificates about experience and how he at one point thought experience was worthless. However, once he had some experience he began to believe it to be very valuable. It does come with some drawbacks and this one is a biggie: It’s been said before, but when you have a lot of experience in […]

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Brought to you by the guys at Simplenote,Simperium"is a service for developers to move dataeverywhere it’s needed, instantly and automatically." Impressive demo video as well as samples that include a video demonstration and code on Github for each one. /via Shawn "I know a lot about keyboards" Blanc.

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Like many Marco Arment thinks it is time to streamline U.S. currency: 1 cent: I don’t care whether we keep these. I’ll still keep them in a bowl and eventually bring them to a Coinstar machine for Amazon credit. 5 cents (5x previous denomination) 25 cents (5x) $1 (4x): I don’t care whether it’s a […]

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The problem with advertising is that the customers will always be the advertisers and they will always want value for their ad spend and value typically comes from compromising the viewer’s experience. Countless well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people have taken a swing at making friendly advertising that is both respectful of the viewer and valuable […]

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Mahdi Yusuf after spending four weeks using DuckDuckGo in place of Google for search: This brings something very interesting to light, I have gotten really good at processing information returned from Google searches. I can quickly determine what is a useful result and what isn’t. After using DuckDuckGo for one week I can concur with […]

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Anthony Bourdain on the different types of people that like his show No Reservations: Generally speaking, there are two distinct audiences for this show: people who like to look at images of food and are interested in where it comes from and how it got to the plate—and people who like to travel—or like the idea […]

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Beth Callaghan of All Things D asks Twitter inventor and Square Co-Founder Jack Dorsey twenty rapid-fire questions and some of his answers are pretty great. The best answer? Name your favorite guilty pleasure. Cheez-Its. I respect Jack quite a bit but this puts it over the top for me.

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Steven Thompson took his journal from 1976 and made it into a blog. It took off. He was offered a publishing deal. But he turned it down and decided to run a Kickstarter campaign instead. I thought it would be a clever idea to do my 1976 high school journal as a blog but I […]

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Andrew Wilkinson for The Next Web about building Flow without venture capital: At MetaLab, everyone is responsible for their own schedule. No bunk beds in the office or ramen-fueled overnight programming melees. We usually clock between four and six hours a day, and most of us don’t even get to the office before noon. We […]

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Yours truly in August of last year on The plusses and minuses of Google+  – filed under minuses: For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) […]

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Taken on March 13, 2012 in Jermyn, PA. Sadly the only photos I’ve been publishing are through Instagram of late. I haven’t had the time to post process any images but I heroically opened Aperture and managed to throw this one together. Hopefully I’ll find a little more time for photography and processing over the […]

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Chris Bowler on finding, and even trying to build, a service that helps him to store more link types for later: The issue is that none of the services I’ve seen fit allmy requirements. Instapaper is primarily a tool forreading later. Same for Readability. But I come across items on my iOS devices that require another […]

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Sebastian Krger does it again with ‘Sean Penn’: His work is amazing.

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Interesting topic. Cities, such as they are, were primarily built around the movement of cars. This resulted in a bunch of noisy, ugly, polution-creating highways running directly through cities where parks, rivers, and other quality of life areas could be. Ben Welle of The City Fix: Freeway removal is really about shifting priorities from moving […]

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My friend Kyle Neath on the GitHub blog: Today we’re rolling out a new and improved flow for creating repositories on GitHub. Remember when I said this, shortly after GitHub released GitHub for Mac: If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for […]

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So, let me get this straight. The guy that wrote, produced, and directed an amazingly successful blockbuster movie about how greedy, evil people were mining the natural resources of another planet to the detriment of thehabitatand natives is now funding mining on extraterrestrial bodies? Got it. /via The "I said hot when I meant warm" […]

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My friend Abby wishes people would slow down and take the time needed to explain things. Details have such little value to many people. No one wants to hear the whole story, they just want you to get right to the point. […]In my mind it would be helpful to explain how I arrived at […]

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The Oatmeal takes a crack at how to get more likes on Facebook. Incidentally, the answer to that question is also the answer to how to build a business; make great stuff.

