Nick Mudge Ignition Software Consulting & Development

Nicest Song
30 December 2007

One of the nicest songs I've ever heard, from YouTube: No Christmas For Me (Original Song)

More: http://newsconomy.com/tag/youtube

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Some Uses of Newsconomy
29 December 2007

You could use newsconomy for multiple things. You could go there just to look at or find interesting things.

You could find things by different topics by using tags in a url. For instance, say you wanted to find items about dictionaries. You could go here: http://newsconomy.com/tag/dictionary You could find interesting things on youtube: http://newsconomy.com/tag/youtube etc.

When you submit things, you could tag them with certain tags to create lists of items. For instance I created a list of items of my blog posts about newsconomy by tagging them with newsconomy when I submitted them: http://newsconomy.com/tag/newsconomy If I wanted to show someone some blog posts about newsconomy, I would just need to give them the link to the list of newsconomy items.

If you wanted to easily and quickly create an RSS feed with certain items in them, you could make a list of items on newsconomy by using a certain tag, and you would automatically have an rss feed with those items. Here's an rss feed with all items tagged with newsconomy: http://newsconomy.com/rss/tag/newsconomy

You could display rss feeds you make on other websites by using feed2js. I displayed an rss feed from newsconomy on my blog, on the lower right part that starts with "Newsconomy: mudge's items"

When you submit items, they automatically go into your account. You have a list of items that consists of everything you have submitted. For example the user sqs has his items here: http://newsconomy.com/sqs You can get items you submitted (or other people) with certain tags by putting the tags in the url, like this: http://newsconomy.com/sqs/dictionary Putting items into your account and tagging them helps you remember things better, and helps you find them later.

Finally, buying items is a way of trading items with people. It's not fully developed yet. Also, buying items puts them at the top of lists, and all buying is recorded with the items.

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The Programming Strategy
29 December 2007

One of the things I really like in Paul Graham's interview in Founders at Work is a focus on programming and great software:

What we really thought we needed to do was write more software. We were software guys. Maybe someone who knew more about business would be thinking about going and getting customers, but frankly the idea of customers frightened us. We thought, "Before we go get any customers, why don't we just write a few thousand lines of code?" ... We wrote a lot of software. We thought, "That's what we're good at. That's what we'll do." ... I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent—to have some bag of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains. But there's also a sort of hack that you can use if you are not a very good salesman, which is simply tell people the truth. Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best software and tell them, truthfully, "this is the best software." And they could tell we were telling the truth.

I've been working on a piece of software for some time. I was a news editor for a couple years and have been a full time web programmer for the last six months. My project is an outlet for things I've found on the web, things I've learned and loved in my work, and new ideas.

I released my project very early on because I was hoping that I could get some good feedback on it and some initial users. I got some feedback by asking some people, but in general I haven't gotten as much feedback as I've wanted. Getting some initial users hasn't gone well. fazil is the only consistent user besides myself. I'm not sure what the main reason is that it hasn't gotten a few more initial users. Maybe it just sucks too much. Sure, thanks.

I haven't promoted it much because I haven't felt that it was ready yet (and I feel like promoting it a lot right now wouldn't do much). But it is ready for some users now. It is useful now. I love what it does now and I use it. You can use it for some of the same things you'd use del.icio.us for. It has some similar uses as del.icio.us but it is also different.

I am worried about users. I want to make something people really want. So I'm going to write a few thousand lines of code. I'm going to keep adding features, make it look better and make it more understandable.

When things are tough, write some more software.

I love how Joshua Schachter describes describing del.ico.us, from Founders at Work:

It is a challenging product to do conceptually. It's not something like, "Let you file your taxes better." There's no clear value proposition here. It is valuable, but hard to understand. You will be able to remember more things this way, and with that, people don't even realize there's a problem. So that's a challenging value proposition to explain or get across. Ultimately, I think people who understand it are better for it, but it's a challenge.

My project is newsconomy.com

Comments (9)
quarterlife and the web
27 December 2007

It feels like it has been a long time since I last wrote an entry, and I guess it has been awhile, I suppose in blog time. It's not that I haven't had some good stuff to blog about, I have. I think it's like I haven't been inspired at the right time when it was good to blog.

I'm inspired tonight. I'm inspired by quarterlife. Artistic! and I don't use exclamation marks lightly.

I originally came across the quarterlife show while I was cruising on YouTube. I watched every quarterlife episode there was on YouTube at the time. It's a well filmed artistic show — about artists really and life. Well I came across it again on YouTube tonight but this time I explored past Youtube and watched more episodes on the quarterlife website.

One of the things that really fascinates me about quarterlife is that it isn't just a show. I mean, you can tell that it is a show for the sake of showness, artistic showness particularly. But quarterlife is also a social networking/video/art website — which is also in the show sometimes. The show made me understand and want to do quarterlife. I wondered if the people behind it were doing it for the show or the social network, but now I think for both. They match like a glove.

The quarterlife about page is pretty good.

For some time I've tinkered with the idea of making videos and video blogs and such. I'm tipped over the edge now. I signed up with quarterlife and hope to be posting some videos there pretty soon.

quarterlife on newsconomy

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Interesting Items
14 December 2007

Recently my step dad pointed me to the website of the company where my aunt Teresa Elam works. Interesting to know how involved my aunt has been with open source software. She has a nice reference in the company history, getting FreeBSD out into the world. She's also worked with Patrick Volkerding, the guy behind Slackware, and appears high on a list of Gentoo contributors.

Chris Minnick, the owner of Minnick Web Services, where I work, has been writing some articles on internet evolution. His latest is Is the Semantic Web Doomed?.

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Some Good Articles
9 December 2007

I read some good articles tonight. The article So you want to be a consultant...? is really great.

Does it ever happen to you that you read something really good and it has a big effect on you? I read the above article tonight and that's what happened to me. It changed the way I think, made me smarter, better, and more good.

Here's a few other good articles I read tonight:

My list

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Newsconomy Has Some Tag Kung-Fu
8 December 2007

What if you want from a news/bookmarking website all recent items that have been tagged politics or government or ronpaul? What if you want recent items tagged with both web and design? What if for some weird reason you wanted all recent items tagged with politics or government or ronpaul or web and design? What if, what if? Newsconomy has this now.

The operator "+" in newsconomy URLs means "and this tag". The operator "|" in newsconomy URLs means "or this tag".

Check out these links:

With this tag Kung-Fu under your belt you could probably make any kind of list of items on the web that you want.

RSS? Of course. Every list of items on Newsonomy has a matching RSS feed.

More info about Newsconomy.

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Calling All RSS Software: Newsconomy Has RSS Feeds!
2 December 2007

Newsconomy now has an RSS feed for every webpage that has a list of items on it.

Here's some of the feeds:

What can you do with rss feeds? A lot! Your imagination.

One thing you can do with rss feeds is use them to display items on other websites. For instance, if you look at the lower right part of my blog you will see a section that starts off with "Newsconomy: mudge's items". Below this heading is a display of my newsconomy rss feed. Any time I submit an item to Newconomy, this list on my blog is automatically updated within an hour. I created this display using a free service called Feed to Javascript. You go here, submit the rss feed you want to display, and then Feed to Javascript will create the javascript code that you will then just need to paste into the web page where you want the feed displayed. No coding or fiddling with XML required.

Facebook has an import rss feed/blog feature that I used to import the Newsconomy homepage rss feed onto my facebook profile which you can see if you look at the section of my profile entitled "Notes" on the left side.

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