AdRoll is the most effective retargeting platform in the world. We’re trusted by more companies than anyone else. AdRoll takes just minutes to setup.

Sinatra application to show a pre-launch page and collect emails

I tell you this not to pitch my idea to you. I tell you this to convey how small and unambitious it can sound. And to tell you this is a deliberate strategic decision.

Focus.

HackerEngine is a payment-ready Rails app with Bootstrap, Stripe, and KISSmetrics.

Actually, it’s not magic, it’s just instant crowdsourcing. Sometimes you just need a real human. What if you could integrate human labor into any application with just a few lines of code?

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Service from Kall8 is pay-as-you-go. There are no confusing packages, no hidden fees, and no monthly minimums to maintain your number. Monthly rates for on-line features are listed below. Click the tab below for the per minute rates.

Bootstrap is an HTML5 & CSS3 framework designed to help you kickstart the development of webapps and sites. WrapBootstrap is a marketplace for premium Bootstrap themes and templates. Impress your clients and visitors while using a single, rock-solid foundation.

Google APIs use the OAuth 2.0 protocol for authentication and authorization. Google supports several OAuth 2.0 flows that cover common web server, JavaScript, device, and installed application scenarios.
OAuth 2.0 is a relatively simple protocol and a developer can integrate with Google's OAuth 2.0 endpoints without too much effort. In a nutshell, you register your application with Google, redirect a browser to a URL, parse a token from the response, and send the token to the Google API you wish to access.
This article gives an overview of the OAuth 2.0 scenarios Google supports and provides links to more detailed content.
Given the security implications of getting the implementation correct, we strongly encourage developers to use OAuth 2.0 libraries when interacting with Google's OAuth 2.0 endpoints (see Client libraries for more information). Over time, more features will be added to these libraries.

Put it out there. If you sign-up for an adwords account, you can get free credit. Same with facebook. Read a bit about keywords and such to figure out how to keep it cheap. It really should not take you a long time to put together a relatively broad, inexpensive ad campaign. Most tools out there allow you to set a budget so you don't spend too much. Set aside 20-30 minutes each night, or an hour every other night. It will be worth it.

Photoshop, meet your match.
Lean Designs is a revolutionary new what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) web design tool built for web design professionals.

Simply design your site using our HTML5-based editor and Lean Designs will automatically convert it to quality XHTML/CSS.

Compared to designing high fidelity mockups with Photoshop and converting them to code by hand, Lean Designs is easier, faster, and more effective.

Welcome to the #1 Marketplace for Voice Over Talent

Last week @robfitz asked me on short notice to join a panel at #foundersexchange about what first time founders shouldn’t do. I quickly took a moment to write down some suggestions into my moleskine to prepare myself. Things I witnessed in our company and things I noticed in other startups.

That “some suggestions” became a full page and that full page became a monster that had almost no free white space left. It was so full of stuff we did, it was ludicrous. It was dark like the night and microscribbled as if I hated that poor moleskine page.

My message at the panel was simple: “Don’t be a first time founder…” – or at least not the kind of first time founder I used to be ;)

After a gentle push by Rob and Sal I decided to share those first time founder mistakes we did publicly. I hope you can learn a thing or or two (to avoid) from this. If you have been through your first startup maybe you see yourself in some of them as well :)

Expectations and results are essential to email marketing, and at MailChimp, we've got loads of data on both. From average open and click rates to bounces and abuse complaints, we can tell you how you perform relative to your industry or business size. We've examined the effects of list segmentation and studied how different subject lines effect customer engagement. Use our research to learn how to best send and track your newsletters.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.

This is how I went about picking up the skills I required in 1 month. First, a disclaimer: I will note that I have an unfair advantage over the general populace because I took Computer Science at UNSW in the early 2000s but since graduation I had never touched a line of code except for hacking some VB macros in Excel in 2007. I held a series of Project and Product Management roles and by 2011 I was very much a ‘Product Guy’.

Step by step instructions for installing Django with Apache and mod_wsgi on Ubuntu 10.04.

About Mapstraction
Mapstraction is a library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible. Developers can code their applications once, and then easily switch mapping provider based on project needs, terms and conditions, and new functionality.

Users can switch maps as desired based on personal taste and quality of maps in their local area. Various tools built on top of Mapstraction allow users to easily integrate maps into their own sites, and configure them with different controls, styles, and provider.

Why Mapstraction?
By avoid dependency on any specific mapping provider (or versions within a provider) your code is easier to maintain.