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Instarchive will gather up all of your Instagram photos to-date and give you a copy of every one in a nice little zip. /via John "Loud Keyboard" Gruber.

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Quick, everyone run over to Google and search for blog before this happens.

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PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser is a pretty great open source project for parsing the DOM using jQuery-like selectors. I recently used it on Nilai to parse recipes from the leading recipe sites. Worked great.

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Trent Walton on blogs: Places on the web for sharing content and ideas often remind me of real life interactions. Facebook is the everlasting high school reunion. Twitter, which I love, is maybe half cocktail party, half party-line. Flickr & Instagram can be the best way to send a postcard, while LinkedIn is the best […]

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There have been some pretty interesting milestones in the history of Viddler for the last 5 years I’ve been on the team. This is one of them. We’re working with Foreigner of _Waiting for a Girl Like You_fame to help them bring a video contest online in a way that no other company could have. […]

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Andy Baio’s Waxy.org is one of my favorite blogs and it recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Baio recalls a few posts from each of those 10 years in his post marking the milestone. I can remember where I was when a few of these posts were published. I’m just happy I, and our team at […]

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Ben Yagoda on the use of the comma: You see this kind of thing all over the Internet as well. People punctuate that way because, if they spoke these sentences, they’d pause after the conjunction (and because the extremely fanciful and undependable Microsoft Word grammar and style checker refrains from applying a squiggly green underline). […]

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Elad Gil 4th tip on hiring the right person for your company’s culture: 4. Take people out for a "beer" test as part of interviews. We would take every candidate to some social outing (typically dinner or beer after work). In a startup, people work long hours and you want to make sure people fit […]

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There was an avalanche a few days ago in Pakistan. You may have missed it scrolling by on the CNN news ticker. More than 135 people are either trapped or dead below 70 feet of snow.

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Umair Haque writes an interesting rag on why things are they way they are and to what eventuality it may all end up. The Great Collision. Here’s why: It’s easy to construct a narrative of victimhood; and a narrative of victimhood is as easily palatable as a Big Mac. Sure, you can argue that the […]

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Interesting. WordPress.com now has an API. Which is slightly different than WordPress simply having the use of the decade old Meta-Weblog API. This opens up features on WordPress.com like reblogging, following, etc. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

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Remember Tumblr’s fairly easy to understand TOS? 500px has a similarly great TOS. /via AOL TechCrunch.

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As a follow-up to my link to Danny’s post about Liquipel there is this review on iHeartApple2: After viewing videos and reading reviews I think Liquipel is a great idea that is just not quite there yet. I think it would be great for protecting your phone in the rain or from spills but a […]

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Danny Nicolas, on the newly-revived Waking Ideas blog, about Liquipel: The number one complaint that I hear from friends, family and random strangers complaining on the train is that their personal technology devices (mp3 player, phone, watch, etc.) are not waterproof. The number one enemy to their electric devices is water. Be it the humidity […]

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There is pandemonium in the streets. Riots are breaking out. Here is Dan Moren of Macworld with more: It’s been almost two months since Apple released the Messages beta, the revamped version of iChat slated to arrive with Mountain Lion this summer. And, thanks to a lack of subsequent updates, I and at least a […]

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Paul Ford, of NYMag, about Facebook: The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP […]

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Maybe you’ve heard; Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1 Billion. Remember, I said it was a network not a camera. Well, some people are a bit miffed and are planning their escapes. Not nearly as many as I’d thought would though seeing how many people were up-in-arms about Instagram on Android. Assuming you didn’t […]

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Oh I’m done for. The Cornell Labs ofOrnithologyhas set up a live cam on a Great Blue Heron nest.

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