Chausse.org

Uh-oh, it’s time for another obligatory “Haven’t posted in a while, better put something up” post.  Here’s the run down.

Baby John has just passed 6 months (I can’t believe it) and he’s doing great. He’s at the age where he’s just starting to figure out how to trick his parents into doing his bidding.  But he’s still super-cute, has a pretty consistent sleep schedule and hasn’t been sick a day in his life, so I can’t complain.  His first two teeth have popped in, and he’s eating solid foods.  Which means, of course, the Great Poop Change - any parents will know what I’m talking about.

Work has been nuts.  Busy, busy, busy.  In all my previous jobs, I’ve basically been an expert in one thing for one company.  In my current role, I’m  expected to be an expert in everything for everyone.  Not that I’m not up to it, but compared to agency life, working at a startup was a walk in the park.

One project I’m particularly excited about is a blog-based site we just “soft-launched”, which has been impressively successful even without any promotion aside from “friends and family”.  I’ll have a post about that as soon as it’s officially live.

Related to the craziness of work, I’ve embarked upon learning and living the “Getting Things Done” methodology.  I’ve completed reading the book, and even though I’ve only just started “living” it, it’s already dropped my stress levels 90%.  Even if you don’t have a crazy job - even if you don’t have a job, you must read this book.  It’s not just about accomplishing tasks, it’s about relieving your mind of worrying about your tasks  so that you can live 100% in-the-moment - whether you’re working or relaxing.

I’ve never said this before - and never thought I would, but here goes: This book has changed my life.  I am definitely not the first tech geek to catch onto GTD -  just Google it and find out how many others are turned onto it - so I’ll try to avoid proselytizing it too much here.

I’ve also, for the umpteenth time, tried to get up and running with Ruby on Rails.  I believe 100% in the promise of RoR, and that it will make developing a breeze once I’ve mastered it, but the learning curve for the total newbie is so steep… especially for someone who initially came from an ASP/ColdFusion background, where you can start with a single page with some inline code, and work your way up from there.  My brain is having a hard time latching onto the use of generators and memorizing all the “magic” conventions.  I’ll get there, though.  I have a pretty simple web app I want to do for work, that would make a good starter project.  If that goes well, I have a much bigger RoR-based side project in the planning stages.

Anyone who’s blogged for a while knows that the blogging bug comes and goes in waves, so I’ll be back again in no time, but for now, time to Get Things Done…

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Anyone know of a web service that can find movie times - either for a specific theater, or near a zip code, or for a specific movie? Anything would be nice…

(What’s Lazyweb?)

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For a while now - and especially since joining Hill, Holliday - I’ve been struggling with the question of what I should be doing with this site. It’s too personal to be a professional site, and perhaps too professional to just be a personal site. This site really reflects who I am - a marketing obsessed technology geek, who likes to dabble in a little of everything - but the topics I cover are far too varied to really serve as a solid backdrop for my role at Hill, Holliday, as the highly successful MIT Advertising Lab blog does for my teammate Ilya Vedrashko.

So I’m creating a new blog, one specifically designed around what I really do at Hill, Holliday. Or, more accurately, what I could be doing for clients, if they were to see things the way I do. It will be about using new technology for marketing. It will not be another Advertising Lab, which focuses on the future. This new blog will focus on things you can do right now, with a special emphasis on marketing-oriented startups and new online services.

One of the problems I’ve had with launching this project was coming up with a name. I dare you to try to find a compelling, available domain name that combines “technology” with “marketing”. Slim pickin’s. Well, I finally managed to find one yesterday that I’m quite happy with, that suits the cause perfectly. I’m not ready to reveal it yet, though. All in due time

So, what will this mean for Chausse.org? Not much, really, except that it will probably become even more scatterbrained, since I won’t feel so guilty about not treating my “professional” site professionally enough. That’ll be fun. It will likely also be rejiggered to be more than just a blog. I’ve toyed with creating a separate “family” web site (I do have that new baby and all), but with the new site taking on the role of potential-client-impresser, Chausse.org can probably double as my family site just fine.

