Faceoff Show Jade Robbins and Mark Sanborn

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