A few months ago I moderated the panel at Ultralight Startups. We discussed adding social functionality and behavior to your website.
Here’s the video:
Click here for info about the original Ultralight Startups event.
Archive for the ‘link’ Category
May 10th, 2010
My new favorite web app, FollowUpThen, and how it made me love gMail
All the cool kids use Gmail. I’ve had accounts for years, but have rarely used them. I use my own domains, and when Google finally introduced accounts for business, I looked into it. I’ve always loved the idea of threaded emails. But I find it clunky in Gmail, and the whole app is slow to me. I’ve been using fastmail.fm for years, and because everything is a page refresh, I just open lots of windows. You can do that in Gmail, but it’s not as nice… Anyway, I’ve never loved Gmail. And I had my way of working.
A month ago I finally made the jump. I decided I could be a grown up and revise my email habits. I moved over for techy and nontechy reasons. The techy reasons involve cleaner headers and better spam handling. The nontechy reasons include integration with the other services, and a great address book that syncs with my iPhone.
It’s been rocky, but an okay experience. The plusses and minuses have been about even. I’ve really had to change the way I think about email and organization, and I struggle with that.
The biggest thing is Gmail uses tags, which I love. However it use them instead of folders, which I find clunky. You can emulate folders, but it’s just not the same. I lose emails. It freaks me out that everything is in one folder. Some get tagged, some don’t, so emails don’t land in the “folder” I expect them to be in, and then I can’t fnd them.
A couple weeks ago, I had an idea of reminders to help me not lose emails. Okay, I still lose them, but what if they popped back up at the right time? It turns out this already exists, as a really well built FREE service called FollowUpThen.com from Internet Simplicity.
When sending an email, BCC the service when you want a reminder, and it pops back up, on the same thread. If there’s an email thread I want to put off till Tuesday, I’ll forward it to tuesday@FollowUpThen.com, and then archive it. The thread pops back up on Tuesday. Perfect!
So now I worry less that emails will fall out of my field of vision, and subsequently I’ll forget to follow up. I follow up on ideas, conversations, deadlines, invoices, anything. Like so many good things, it’s dead simple, free, and works well.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.
February 9th, 2010
Using an uptime monitor
An uptime monitor is a service that acts like a visitor to your site to check if your site is up. You can schedule the service to visit your site as often as you like. I find five or ten minute intervals to be comfortable without using a lot of bandwidth.
They hit your site and notify you if it’s down. Depending on the service you can get an email or SMS text message when your site goes down. They use different servers around the world and can also tell you how fast your site is delivered.
It’s reassuring to know if your site down and start doing something about it. Don’t count on your hosting company. I recently had an issue with a site being unavailable, but because it was a network issue and not a server issue, my hosting company wasn’t aware of it. My monitoring system notified me and I was able to create a support ticket immediately.
I highly recommend pingdom.com. They offer a free version that’s everything you need.
January 4th, 2010
Four productivity apps I swear by
I love tiny web apps that are 100% utility. I try to build apps like this because I think it’s one of the biggest values of the web. Get out of my way and help me get the most out of the work day.
Here are four apps (web based and not web based) that I use often:
RescueTime.com – You run a little app that monitors your activities, and then generates reports. It’s definitely insightful!
Tweetminer.com – Post web content to your Twitter account.
GetItDoneapp.com – My favorite GTD app (while I work on my own)
mite.yo.lk – I tried every time tracking app I could find. This one does less than all the others, and that’s why I love it. I use it to track more than work now.
And here are a couple I can’t wait to try:
GetConcentrating.com – A super simple little app for OS X that forces you to concentrate on the computer.
TeuxDeux.com – SwissMiss designed a great looking daily todo list. I’ve signed up, it seems awesome. I just haven’t incorporated it into my life yet.
December 28th, 2009
Google browser sizes
Google has introduced one of their best tool ever. It simple shows you what percentage of people will see what percentage of your web page. So simple, yet so crucial.
October 24th, 2009
Own your space, like this…
Brian Clark from Copyblogger created a site explaining how effective authority can be in marketing.
The site, Authority Rules, is amazing. It illustrates it’s own point. Well worth reading through.
October 14th, 2009
Usability and conversions on Fearless Business TV
I had the pleasure of being on Fearless Business’ first episode on Uba.TV today. I got to talk about some simple things you can do on your web site to increase conversions. I’m on around 7min, but I recommend watching the whole thing to learn about social media for small business, and also how to pitch your self or your business better.
May 22nd, 2009
Information design
January 23rd, 2009
Flickr mashup Crayon Box Experimental Colr Pickr
In finishing our Crayonbox Color Picker jQuery plugin, I came across this: Which allows you to select a color, and then it finds images matching that color. Just amazing.
July 20th, 2009
Great comments on life in a start-up
Onstartups has a great collection of comments made about one of their articles.
Tags: comments, insights, link, onstartups, start-ups
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