Mapstraction is open-source and released under the BSD License. Yay

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required - businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Pepperjam, a GSI Media company, is an industry leader in online performance marketing and technology. We drive quality pay-for-performance results, provide unparalleled service, and maximize long term relationships between online merchants and publishers through our people, expertise and technology. Pepperjam operates a next generation performance marketing network, which provides innovative tools and analytics to optimize the complex performance marketing channel.

The easiest way to create high quality, original written content.
Tap our 24x7 writer workforce to produce high quality, original content quickly. Pay only for the articles you accept.

Any assumption that an entrepreneur makes about their customers and markets is nothing but a guess, says serial entrepreneur Steve Blank. But how can one prove a working hypothesis? It goes beyond soliciting friends for feedback in the dorm room. Successful ventures locate real customers in the field, solicit their feedback, and deeply analyze the customers whose problems they hope to solve.

Simple, Cheap Usability Testing for Your Website.
Start a usability test for your site in two minutes. Submit questions about your site and receive 10 responses from our reviewers. The cost is $20.

HTML5
A technical specification for Web developers

This HTML5 specification is like no other—It has been processed with you, the humble web developer, in mind.

The focus of this specification is readability and ease of access. Unlike the full HTML specification, this "web developer edition" removes information that only browser vendors need know.

To read about its conception, construction and future, read the press release.

— Ben Schwarz

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments.

By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments. For more information, see the part of the getting started guide on ”Why Vagrant?”

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you work? Check out the getting started guide, the getting started video.

Bad news. That last DELETE statement you typed had too wide of a WHERE clause and it wiped out records it shouldn't have with a cascading effect. Or worse, a programming bug has been wiping database records for a while and you only just noticed...

Yummygum is back with another iconSweets; a huge FREE icon set containing over a 1,000+ icons, all in a vector-shaped Photoshop format. iconSweets2 will crunch your icon thirst for all of your iPhone, iPad & Android apps or new web projects!

Yummygum designed 60 free vector Photoshop icons with care. Perfectly suitable for iPhone & iPad apps or your new web project!

94 hand-selected icons from the Pictos Vector Sets

I haven't used mTurk personally, but I know people who have, and I've looked a lot into their model.
Here's the deal: For a small amount of money (1 to 5 cents, or more if you like), you can pay people to take a specific action on your site, like posting a review, voting on 10 items, commenting to a post, etc.
I took a look at the mTurk site (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/findhits?match=false), and here are some things that you can earn money on:
- Look at 25 photos and click on the parts that are sidewalk ($0.02)
- Enter the title, name, and residence of a US Patent ($0.08)
- Write a 30-word comment to a blog post ($0.03)
- Find the longitude and latitude of a business, given its street address ($0.10)
- Write a one-paragraph abstract of an information technology article ($0.05)
I find it amazing that so many people are willing to do such drudgery-laden, time-intensive tasks, but evidently, when you toss a bunch of nickels into the air, lots of people jump.

gimmeh teh CSS docs.
query is a regex. try "background" vs "background$" or "color" vs "^color"

bloggergirl 394 days ago | link

I've been writing web copy for 7 years, and, although the advertising guys referenced so far (e.g., Hopkins, Ogilvy) are great, their tricks focus largely on direct response (i.e., long form letters). Use those tricks for writing PPC ad headlines, etc -- but be careful on your website.
On your site, your copy should set a tone for your service; get your value proposition right; be scannable; and err on the side of clear rather than clever.
Tone can be tricky because it's easy to get carried away... but check out Mint.com for examples of how to stay light & friendly but also professional & credible. As for your value proposition, check out MarketingExperiments for their tips on writing a value prop that resonates --- and that goes beyond "save time and money" (which every company seems to default to, making that phrase totally meaningless).
Regarding scannability, that one's pretty straightforward. Short, snappy headlines. Bullet lists with 3-4 bullets; concise copy in your bullets. No paragraphs over 3 lines long. Bolding used only for things that will be important to users (not just things you wish they would care about). Great typography to help users see the words they're supposed to. Not too much dedication to the rules of grammar (keep the reading level at about grade 5 or 6; Word can help you run tests to see what level your copy's at).
As for clear over clever, that means writing "88% of our users saved 6 hours on payroll last month" rather than "Payroll, meet your match".
(SEO, persuasion, emotion, etc. can always follow after you launch.)
If all else fails, I'm happy to read over your copy and offer recommendations. I'm at joanna AT page99test DOT com. Good luck!

