Taking another stab at RoR

Late last week I started looking around for the best free time tracking tool for my work hours and projects (PS: Best one I could find is Toggl.) The actual search got me thinking about how I’d make a time tracking site and that got me thinking about other things I could use Ruby on Rails for which of course led me to the Build a Blog in 15 Minutes screencast which then got me looking for Locomotive at home last night. Locomotive is an all inclusive package to use Rails on a Mac. It includes Ruby, MySQL Lite, Rails, and whatever server stuff you need to run it locally — clearly I’m a prime candidate for using something like this. Note: if interested, the download I found by Googling didn’t work. Instead, you should use this one.

Esquire’s Napkin Project

Lately I’ve been really into reading the fiction stories on Esquire’s Napkin Project. It’s sort of old at this point, but basically, Esquire mailed out square napkins, like you’d find in a restaurant, to authors or various levels of experience, asked for some kind of fiction, and posted what they received back.

It’s crazy how much engrossing some of these are given the space constraints. Some of my favorites include this one, this one, this one, and this one.

I wish this had been an assignment for one of my English classes in school. Even though I didn’t take any creative fiction writing courses, I think this would’ve been so fun. If I ever become a college professor of English 100, maybe I’ll make it part of the curriculum.

Dooce as the Blogging Model

Monday, Dooce announced what we all should have seen coming: “The new dooce® community!” I read the post on my lunch break, clicked through a few of the brand new community pages, and signed up.

It’s fantastic. It’s basically like a better Yahoo! Answers with added social networking features and the assurance that the people interacting with you probably aren’t crazy because they’re Dooce fans.

In the year or so that I’ve followed Dooce’s website, I’ve been pretty fascinated with it (see old post, “Modern Rules of Blogging”). To me, it seems to be THE great blogging success story (The same blog that got her fired from her job years later supports her family? Come on, that’s awesome.). Not to mention, arguably, THE blogging business model. She writes about what she cares about, writes well, her content appeals to a wide audience, and now she’s added this new feature to give fans another reason to visit and stay on her site. I mean, she’s got the following. She should capitalize on it while further adding value to her site. The fact is Dooce.com has tons of ads and money-making devices all over the place, but they don’t distract from the content. And in a way, when I click through and see a bunch of ads, it makes me happy to know I’m helping with the ad revenue because the site is great and should be rewarded. Maybe that’s the sign of a truly successful blog.

Yahoo! Mail’s Business Model: Charge for Basic Services

I’m feeling a little scandalized right now. I just tried to help my boss set up his Yahoo! Mail in Outlook. Should be no big deal, right? I envisioned taking the commonsense steps Settings -> Forwarding/POP/etc access -> putting in his Outlook email.

Turns out this isn’t possible with the free Yahoo! Mail. You have to spend $20/year to get the ability to forward your mail. See Yahoo! Mail Plus.

The benefits? “No graphical ads, Offline Access with POP, 200 Filters instead of 100, No account expiration, Live customer care, Mail forwarding, and Disposable addresses.”

Okay. POP access is definitely important, but I feel like Yahoo! is throwing in these other perks to try to validate the $20 fee. Unfortunately, these other things are fluff.

No graphical ads – Those are so annoying — that’s hurting Yahoo! to have in the first place and shouldn’t be used as a bargaining chip.
200 filters – Who’s using more than 100? No, who’s using more than 15?
No account expiration – I see where they’re coming from, that’s probably a drain on the system to have unused accounts, but I’d hate to feel like if I didn’t log in often enough my account would be deleted — that’s a bad feeling to put on a user, even if it is highly unlikely ever to happen.
Live customer care — how often will you ever need help with your email? And if you did, how often is it that a 3 second Google search wouldn’t solve the problem?
Disposable addresses — “Create disposable email addresses when you don’t want to give out your primary address. Messages sent to these addresses are delivered to your Inbox or to any folder you designate.” Why would I want the emails going to my mailbox at all? Seems like there are better services out there for free disposable email addresses anyway (GuerillaMail.com, Mailinator.com, Mailexpire.com…).

I guess I’m having a hard time visualizing Yahoo!’s market. What hooks does Yahoo! have that get people to use Yahoo’s mail? Why wouldn’t people just use Gmail and get all of these things (except for the live customer care and “disposable addresses,” though you can create as many for-junk-mail email accounts as you want) for free?

Is this business model working for Yahoo!? I just thought we were now in the age of Wikinomics where $0.00 is the Future of Business (Wired.com). Although there must be some people still paying for these basic services, I feel like this is indeed a dying business model. I mean, look at the stock. Today, Yahoo! is selling for $16.98 while Google’s currently at $525.59. I think that’s a pretty emphatic statement of what’s working and what isn’t.

“Not Nice” – Chris Garneau

Can’t stop listening to this song.

Also, I love how easy it is to embed YouTube videos on WordPress. (Read how here)