…built my share of CRM, PIM, Analytics, marketing campaigns, SMS, IM servers; you name it I probably built it.
So now, when I start a new business I make the list of the third party companies and tools that I am going to off-load what's not part of the product experience to:
* CMS/ Blog => wordpress/radiantcms * Marketing email campaign => MadMimi, Mailchimp and the likes * CRM => Fatfree crm, sugar crm * Analytics => Google * Forums =>…
- Vineet Gupta | Computer Programmer: Do you know about OBA?
- How Software is Built: Interview with Brian Gentile - CEO of Jaspersoft
- Ruby Best Practices: Rails Modularity for Lazy Bastards
- Global Nerdy: Toronto Code Camp: Saturday, May 1st!
- Signal vs. Noise: Product Blog update: Extras for Highrise, Backpack Reminders, and Basecamp case studies
- Jason Seifer: Live blogging BizConf Day 2
Then. on Monday afternoon I received some SMS and email alerts from our monitoring system that a few of our app servers had stopped responding to queries. Since it was a few app VM's which failed I went straight to our HP based SAN, which would not respond to either SSH or web access, even ILO showed it as being up. I began to get very nervous thinking about the risk of data corruption on our multi terabyte array.....
When I arrived at the data center the SAN was not responsive …
- Gears Within Gears: Slides for my talk on construction techniques for internal DSLs
- AdminMyServer Blog: Coraid / AOE / ATA Over Ethernet
- Lessons Learned: New York: three straight days of Lean Startup (two of which are free)
- skwpspace: musings on ruby, rails, software by Yan Pritzker: pritzkerphoto.com relaunched - portrait photography in San Francisco
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- Software by Rob: My Report on StackOverflow DevDays
One of the first issues I ran into with Android was in the SMS app. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't auto-completing my brother's work cell number when I typed his name. It turns out that the application will only autocomplete numbers that are marked as ‘mobile' in the Contacts application. In the case of my brother, I mark his work Blackberry as ‘work' and his personal iPhone as ‘home'. On the iPhone, it will search any of the …
- Headius: Busy Week: JRuby with Android, Maven, Rake, C exts, and More!
- Ruby Inside: In-depth JRuby Q&A: What Makes JRuby Tick in 2010?
- Pathfinder Development: Coming Soon: Android Wireless Application Development Review
- Rails Envy » Home: Episode 104: Something New
- Pragmatic Bookshelf: Hello, Android (2.1) Third Edition in beta
- Intridea - Company Blog: Recap of MobileX Conference in Nashville, TN
Interesting tidbits from around the web (May 25th):
Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and Note-Taking PDF Templates - Smashing Magazine -
Paper Browser: It's a Browser only in Paper -
iPad as desktop status monitor -
PhoneTell Adds Caller ID and Canned SMS Responses to Android -
A List Apart: Articles: Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing -
…
- Luigi Montanez: Respect the Browser - Lessons from JSConf 2009
- Ruby Inside: A Walkthrough of Ruby In The Web Browser using IronRuby and Silverlight
- Railscasts: Episode 175: AJAX History and Bookmarks
- : Rails 2.3.4 and SWFUpload - Rack Middleware for Flash Uploads that Degrade Gracefully
- Vineet Gupta | Computer Programmer: Microsoft's Recent Announcements on Web Technologies
- Simone Carletti's Blog: Google Chrome OS User Agent
….) It is a web application that handles scheduling and automated appointment reminders via phone, SMS, email, and post cards. The phone and SMS reminders are through the magic of Twilio , which lets you make and receive phone calls and SMSes using simple web technology.
My value proposition to my customers is simple:
Schedule your appointments in the easy-to-use web interface. That's all you have to do.
Prior to the appointment, we'll automatically remind …
- Heroku: Develop a Voice App with Twilio + Heroku, Win a Netbook
- Jason Seifer: Mac OS X Post Install Guide, May 2010
- danieltenner.com: The questionable value of the real-time web
- RubyLearning Blog: Patrick McKenzie Winner RPCFN #5
- Rails Inside: Chargify: Rails Powered Recurring Billing Service With An ActiveResource API
- Envy Labs: Ruby Call Center
…you have them , it doesn't matter how you do it, dictate them into your phone, carry a pen and paper, send yourself an SMS. Just make you sure you don't lose them; there is really no point in training yourself to have ideas if you're just going to let them flow away into the ether. Especially considering that given enough time, any one of them could be a real winner .
Images by Cayusa and sarah ...
- Topics: Alan Skorkin
- Signal vs. Noise: When knowledge makes us hesitate
…with HTTP 200 when they try to access it (every 15 minutes or so), you get an email or SMS. This is the simplest thing that could possibly work, but there are circumstances where it won't catch failures. (For example, applications of non-trivial complexity often have parts which can fail without taking the front page down.)
I recommend creating an internal status page which automatically checks all the things you think are crucial, risky, and tractable to resolution if you were to know …
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- Paul Dix Explains Nothing: Using the Nginx Memcached module with Passenger
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- Freelancing Gods: script/nginx
- Expected Behavior : : script/nginx - nginx+unicorn ftw
…it's scary out there. Such transitions can be jarring ( Not to mention impossible for users of SMS or the Peek twitter devices ), and have only been tolerated thus far by the status update services because there has been no alternative. Until now.
Introducing TweetFTP (the Tweet File Transfer Protocol), a revolutionary new approach for sharing files within the contents of tweets themselves. It works by encoding a file to be transferred as a series of encoded tweets (plus …
- Wynn Netherland: Twitter gem hits 0.9.0
- Heroku: Background Jobs with DJ on Heroku
- Michael Ivey: blogging since '99: My Proposed Solution to the "Can't Comment On RTs" Problem: Retweet-Replies
- How Software is Built: Interview with Joseph Smarr - CTO - Plaxo
- The messagepub Blog: New-Feature: Use your own Twitter username
- zerosum dirt(nap) - Home: TwitterAuth Integration Testing
…on the web, but are simply unacceptable for our realtime microwork service at kgb. For both web and SMS apps, response time is absolutely critical to customer satisfaction. Differences between these techs require different scaling approaches, and we work with both at the same time. Almost every SMS gets passed directly to our workers on the web, who we call "agents". An agent's response then travels from the web to the customer via SMS.
So for each question answered, we faced …
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- The messagepub Blog: New: C# Helper Library
- Scout ~ The Blog: RabbitMQ Monitoring Plugins
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- Michael Ivey: blogging since '99: How I use Foursquare
- Lessons Learned: Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events
sending of bulk email, newsletters or SMS
Many big sites use background jobs and job queues to process time consuming operations, for example Amazon, GitHub and Twitter, at least in early days. Amazon offers now a queue service named Amazon SQS. Chris Wanstrath has written a short history of using background jobs in GitHub . Twitter has tried various ways of using background processes, too.
There are in fact many options for performing background processing in Rails…
- Plataforma Tecnologia Blog: Monitoring Delayed Job with Bluepill and Capistrano
- ronin coder: Never do today what you can put off 'til tomorrow
- Brightbox Blog: Queues and Callbacks
- Scout ~ The Blog: RabbitMQ Monitoring Plugins
- Heroku: Background Jobs with DJ on Heroku
- igvita.com: Advanced Messaging & Routing with AMQP