Signing Off

Have clear goals in mind, visualize success or failure

Concrete

Yes or No

Define Success

What is  your end goal?

What is next after achieving success?

Define Failure

When is it no longer feasible to continue?

Do the pros outweigh the cons?

Exit Strategy

Be prepared to fail, this is the difference between total failure and a graceful exit

Things we learned

Creating 125 episodes of content is difficult

Giving  things out and getting a response is amazing

Thanks for everything

-Mark and Jade

Track and increase your conversions for fun and profit. :)

News and Follow-Ups – 03:04

Elasticsearch

Twilio cuts pricing

Geek Tools – 05:59

Logitech DiNovo Mini

Webapps - 08:14

localtunnel - Super-easy publicly-accessible URL for your local server

Account Killer - Tips on how to delete your accounts

Increase Conversions - 14:15

Track it, Faceoff Episode 53 - Evidence based web development

Agiletask, Signup - Take it for a spin

Have a good headline

Men’s Cothing vs Order Men’s Clothing easily for Bargin Prices, 127% increase

90% improvement in conversion by just changing the headline

Schedule emails to go out

1, 3, 15, 30, 6months?

Monitor 404s and errors Episode 124 - Website Issue Monitoring

Error pages, db and JS errors will drive people off

Try different colors for your main signup/add buttons

How we increased our conversion rate by 72%

Don't let issues and problems go unnoticed.

News and Follow-Ups – 00:38

Apple taking the cloud seriously, doing OS upgrades in the cloud

Ninjabutton goes down, how much can you depend on web services?

Ebay aquires Magento

Jade's iTunes account compromised

Skype protocol reverse engineered

Geek Tools – 14:45

Belkin Conserve Smart AV F7C007q Energy-Saving Power Strip

Webapps - 17:33

TravelPod Traveler IQ Game - How well do you know your geography?

Explorra Visual DNA - Visually select good vacations

Website Issue Monitoring - 22:01

Website Issue Monitoring

Uptime

Browsermob - Multiple locations and adjust time

Uptimerobot - Totally free, includes SMS support

Pingdom - Response times, error analysis

Free account 1 website with 20 free SMS messages

Load Time

Browsermob - Multiple locations and adjust time

Pingdom - Response times, error analysis

Google Webmaster Tools

Error Tracking

Google webmaster tools, 404s unreachable to spider

You need to track when people hit errors, so you can fix them

Think about your error messages, ala Rails "Someone has been notified"

Methods

App Emails You

Exception Hub

Hoptoad

Traffic Jams

Google analytics traffic spike alerts via email/sms

Set for no traffic

Set for high traffic

Find out what NoSQL is and isnt.

News and Follow/Ups – 02:24

Google Sunsets Translate API

"Why would anyone ever use your api's again?" and Google is not your daddy

Could they have made it profitable though?

Google Wallet

Geek Tools – 13:15

Supergoop! SPF 30 Sunscreen Swipes with Zinc for Sensitive Skin

Supergoop! SPF 30 Single-Application Individually Wrapped Sunscreen Swipes, 21-Count

Webapps - 15:22

Kitten Image Bookmarklet - Replace a site's images with Kittens (such as NSFW sites)

Easy Bar Tricks - Cool tricks and sneaks to show your friends at the bar

NoSQL - 19:56

What are they?

Usually don't require fixed table structures

Usually used to scale horizontally

Add more commodity nodes as opposed to adding more resources and using expensive hardware

Why would you use them?

Scalability

Performance

In certain use cases they are easier to implement

When would you NOT use them?

If you don't know ahead of time how you are going to query or data

Applies mainly to key-value type NoSQL

Usually arguments start because people think in terms of RDBMS vs NoSQL.  They are usually implemented side by side for difference use cases.  It is not an all or nothing.

CAP Theorem

Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time)

Availability (node failures do not prevent survivors from continuing to operate)

Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss)

Cap Theorem says that a system can satisfy two of these but not all three.

Popular DocDBs

CouchDB

Friendpaste

MongoDB

foursquare

intuit

shutterfly

Key-value based

Redis

Blizzard

Stackoverflow

Github

Tweetdeck

Memcached

Just about everyone, although many people are moving to redis

Cassandra

Cisco

Cloudkick

Column oriented

Google bigtable

Hbase

Graphdb

neo4j

Good at multiple relationships

Think product categories

User friend follow relationships

Amazon

The top web do's and don'ts.

News and Follow/Ups – 01:40

Microsoft buys Skype

Google Docs split testing

Split testing is like ground hog day

Geek Tools – 12:25

StarTech.com ICUSBAUDIO USB 2.0 to Audio Adapter

Webapps - 16:43

http://chopapp.com (via @manifestphil)

http://www.cascader.co/ (via @manifestphil)

Web Do's and Don'ts - 21:16

Don’t use splash pages

Specify HTML document’s language

Write effective Loops

Do Proofread

Use the right DOCTYPE

Keep content in a logical order in the source

Don’t put block elements inside inline elements

Use the CSS cascade

Learn the box model

Improve Your Web Typography

Find out how your favorite mashup webapp works.