Well, that’s what’s cookin’. I’ll reveal the new site to everyone here once it’s up and running. Hang tight.

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Way back in January, I created a nifty little Ajax-based site called MyBigRiver.com. In Web 2.0 lingo, it provides “live search” for Amazon.com. It was a lot of fun to make, and was my first real venture into the Ajax world.

When it launched it got a little bit of buzz from sites like Ajaxian and TailRank, got a brief mention from Evan Williams of Blogger and Odeo fame, and even created its own unexpected spinoff meme.

But the buzz died out pretty quickly after that. I think the main reason was that the site was a cool (even useful) gimmick, but the fact that you had to go to a standalone website to perform the search kind of detracted from its usefulness. I knew it was a real problem when I realized I wasn’t even using it. My interest in the site waned around March, and I hadn’t touched it since.

Recently, though, I started using Google’s Personalized Homepage and the idea suddenly struck me - this is where MyBigRiver belongs!

A quick perusal of Google Gadgets API Developer Guide, a bit of DHTML and CSS tweaking, and - voila - Live Amazon Search for Google.

Add it to your Google homepage and enjoy!

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An odd sense of combined giddiness and guilt came over me as I registered the following domain name for a MyBigRiver spinoff project:

www.pluggr.com

I thought twice about it since the the single g version goes to some kind of lawn care products, but it’s actually a great name (as far as Web 2.0 domain names go) for what I’m cooking up. It doesn’t go anywhere interesting right now… Just wanted to share.

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Sorry to sound like a dorky fanboy, but I’m excited to announce that Evan Williams, inventor of Blogger, CEO of Odeo, and personal hero of mine, has kindly granted MyBigRiver.com a link on his personal blog. W00t!

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MyBigRiver.com just got its first major blog write-up on Ajaxian.com. They point out (correctly) that I attach my own referral ID into the generated Amazon link. The way I see it, people who don’t have any interest in using referral links won’t care at all, and people who do use Amazon referral links will be well aware that they can (very easily) switch it to their own.

I don’t mention it on the site because I have a feeling that could cause people in the first category to strip out my ID out of spite, without considering the fact that its existence does them no harm and provides me an incentive to continue providing and enhancing the service.

In any case, the site was just launched yesterday. If there is great interest in allowing custom referral ID’s, I will certainly add the feature. I’m sure there would be enough users without their own referral ID’s that I’d still make some bucks.

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Wow, I either started an instant trend, or unknowingly joined into an existing one. While trying to discreetly pitch MyBigRiver.com to influential folks who might find it interesting, I stopped by evhead, the site of Evan Williams (creator of Blogger). I was trying to figure out how to tell him about MyBigRiver.com without sounding like a press release, when I noticed that his latest post is about “InstantDomainSearch.com“, a site which works in almost exactly the same way to search available domain names. Huh.

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Today, I’m proud to announce that one of my crazy ideas has actually seen the light of day. MyBigRiver.com is an online tool that searches Amazon.com using web services and AJAX. The general idea is that, as you type, it automatically shows the top search result for that item. It’s like “incremental search” for all of Amazon.com. This may sound kind of unnecessary and pointless, but once you start using it, I hope you’ll find it as fun and addictive as I do. There is also a very practical use for the tool –for which I’ve optimized the site. It’s an excellent way to quickly snag a link to a product you want to recommend on your blog or other website. There will be much more functionality along these lines rolling out in the future.

One quick tip for people looking to launch little projects like this. Focus on the really unique part of what you’re cooking up, and focus on releasing SOMETHING that does only THAT. I actually had the foundation of MyBigRiver.com operational for months now, but I got carried away adding a bunch of other features, which I never could manage to quite wrap up. So, I finally went back and stripped away everything that wasn’t essential. I have a feeling that once people start using the site, it’ll give me much more incentive to roll out cool new features than I could generate for myself, toiling away in anonymity.

Well, check out the site, and if you enjoy it, please spread the word! If you have a blog, double-please spread the word there. If you have advice regarding where I can promote the site to a receptive audience (AJAX enthusiast sites, etc) I’d love to hear that as well. Have fun!

