Shanti’s Dispatches

Wow. Wow. Wow. Congratulations to the creator of The Million Dollar Homepage - who just surpassed $200,000 in ad/pixel sales!

The Million Dollar Homepage is one of those ideas like the pet rock, when, after you see it, almost everyone thinks “Why didn’t I think of that!?!”

I’ve got to hand it to its creator for having the foresight and ability to bring out the press on this idea. Not to mention the new, new media (bloggers, etcs).

He’s even got a pretty decent case study up if you’d like to see how your “ad” might perform.

Charles Jolley of Sproutit recommends giving macs (& OS X) a shot:

Not to be a Mac freak, but I would just like to mention that my friends and I have started a new business while also moving half way across the world. Through airports, hotels, trains, and flats we’ve had lots of challenges but one thing we never had to worry about was our Powerbooks.

As a recent Switcher myself, I couldn’t agree more.

Especially since I would consider myself a (quote-unquote) power-user, in areas such as programming and web app development.

So tweaking certain things in apps like TextMate definitely took a little time.

But now that my setup is all customized to my liking, I’m hooked — probably for life!

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is a way to kickstart a new Ruby on Rails project even more quickly than the standard rails myappname method.

It’s called QuickStart Rails.

This follows, I believe, the Don’t Repeat Yourself ethos because I always found myself doing the exact same things when starting up a new rails app. (login generation, decent looking decent/layout structure to work with, etc)

I’m eager to hear feedback on QS rails and how it can be improved. Please send comments / gripes / suggestions to: shantibraford (at) gmail

Getting Started with QuickStart Rails

CREATE TABLE users (
 id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 login varchar(80) default NULL,
 password varchar(40) default NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY  (id)
);

QuickStart Rails gives you:

	./myapp
	   |  /branches
	   |  /tags
	   |  /trunk    - main rails application tree (always the latest release)
	        | ...   - all the usual rails files

QuickStart Rails comes configured with:

• A pre-configured login account controller (which uses the login generator: ./script/generate login Account)
• A Home Controller and default route to /home/index : ./script/generate controller Home index about contact
• A fairly sexy-looking design to help you get started & inspired (yes, you’ll replace it eventually, we know)

Future Goals of the QuickStart Rails Project


Themes

• Themeswitcher functionality (ala Wordpress)
• Themes go in a /themes directory (themes include: layout(s), css, images, etc)
• ./script/themeswitch <theme> — to change themes
• Build a library of decent themes that can be included in a public Subversion tree and easily exported (per-theme or the entire repository)

Nano-Rails Ninjas — or — the Rails Sentient Engine ® Project

• These will be embedded under your skin and behind your cerebral cortext.
• Will write your Rails applications for you (even more than standard Rails), in your sleep.
• TODO: Figure out a way to turn off the nano-rails when they become self-aware.

Any other ideas?

Having read several of his books and been a longtime follower of his blog, I can tell you that Seth Godin is definitely an outstanding marketer, writer and conveyer of ideas.

He writes about his $5,000 bounty program for finding a new Chief Engineer for Squiddoo:

I’ve gotten some fantastic resumes for this gig, but surprisingly few people seem to be trolling for the bounty.

My personal take on what the problem might be (in this era of globalization, Skype and constant interconnectedness) — Seth writes:

You must … be delighted to work in our offices (a forty-minute train ride from Grand Central Station in New York). Alas, no telecommuters.

I understand the desire to have someone onsite, especially for certain kinds of work.

But just look at the success of 37 Signals, with their team spread out between Chicago, NYC, Copenhagen and Provo, Utah.

Gabriel and I have created the entire Niner Niner weblog network with him in St. Louis and myself in Phoenix, using only Skype and Instant Messaging.

I’ve been playing phone tag recently as well with Charles Jolley of Sprout It systems, who just moved to Prague (Czech Republic), about possible collaboration on a project of his.

SocialText is another geographically disperse “virtual company.”

Not to mention, I believe, Blogger.com throughout most of its pre-acquisition history.

So, Seth - do you see any possibility for future positions / roles for people that don’t have to work / live near Irvington, NY?

I can guarantee you that you’ll get some outstanding resumes the moment you mention “telecommuting OK” in the position blurb.

Think about it this way — the very best people get to choose their working conditions on their terms.

If those conditions are “from home” (for at least a good percentage of the time) — then that’s what the very best will be afforded (by people who recognize said talent).

UPDATE: Seth said he’s raid the post.

In all honesty, I don’t think someone like Seth is going to have any trouble finding the very best, one way or the other.

Well, I finally got around to getting the WhoLinksToMe.com codebase into Subversion.

Now deployment is a snap:

> ssh wholinkstome.com
> cd /path/to/wholinkstome/root
> svn update

Ta-da!

Of course, the deployment fascists would come after me for this kind of reckless behavior… but quite frankly, Susan, I don’t give a d*mn!

In other news, MSN Results are back (at least for the time being) on WLTM.com.

For example, Who Links To Me found the following number of links to sablog.com:

WhoLinksToMe.com has found 11 links to this site.
Blogrolling.com has found 49 blogrolls that contain this link.
Google has found 23 links to this site.
Yahoo! has found 426 links to this site.
MSN Search has found 6,485 links to this site.

WLTM.com Tip of The Day:

Upset because Who Links To Me tries to change your url to “www.yourblog.com” instead of just “yourblog.com” ?

Just pass in the exact URL you’d like details about through the querystring, like so:

Examples:
http://wholinkstome.com/?url=http://yourblog.com/
http://wholinkstome.com/?url=http://www.whatever.com/
etc…

Drop me a line if you have any questions!

Well, folks, it’s official.

Google has finally launched a Blog Search Engine (beta).

I’ve been saying for a while now… why would Google want to buy Technorati when a few of Google’s hotshot engineers can whip up similar functionality over a long weekend, or as one of their 20% projects?

Sure, Google’s Blog Search doesn’t have the massive index quite yet of blogs that the ‘roti has. But just give ‘em another weekend or two =)