News and Follow/Ups – 00:39

Penn State MacAdmins Conference

Geek Tools – 05:14

Jump-N-Carry  JNC300XL 900 Peak Amp Ultraportable 12V Jump Starter with Light

Coleman Cable 08660 20-Foot Heavy-Duty Auto Battery Booster Cables with Polar Glow Clamps, 4-Gauge

Webapps - 11:06

Plastic Jungle - Buy and sell gift cards

Famous Objects From Classic Movies -  Can you guess the object?

Mashing, Scraping, and APIs - 17:12

Mashups

Hipmonk

Gist - just bought out by blackberry

http://opensignalmaps.com/

http://instalyrics.com/

http://www.checkinmania.com/deals

Scraping

Computers reading data otherwise intended for end-users

The billion dollar scraping business

Google

Infochimps

Pitfalls

Copyright, Terms of Service

Fragile

Advantages

Access to data otherwise not available

Tools to make scraping less painful

http://scraperwiki.com/

http://www.junar.com/portal/HomeManager/actionQuery

APIs

Data/operations made available to computer programs

XML/REST/SOAP/oauth

Top APIs

Payment Gateways

Google Maps

Twitter

Flickr

Shipping, UPS/FedEx

Facebook

Twilio

APIs as a strategy for business

Twitter

Google Maps

Successful businesses based on APIs

Tweetdeck

Twilio

Learn how you can write less code with CoffeeScript the Javascript compiler.

News and Follow/Ups – 00:40

Jade is going out of state!

Geek Tools – 03:25

Vic Firth Pump and Grind Stainless-Steel Pepper Mill

Webapps - 05:06

Visual Event - Bookmarklet that lets you see Javascript click events assigned to elements

Open Signals Map - Mashup of cell providers towers and cell usage.

Full Text Search - 11:15

As of March 16, 2011, CoffeeScript is on GitHub's list of most-watched projects

A Ruby/Python inspired language that compiles down to Readable/Lint compatible Javascript

CoffeeScript claims to reduce the number of lines needed to be written to 1/3 of hand written JS

Because CoffeeScript compiles predictably to JavaScript, programs can be written with less code (typically 1/3 fewer lines) with no effect on runtime performance.

Who is using it?

Used in production by 37Signals

Used in the Ars Technica reader for iPad

Some advantages

It is still compatible with Node.js, jquery, or any other framework

Removes noise

adds keywords, classes, and features like heredocs to make coding cleaner

It is said to be faster to code in CoffeeScript once you learn the ropes

Some potential downsides

Debugging a coffeescript script still requires you read the generated Javascript code, which can be tedious, since you haven't actually written it yourself.

CoffeeScript - Compiler-for-Windows

Faceoff interviews Phillip Downer from Manifest Creative.

Phillip Downer

Phillip Downer

Manifest Creative

See Phil's work on Dribbble

Thanks Phil!

Faceoff interviews Jeremy Linden from Mixpanel.

Jeremy Linden from Mixpanel

Jeremy Linden

Mixpanel - Real-time event tracking and analytics

Follow @Mixpanel on Twitter.

Add enterprise level search into your site.

News and Follow/Ups – 01:00

Square now being sold in Apple’s store

Check-Ins dying out?

Dropbox: 25 million users

Geek Tools – 14:13

Yikerz! - Super fun magnet game

Webapps - 16:12

Surfboard - Flipboard as a web app

InstaLyrics - Find lyrics quickly

Full Text Search - 22:11

Options

Google Custom Search

Commercial

Benefits

Super fast to setup

Easy to implement

Ability to add adsense into search results

Downsides

Unable to adjust content ranking and do custom integration

Mainly for just indexing HTML pages, not search queries and other text.

Sphinx

“Searching via SphinxAPI is as simple as 3 lines of code, and querying via SphinxQL is even simpler, with search queries expressed in good old SQL.”

Open source with commercial support

Result relevance ranking is the default. You can set up your own sorting should you wish, and give specific fields higher weightings.

The search service daemon (searchd) is pretty low on memory usage - and you can set limits on how much memory the indexer process uses too.

API for:

Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, C, and other languages.

Written in C++

Stats

60+ MB/sec per server

500+ queries/sec

Biggest known Sphinx cluster indexes 5 billion documents, resulting in over 6 TB of data. Busiest known one is, unsurpisingly, Craigslist, that serves 50+ million search queries/day.

Companies using Sphinx

Craigslist

Slashdot

Mozilla

Wordpress.org

Lucene

Done by the Apache foundation

Open source

Written in Java

Search types

ranked searching -- best results returned first

many powerful query types: phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries and more

fielded searching (e.g., title, author, contents)

date-range searching

sorting by any field

multiple-index searching with merged results

allows simultaneous update and searching

Stats

over 95GB/hour on modern hardware

small RAM requirements -- only 1MB heap

index size roughly 20-30% the size of text indexed

Solr

Lucene is a library where Solr is a server that supports XML, REST

Benefits over Sphinx

Solr is easily embeddable in Java applications.

Solr can be integrated with Hadoop to build distributed applications

Solr can index proprietary formats like Microsoft Word, PDF, etc. Sphinx can't.

Companies using Solr

eHarmony

Ticketmaster

Digg

AOL

Zappos