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Hey, cyberfriends… A couple announcements about the site. First, all the photo galleries are back. I’m managing (and web-exporting) them with Picasa2 and hosting them myself. Seems I’ve got plenty of storage space to handle it. This works out pretty well. I’ll also be posting pics on Flickr (including camera phone pictures, which won’t show up on this site). Flickr offers some neat features like RSS feeds, so check that out.

Secondly, I’ve upgraded to a new version of WordPress for managing the blog. Of course, this doesn’t really affect you guys much, except it’s got a handy new way of handling comment moderation. If you’ve had to deal with the email confirmation process in the past, that’s gone now. Spamming and general jackassery will still get filtered, even better than usual, but friendly frequent posters will now be able to post immediately without moderation. Hooray!

Finally, I’ve added a “hosting” page, where you can sign up to host your site on my server. Now, why would you want to do this? Well, if you just want cheap hosting, you probably don’t, since there are cheaper services around. Primarily this is for people whose sites I develop and manage (as kind of a package deal) but, hey, if you want some hosting and want to be able to personally complain to me if something breaks, it’s open to everyone. Check it out.

OK, that’s all for now. Hopefully some new, useful, content will be coming soon. Imagine that!

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I finally got around to playing with Amazon Web Services, and now I wish I did much sooner. Fearing that it would require a ton of complex SOAP or Java code, I was reluctant to get started. Now I’ve learned that all you really need is a language with the ability to read the contents of a URL (PHP can handle that) and a bit of XSLT knowledge (I’ve got some of that…)

So, I’ve started in a new venture I had been pondering for a while. It’s called “MyBigRiver”. I don’t want to say much more about it now, except that it’ll mainly be of interest to those with blogs or other personal web sites. Hopefully, it will only take a few weeks to set up.

Here’s the general business plan:

1. Learn Amazon Web Services
2. Register MyBigRiver.com domain name
3. ???
4. Profit!

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I’ve just launched my photo weblog (moBlog, phoBlog, whatever). The idea is this: I take pictures with my camera phone, click a few buttons, and they magically show up online, weblog-style.. It’s called Show/See — pronounced: “Chausse” There may be some bugs, so bear with me if it acts weird. I’ll be contributing over the weekend, but won’t be able to code, so hopefully it will cooperate. Once it’s stable, I’ll put up a permanent link somewhere on this page. Enjoy!

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I just started working on another web project that’s been in the back of my head for years now… It’s a framework for a piece of collaborative fiction, tentatively called “Bystander“. The concept is extremely simple, but I think it will become a very remarkable project as it evolves over time.

Actually, I’ve “started” this project several times, but this time I’m at a point in my professional development where my coding skills are good enough to outrun my infamously short attention span, and I believe I can actually get it done. In fact, I already implemented the basic functionality in about two hours. Expect “Bystander” to be online within a couple weeks…

For those wondering about the “Webslice Labs” thing, it’s still in development, sort of… The scope of the project is just a bit mentally overwhelming to be an enjoyable “spare time” project right now. I have enough stressors in my life without having to worry about completing a highly complex project that I’m doing just for the sake of proving that I can do it…

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For those anxiously waiting, I finally managed to sit down and make some significant progress on Webslice Labs. Yes, it’s taking a lot longer than I thought, but it’s certainly been a good learning experience, building a complete “ASP” service from ground up. User accounts, registration, session management, client side validation, database architecture… Not to mention design and layout… Whew! The coolest part (to me) is that I’ve designed the site architecture in such a way that new services operate like “plug-ins”. If, for example, I come up with some kind of forum tool, all I have to do is add an entry to the “Services” database, put the options page in the right directory, and bingo! All the icky stuff like user account management is already taken care of.

Give me a few more weeks, and hopefully we’ll get this show on the road. Meanwhile, I have to brush up on my SQL “inner joins”. Hm… maybe I’ll launch the site on my birthday (May 22)… just for the heck of it.

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