Ryan on the Internet » Internet

StartupWeekend announced “open” at BIL

Ryan Imel — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:57:30 +0000

So this may seem really silly to some of you, but this was actually a pretty exciting moment for me. Among all of the prep for Ashley’s birthday on Saturday, I was keeping an eye peeled at the live feed from the BIL conference to see Andrew Hyde announce something that I’ve had the pleasure to work on for the past couple of weeks.

Here’s the screenshot I took. Yeah, I’m a dork.

BTW, most of the chat that happens on live feed chats is all centered around the quality of the feed. Just sayin'.

Exciting, because this is really the first time that anything I was a part of was announced to a group this large, and being broadcasted on the web for me to see way over here in the midwest. Cool stuff.

Oh yeah, and Startup Weekend’s new site is pretty badass. Check it out, especially if you’re into the idea of being in a startup. And badass things.

On Storing and Sharing Photographs

Ryan Imel — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:01:14 +0000

When I started using WordPress about two years ago, I was interested in the platform specifically for the utility I saw in it. At the time I didn’t have the slightest idea about how to construct a system for managing content. I had begun to play with PHP includes, but that only gave me a slightly more efficient way of handling static information.

With WordPress I was able to easily build around a dynamic set of information. This was completely new to me. It was fun. But aside from these simple things I can’t claim any sort of noble reason for choosing WordPress.

Now I know more about why one would want to use WordPress. Not only is it simple yet powerful, but it is built on the beautiful foundation that is open source. WordPress is free, self hosted, and entirely customizable. I would also argue it is worthwhile for what it teaches you about PHP.

With the latest release of WordPress 2.5, a fairly impressive gallery system now comes built into the default WordPress install, complete with template tags. Matt Mullenweg has been the best example so far of this feature in action. He has uploaded thousands of photos up to this point (right Matt?) and this tells me the feature is fairly robust and can handle some heavy use.

I’m drawn to this new feature, and to the possibilities I see coming out of it in the future.

But right now I’m on Flickr.

At the time I chose Flickr for my photos, I really did believe (and still do) that the choice I made at the time was correct. Then. My options were Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, or nothing at all, really. Flickr was new, exciting, and social. Why wouldn’t I want to use it? Why wouldn’t anyone?

Now, a year and one half after starting my Flickr account (as well as coaxing others to join and start their own) I am reneging on my decision. I have been influenced, albeit late in the game, by some great open source literature.

Open source is free. More importantly, it means it can never be taken away.

Flickr, my current photo repository, is $24 per year. If Yahoo pulled the plug, the service would disappear.

Open source—more specifically, WordPress—is self hosted. I get to keep it on my server and maintain it myself.

Flickr is Yahoo’s. I can touch, but only in the way they allow.

Open source platforms can’t die.

Flickr could die.

I’m not against Flickr. I’m not even against paid photo hosting services in general. I know that these services provide very valuable things—social interaction, sharing, and printing directly from viewing screens, for example.

At the same time, with what is being pushed forward in BuddyPress at the moment (check out the site and sign up for the mailing list to get some of the inside scoop) I see these sorts of social interactions happening in an even better way than what is possible with Flickr. An open landscape sounds really nice.

I’ll be slowly moving over photos from Flickr to my personal WordPress blog (that’s here). Note that this has nothing at all to do with the recent decision over at Flickr to begin accepting video clips. Purely inconsequential.

Now I’m just excited to move forward and get my “media library” back under my full control.

Don’t Punish Customers When They Purchase

Ryan Imel — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:02:34 +0000

Let’s say I just went through the purchasing process, and wasn’t too happy with the end result. The retailer in question is a very popular one, but pointing out who won’t strengthen my point any. At the end of the process, after completely checking out and giving them my money, I was bombarded by affiliate ads and promises for “$100 for free” if I participated in a survey. Yuck.

I understand that this particular retailer wanted to make a few extra bucks and so they sold some real estate. But I, the customer, end up with the feeling that any degree of professionalism throughout the shopping experience was all a charade, something they pulled over my eyes to sell me something. Once they had my money, they didn’t care about me anymore — at least that’s the image I left with.

The Moral of the Story

Don’t punish your customers/clients/readers when they “purchase”. They will see that you value dough more than them, and it probably won’t make them very happy campers. Respect your customers and they will respect you back.

At An Event Apart

Ryan Imel — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 12:00:57 +0000

I’ll be away for the next two days at An Event Apart in Chicago. If anyone who reads this is also going, it would be great to meet up and chat. Just comment and we can get in touch.

I’m looking forward to the event. Things like this always get me inspired. I’m sure I will have lots to say when I return.

