are you prepared to be?
I joined Dan Benjamin on the Conversation yesterday for another chat about startups and business. I could talk with Dan for hours, it's so much fun. Show notes and audio/video link below.
Dan Benjamin talks with Matt Tanase of Slicehost and DevStructure. They discuss creating demand for a product and your business, marketing on a budget, building an audience, getting your users to help market for you, the importance of a co-founder, acquisitions, and more.
I just wasted a ton of time trying to get render :js working. I hope this saves a google visitor time or someone tells me what I was doing wrong.
According to guides.rubyonrails.org, render :js should work, but I kept getting an error about nil formats. Some people used render :text, but even after setting :content_type to "text/javascript", it would just display the text. So I finally gave up and used the javascript_tag. This was all done in a helper. I also just wanted to post something using Markdown to Posterous.
UPDATE: Markdown didn't work, so I'm using a gist.
"Here's the thing about engineering, and this car is all about engineering: A machine is never finished, never fully optimized. Engineers subscribe not to Aquinas but Augustine. No machine is ever perfect except when it marches toward perfectibility." - WSJ on the Perfect Porsche
"But this game is really, really important to me. It's done a lot for me. It's done a lot for my family. As much as I've been through, I don't take any start for granted, 'cause I never know when it's going to end. And I love doing it. I really do. And I love everybody in this clubhouse and I don't like anybody I play against when I'm between the lines. That's just the way it is. It's super, super important to me."
Devise has quickly become the de facto Rails authorization tool. I'm working with it for the first time and have been impressed with everything it can do. It's very complete, a little too much for my taste, but it plays nicely with Rails 3. I had to dig around in order to accept either a username or email address at login, since by default it only accepts one. If you modify the config.authorization_keys to include 2 paramaters, it requires both at login and is really intended for a custom subdomain. Multiple people were asking the same question and nobody presented a solution, so here is mine. I hope it saves people some time. Set config.authorization_keys to :login.
Door No. 1 (more expensive): Traffic, parking, long walk to stadium, lousy seats, lifeless state-of-the-art arena, TV timeouts, dead crowds, drunk/bitter fans, more TV timeouts, hiked-up concession prices, PDAs with jammed signals as you're searching for scores, even more TV timeouts, long walk to car, even more traffic.
Door No. 2 (less expensive): Sofa, NFL package, HD, fantasy scores online, remote control toggling, gambling, access to scores, seven straight hours of football, cell phone calls, beer and food in fridge, no traffic.
I can see going through Door No. 1 once a year just to remind yourself that going to an NFL game sucks. But eight times a year? Unless you had good seats, or unless this was your only excuse to get out of your house and get plastered, why would you? It's a blue-collar sport with white-collar ticket prices. This blackout trend would have happened whether the economy was suffering or not."
ABOUT
I started Slicehost, now I'm building DevStructure. I like business, geekery and gambling.
work: devstructure.com
blog: howradical.com
tweet: zenmatt
mail: matt AT howradical