During our recent checkout study we found several usability issues when using a drop-down for your country selector: a lack of overview, unclear sorting, scrolling issues, inconsistent UIs, a lack of context on mobile devices, and finally, they break the user's tab-flow.

So we took it upon ourselves to redesign the country selector.

Never, ever, disappoint en masse.

After my last post, my linode suffered a traffic surge.

That post passed half a million views, pushing page load time to 24 seconds.

Four years ago, an unexpected surge of traffic hit a start-up I was in.

Then, it ended in disaster as the service went down for three days.

But, because of that experience, I knew how to handle a surge.

Once I detected it, I brought page load time back down to two seconds. I used three techniques, and it took about 15 minutes:

Protect your brand. Simplify PCI and secure data with tokenization, hosted payment acceptance and remote storage.

This blog post is about building your application in two distinct layers: a HTTP RESTful API and a web frontend. This technique is not new and I am not the first developer to build a web application with this model. However, this is the first time I have built an application this way, and I want to share my experience.

Paul Graham and Harj Taggar doing office hours at Startup School 2011

WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for online businesses. WHMCS handles everything from signup to termination, with automated billing, provisioning & management. With WHMCS, you're in control with a very powerful business automation tool.

We create user interfaces,
icons & develop apps. Great design studio from Russia that makes UIs and Icons of the highest caliber for relatively cheap.

It's tough when you're bootstrapping a web app and still have a day job. There's the potential of making buckets of money from your app, but you still have to work at least 40 hours a week at your day job. So where do you find the time to work on your 'side project'? Here's how I found an extra work week, in between the normal work week.

When we launched in March, I spent a fair amount of time getting press coverage for GiftRocket. We haven’t been the most successful startup with PR, but we did decently for not having hired any professionals. We learned a lot over the course of that time. This article describes exactly what we did to get that PR, including the one tip for coldcalling journalists that made all the difference.

The first part of this got enough positive feedback that I decided to finish it up. Basic flashcard game, beginner Django tutorial + javascript/jquery tutorial.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

App - http://wordconfusion.com

Code - https://github.com/jarv/wordconfuse/

great cheap domains

Do you want a 7 KB cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable? Yeah!
Do you also want the possibility to add, edit and remove items by dead simple templating? Hell yeah!

Illumination Software Creator allows anyone to create their own software applications… without writing a single line of “code”.
The idea is simple: Arrange colorful building blocks of functionality however you like to create your own, unique, piece of software.
No reading large computer programming books.  No steep learning curve.
One project creates apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, Desktops and HTML5 or Flash websites.

This is not an essay on credit cards per se. If that's what you're looking for, I recommend Joe Ziegler's excellent series Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Credit Cards. This essay has a narrower focus -- to explore the anatomy of your credit card number, and to provide Java source code which determines if a given credit card number might be valid.

Of course, you do! But how can you find your first 1,000 customers and still have time to build your business? Simple!

The purpose of this page is to establish a concise and consistent approach to secure application development of Mozilla web applications and web services. The information provided here will be focused towards web based applications; however, the concepts can be universally applied to applications to implement sound security controls and design.

This page will largely focus on secure guidelines and may provide example code at a later time.

Patio11 or Patrick McKenzie of Bingo Card Creator fame gave this talk at Business of Software conference.

Note that the knowledge for each level is cumulative; being at level n implies that you also know everything from the levels lower than n.

Tool for designing logos using cool fonts for projects quickly.

“My vision is to use technology to make classical, one-on-one art training accessible to anybody who wants it. The traditional atelier process works, but is certainly not an option for everyone. ClassicalArtOnline.com allows students to receive the same quality classical instruction from the comfort of their homes.That’s what CAO is all about. That’s what I provide.”

Flexible authentication solution for Rails with Warden. — Read more

The Columnal CSS grid system is a “remix” of a couple others with some custom code thrown in. The elastic grid system is borrowed from cssgrid.net, while some code inspiration (and the idea for subcolumns) are taken from 960.gs. Check out the demo.

This Django application provides management commands to help backup and restore your project database to AmazonS3, Dropbox or Local Disk.

Behind the scenes of Glennz Tees T-shirt designs. All tees designed by Glenn Jones

Have you ever needed to get query string values using JavaScript? This task is usually a painful split, split, split, iterate, indexOf hack that is really slow and terribly ugly to look at. It also tends to pile up lines of code really fast.

