Faceoff Show Jade Robbins and Mark Sanborn
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- Technology
Faceoff is your face-to-face web technology podcast. In this podcast Jade Robbins and Mark Sanborn talk about various aspects of web technology such as web development, social media, and web entrepreneurship.
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Episode 126: Signing Off
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
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Episode 125: Increasing Conversions
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%
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Episode 124: Website Issue Monitoring
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
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Episode 123: NoSQL
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
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Episode 122: Viva Las Vegas
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
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Episode 121: Mashing, Scraping, and APIs
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