Clean Out Your Inbox With Highrise

Ryan Imel — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:36:27 +0000

One of my pet peeves is disorder. It doesn’t always get to me—sometimes my desk is in disarray, and my screen desktop is usually nuts—but certain things have always been (and always will be) an annoyance. One of those annoyances is my email inbox. I use Outlook, and I hate that it gets cluttered. Even when I organize it everything isn’t ideal. Windows’ folder system just isn’t attractive to me.

Then, one day not so long ago, I found a solution.

Highrise is a web based application created by 37signals, and it specializes in collecting your email and contact information in a central location, off of your computer. Information is fully exportable either as CSV and as Vcards, depending on whether you want your emails or your contact information.

Highrise also allows you to attach notes and all sorts of information about your contacts, keeping them in one place. You can add to-do items ranging from tomorrow morning to next year sometime. Makes it harder to forget birthdays that way.

The free version of Highrise is intense—allows for over 200 contacts and up to two users. Right now I have 4 versions of Highrise running:

My business account (for Aspiring Indie)
My other business account (for the NIIC)
The church (Aboite Lutheran)
and finally, myself (Ryan Imel)

I would encourage you to check it out. Using OpenID it’s easy to switch between different versions of the same application, which is a great help and encourages you to only use each for what it should be used for. For instance, I am now beginning to use Highrise for my personal email, so it doesn’t get all tangled up anywhere else.

The Power of the Facebook Social Timeline

Ryan Imel — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 05:43:51 +0000

It really is pretty cool. I actually spent over an hour today going through my ~190 friends and setting our friend details. This involved, in some cases, listing multiple trips and work experiences together. The emphasis was put on when we met, and I tried not to delve too much into classes we shared together.

The result is the timeline below, and I have to say it was exciting to see. It’s nice for me, especially, since I don’t have a great memory with some of this stuff. Take a look. (Image has been resized to protect the names and information below )

Who wouldn’t get excited by that?

Now, I do have a question or two. First off, why does my info stop at 2000? I have plenty stretching before then, but instead I get the subversive feedback “That’s a negative, Ghostrider. The pattern is full.” I guess this is a way of the Facebook crew telling me it won’t show me more? I don’t get that. Anyone know why it wont go on, or how to coax it farther?

Also, I’m curious if Facebook is interested in allowing this information to be outputted in any way. I’ve thought of this before; whether or not Facebook will ever support vCard exporting for contact information. Maybe that’s a stretch.

Okay, enough time wasted on Facebook today. At least I pulled a blog post out of it.

404 Research Lab

Ryan Imel — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 19:44:55 +0000

Just ran across an interesting site this afternoon – especially for anyone with knowledge of the web. 404 Research Lab is a website dedicated to all things 404; in other words the pages that show up when you click somewhere that doesn’t exist.

Any site owner may define their own custom 404 pages. 404 Research Lab exists to celebrate the great custom pages, to educate on the history of the 404, and show how to make your own 404 pages great. If you are a huge dork (like me) or have a few minutes to kill, check them out. Especially look through their gallery, Area 404, to see their favorites by category. My personal favorites are all from the “amusing” category.

Update: My favorites have to be shame 404 and rage 404. For a little 404 action from Fort Wayne, see ipfw.org. That one’s gold, I really should send it in to 404 RL.

Windows Live Mail

Ryan Imel — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 16:14:58 +0000

When I first received notice of the existence of Windows Live Mail (as it interrupted my normal Hotmail session to tell me) I was somewhat excited. The way the idea was presented, it was going to be a step up. Forget lousy Hotmail, this is Windows Live Mail. It looked shiny. It sounded cool.

I hate it.

To put it more kindly, I’m disappointed. The pretty little notice lied to me. I was expecting something that, although it might require slight adjustment, I could step in to and love immediately. I’ve been trying it for a week or so now, and nothing has really “wow’ed” me.

First of all, the whole “choose your theme” idea doesn’t deliver. Excuse me if changing the color of a handful of category headers throughout the site doesn’t whip me into a frenzy of joy, but that’s just pointless. The preview pane is a nice choice to have, but really just gets in the way. I’m going through the daily box-checking of removing dozens of junk e-mails, and if I click any cell instead of the checkbox, I lose everything I checked! It brings up the message and checks this new email. Now that I’ve written it all out it does sound somewhat petty, but when I’m attacking junk mail I’m usually not in the best state of mind anyway .

Like I said, it’s a nice idea – Microsoft could probably still pull it off. It would be great to see my email provider of years develop a system that works as smoothly and beautifully as some web sites out there, but this current build makes me wonder if they’re capable.

Back to Hotmail for me.