Here is a really sweet way to parse the query string into a JavaScript object with two lines of code using regular expressions to populate an object. I discovered this trick a few years ago and filed it away in my code snippets folder.

Touchy goes beyond just an HTML/CSS template, adding performance optimization tools, hardware accelerated animation, device API, fixed positioning and much more so you can really rock the mobile web.

There is a fundamental disconnect between the way most people see a hustler and what a hustler sees when she or he looks in the mirror. On a bad day, a hustler sees themselves as someone who needs to improve drastically. On a good day, a hustler sees themselves as someone who could have done something different to improve their hustle. The consistency is the fact that a hustler always strives to be better.

I just got back from attending [1] this skillshare class called "Practical Advice for Getting Into Y-Combinator". It was taught by two guys who are YC alums. I took a few notes and felt like typing them up and summarizing, so here's the gist of the class if anyone is interested and/or thinking about applying to YC.

When I need a Django app I just search it and most of the time I quickly find a FOSS project that either does exactly what I want or that can be forked and tweaked to do exactly what I want.

Here’s what I’d do in the beginning:

xec Summary: Today I’m launching a Beta open source project called DeployMint. I’m using it on WordPress installations where WordPress is being used as a CMS. It runs as a WordPress plugin and allows for staging and deployment of WordPress sites along with robust version control and zero down-time during deployments. It uses the Git version control system to store site snapshots in a safe and space efficient way. It also takes a “belt and braces” approach and provides an emergency back-out system separate to Git in case a deployment fails. You can download the latest version of DeployMint and see a video demo at the DeployMint project page on Google Code.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.
Nerd alert: Bootstrap is built with LESS and was designed to work out of the gate with only modern browsers in mind.

The following is a list I've been building up in my notes of some of the things that should be done in preparation for launching a new site or major revamp.

What you are about to read might be a little shocking. Why? Because it’s so freakishly long. It contains a 6-month action plan for marketing your business online and if you can read it all in one go you’re a hero or a raging insomniac. I’d recommend bookmarking it to use as an ongoing reference guide.

There are plenty of great ways to accept and receive payments from others, some designed for specific purposes and others just aiming to be better ways to handle money. Here's a look at our favorites.

Currently, payment networks are something which control you. We think it should be the other way around. Grid will redefine the way you interact with the Dwolla payment network, setting a new precedent for the way you interact with any payment network.

Keep in mind that these templates do not replace the "soft intro" or the initial conversation where you talk to an investor and pique their interest. In my limited experience in fundraising, COLD CALLING and COLD EMAILING generally does not work. So get that "soft intro" first, or connect over AngelList and then start with the first template.

Whats more amazing is that Eric lays out the first steps for you to start shaping up your business to really make money and WE'VE GOT IT ALL. But be careful once you start watching it you might not finish because, like me, you will have to get back to work implementing all the good stuff Eric is talking about.

For the past year and a half or so I’ve been working full-time at Dumbwaiter Design doing Django development. I’ve picked up a bunch of useful tricks along the way that help me work, and I figured I’d share them.

With all of the start-ups coming out of YC, I would imagine it's just a matter of time before one falls prey to a successful attack--sql injection, xss, etc. Any start-uppers on here have experience defending their turf? How does a cash-stretched start-up devote enough time to security when a million other things are calling for attention?

I haven’t updated this blog in a while. That’s partly because we’ve had a lot going on, and partly because I wanted to first get the big fucking monkey off my back. i.e. I wanted to wait until I started to get new users and content onto Get Comparisons. Which I’m happy to say… we’ve been successful at doing! So with a big sigh of relief I return to blogging.

This element will receive inline changes as you edit the CSS rules on the left. Enjoy!

Ducksboard is a real-time dashboard for tracking your internal metrics and webservices. A single place where you can gather data from all SaaS apps you use (GoogleAnalytics, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Zendesk…), as well as pushing us any internal metric you might consider through our REST API.

Building a startup is hard. Really hard. The last thing you want to do is make it harder. Through the trials and tribulations I've undergone in launching my startup, I've discovered several gems that are indispensable. If you're trying to launch a startup, here are the tools you need.

I get it, you want to learn how to program and how to be a hacker, fine let’s do this. It sounds tough but you’ll want to learn two languages for your first time: Ruby and Python. They are similar in syntax and usage cases so this shouldn’t be a big problem. Pick up the basics, the syntax, and the community standards of each. Understand that each has it’s own power and use as well as problems. Read these two books front to back for as long as they interest you, they’re made for beginners so don’t be afraid!