Earlier this week I was looking for a donation widget (with a progress bar) for Missed Connections to ask for help with paying for next year’s hosting fees.
The three I found, all requiring PayPal accounts
I went with Pledgie as it was the simplest, and had a badge just the right size and look for the site:
Here’s the donation page that goes along with it. Pledgie also has two other smaller designs you can use.
I almost went with ChipIn but their flash-based widget didn’t look right with the flash player my Ubuntu’s Firefox 3 uses.
The PayPal labs giving widget looked promising but I didn’t find enough information on it and whether it was OK for non-non-profits to use.
A few ways to backup your Tumblr hosted blog:
Full details at WebMonkey.
I’ve opted to do the first option monthly for now.
I’m trying to catch up on all these blog posts I’ve been meaning to do for months now…the next one up is this experiment performed by Codynamix on the Missed Connections logo redesign.
A few months ago I posted a contest on CrowdSpring to design a new logo for Missed Connections (see my laptop skin post to check out the winner).
Codynamix kindly took the first few submissions of that logo contest and collected feedback using Amazon Mechanical Turk, I believe their primary objective was to try out the Mturk API.
You can read the results on the Codynamix blog: Vote for a logo design using Amazon Mechanical Turk
I’ve started a blog to chronicle my attempts to make Missed Connections happen. Read why at How Not To Run A Startup.
Just ordered a custom laptop skin from Avery, it looks like this:
Easy and good value, it cost under a tenner with a discount code. The design tool is OK although could do with a few tweaks to help with alignment; the grid would be improved with some bold lines, rulers and units. I ended up using a tape measure against my screen for alignment, which seems odd now I think about it when I could have used a browser extension.
I don’t know when the discount code expires, just enter it during checkout, and it gets you 50% off. The code is AF50SK. Here’s the Avery web site.
This morning I’ve been adding a staging environment for a Spree deployment and following these instructions from Blue Box Group meant it only took a few minutes to get up and running with the Capistrano Multi Stage gem. Thanks Blue Box Group.
And to install the capistrano-ext gem:
gem install capistrano-ext
Updated 22/Aug/2010 Added Youseeble
Updated 25/Mar/2010 Ghost is now out of beta and available in free and priced plans. Added Mouseflow to list.
Updated 31/Jan/2010 Gladly added to list the first open source contender, SMT
I’ve been interested in using a javascript screen recording tool to help find usability improvements for Missed Connections.
There’s a few around, most of which have a free option that allows at least a few recording sessions.
I’ve not found an open source app for recording sessions (Open source project now exists, see SMT in list below) perhaps someday a usability agency will do that as a lead generator.
I’ve not decided on one nor tried any of them, but here’s a list of all the screen recorders I could find, in no particular order:
I’d like to keep this updated with any new ones, shout if you find any not mentioned.
Good advice from High Tech Dad on fixing the WordPress White Screen Of Death (WSOD) after you’ve updated WordPress. This happened to me upgrading to WordPress 2.8. My problem was the tumblelog theme being incompatible with WordPress 2.8.
Photo: Thanks to Cristian
find_random is a decent rails plugin that I’ve been using for a while now on Missed Connections that is very handy for finding random active records.
The plugin author is Ben Tucker of Green River . I’ve just emailed him in the hope he’ll add a couple of changes I submitted.
find_random subversion repository: http://pub.svn.greenriver.org/find_random/
Update: Heard back from Ben and he’s kindly merged in my changes – thanks Ben!
When looking to find a way to have multiple signatures in gmail, I found a lot of older blog posts talking about Firefox plugins, which aren’t great if you use multiple computers or a different browser.
So anyway, there’s a better solution, works on all platforms and its built in to gmail.
- Go to the Google Labs features in Gmail and enable “canned responses”.
- Add your signatures to canned responses. To add a canned response, “Compose” a new email, enter the signature you want, then just above the message text area use the “canned responses” drop down to save the signature.
- Repeat above steps for every signature you want
Photo: Thanks to Mario
