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.

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)

Twitter with Twitterfeed: Listening to: and Reading:

Last week, thanks to @schnitzer’s recommendation, I checked out and eventually set up my blog on Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed allows you to enter RSS feeds and have new items come through as tweets on your twitter account. So, for example, I have this blog’s RSS in there, so whenever I post something, within a half hour, my Twitter account will auto tweet: “New Blog Post: __” where __ is the title.

I was trying to think of how else to utilize this, because it’s pretty powerful and handy. I was thinking about how people often put on their Twitter accounts “Reading: ” or “Listening to: ” whatever. So, I created a tag in my Delicious called twitterfeed_listening and twitterfeed_reading. So now, if I’m listening to something on YouTube that I want to tweet I’m listening to, I’ll save it on Delicious and tag it twitterfeed_listening, then TwitterFeed will post that to my Twitter with the prefix “Listening to: “

Okay, just tested it and it works. Here’s the tweet and here’s the tag on Delicious.

*Thinking of how else Twitterfeed could be used… *