Meetro is a new proximity based service to find people based on their distance to you. The cool thing I want to point out is the website. Rather than have 4 pages of text to explain it they have a nice little video right on the homepage, in fact it's basically the only thing on the homepage. Normally I wouldn't like that but for this type of site and their target audience I think it works really well.
[via Trend Junkie]
I procured myself a lawyer the other day to write up the HelpSpot license and support contract. This is another thing all you up and coming MicroISV's should budget for because it ain't cheap! It's an expense though that is well worth it, at least I hope so. It also ensures that you have a legal representative who knows your business if any issues ever arise.
I looked into some of those prefab license agreements, but they just didn't fit the bill. They might be OK for selling consumer software which is what they seem to focus on, but I didn't trust it for a multiuser B2B application . Also, there really aren't that many examples for a named user type license.
Really getting down to it now.
Rasmus (creator of PHP) on his wish list for PHP 6. I'm with him 100% on all of it. Most of those things are bogus hacks anyway which were supposed to make things "simpler" and "more secure" but failed on both.
If you're into Java go checkout http://www.cafeaulait.org/. Rusty prommenently linked to my Leaving Features Out post and sent a frickin boatload of traffic my way. Thanks Rusty! And hey he appears to live in Brooklyn, cool. For some reason I rarely see East Coast folks in the blogging world, but maybe that's just me.
This is a warning, I'm about to modify my htaccess file to deny some pesky content scrappers who are pulling content from this blog to feed they're bogus google ad filled sites. If any of you have trouble accessing the site after please email me at ian [at] userscape.com. Hopefully there won't be any trouble. Of course if you're the content scraper then please don't bother me :-)
I don't like much that's done with AJAX because it's usually too much. If you change half my screen then you should really just be reloading the page. However, Mike Davidson has done a little polling widget for inside blog posts which is great. A perfect use that's instantly and obviously superior to other polling systems that have popups. A poll is a small ancillary piece of content to the blog post itself that doesn't need it's own page refresh.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/08/the-polls-are-in
Good short little podcast from pro-php.com on why you shouldn't use strip_slashes and magic quotes. It's too bad magic quotes are even part of PHP. They should have removed them in PHP 5, because all it does is confuse people.
Bob (I think his name is Bob, I may be wrong), did a nice interview with Mike Rohde, the designer of my UserScape and HelpSpot logos and featured in my post about the process. You should check it out. As Mike points out, getting custom logo's done is pretty cheap and I think an extremely important part of your business.
Great post by the 37sig guys on why you shouldn't be pawning off your poor decision making on your customers. HelpSpot has just a few prefs related to how to contact you and that's about it (email, sms, etc). This is actually a big problem I see in alot of help desk software. They have all kinds of user preferences which sounds like a good thing on the marketing site, but ends up being a pain when you actually use the software.