attemptry.com

I've decided to switch the Attemptry blog from Drupal to Wordpress. I've also consolidated the different blogs from different people to a single blog for all of Attemptry.

The new blog is here: http://attemptry.com/blog

I've been thinking about this for a while now. I might not be right. To be honest, my experience is limited.

Conventional wisdom is that you should always have a co-founder. This person fills in for your weaknesses (and tells you where those weaknesses are), inspires you when times are rough, gives you a sounding board to bounce things off, and generally dispell the lonliness of founding a company.

However, if you look at the traits one at a time, perhaps a co-founder is less necessary than you think.

Just a quick update. I spent some time futzing around with attemptry over the last couple evenings.

• Upgraded to drupal 6.2
• Upgraded my modules: Google Analytics and PathAuto
• Added the Trackback module.
• Fooled around with rewrite rules to get http://attemptry.com to redirect to http://www.attemptry.com:
  

    # attemptry.com -> www.attemptry.com
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^attemptry\.com
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.attemptry.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
  

• Fooled around with rewrite rules to point my feed to feedburner:
  

I got tired of seeing the SSL certificate error, so I bought a real SSL certificate from GoDaddy for $15. I will be installing it soonish.

I'm thinking about switching to Wordpress:
* Drupal is more than I need for this site.
* Their iPhone application is pretty compelling - it's a pain to update from the iPhone without it.

It takes time to do these things, so it may be a while before they happen (if at all).

It's been too long since my last update. I haven't gotten much done online lately, despite having relatively plentiful free time.

I've updated holdist. I made the user interface super ugly, as I'm mostly ignoring it for now, but wanted to start giving myself places to put additional features.

I re-architected the code a little to reflect my continued growth in understanding python and django, as well as development in general. You can checkout the code with subversion using the command below:

It is getting cheaper and cheaper to write aggregators (tools that take content from many different Web sites and display it in one place). In the not to distant future, it will be easier to collect and redisplay content than it is to create it.

What does the world look like when that happens? Think Google news for any topic. When you're looking to buy a car, you'll be able to find dozens of places that scour the entire web for the information you care about. When you hire somebody, there will be a hundred tools that collect and post resumes from all the job sites.

Now days, whenever I want to find out how to code something in one language or another, I just google it. I don't get documentation from anywhere else.

I'm pretty sure that the only reason PHP made it was because the online documentation was so high quality, so accessible, an so searchable.

Whatever language will be popular next better have really good, very googable documentation.

High performing sales people tend to make orders of magnitude more than the engineers who built the product that is being sold. Bandwidth providers are struggling to stay afloat, but Google is making billions. Unix vendors are becoming non-existent, but Mac OS is booming.

I've definitely felt the degradation of my writing abilities in the years since I graduated from college. I always have prided myself on a clear, direct style of writing – clarity of thought, if not necessarily the prettiest prose to communicate it.

Lately though, especially when thinking about my blog, or twitter, or even my del.icio.us bookmarks, I've been struggling with the thoughts I want to communicate. Writing is getting harder, and it seems for the first time, thinking is getting harder too.

Installing the Drupal plugin for Google Analytics was very easy. The hardest part was finding a tutorial for installing Drupal plugins.

A step by step guide is below.

Shapiro and Varian provide some insight into strategy for the information economy in Information Rules, page 10:

Traditional rules of competitive strategy focus on competitors, suppliers, and customers. In the information economy, companies selling complementary components, or complementors, are equally important.

I spent the last week running potential customers through some proposed marketing content for my company.

My takeaway from the sessions was that marketing needs to be done first. If you can't clearly articulate to potential customers what their need is, how you are addressing that need, and have the value of that solution resonate with them, then you shouldn't build a solution.

Attemptry is a domain name I registered earlier this year. It's a combination of the words "attempt" and "try." The site is meant to be a placeholder for all the side projects that I've worked on or have plans to work on. Perhaps one day, if I ever get the capital to self fund, the name could serve for an incubator of ideas and projects.

Right now, the site you see is little more than a subversion repository (https://attemptry.com/svn/attemtpry), a trac project (https://attemptry.com/trac/attemptry) and drupal CMS managing it all.

Here's a script I wrote to scrape Cingular's Web site and download my cell phone usage data. It was my first experience using mechanize. It's a very nice framework.

The script takes your phone number and password for Cingular's Web site. It outputs a CSV file with the calls that have been made in your current billing cycle.

You can also checkout the script from the subversion repository.

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'
require 'fastercsv'

CELL_NUMBER = ARGV[0]

After much struggling with mod_rewrite, I've finally got attemptry working like I want. Drupal is in a subdirectory, but it looks like it's in the root directory.

Links to trac and subversion still work.

Here's the .htaccess file, in case you're interested.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on

  RewriteRule ^$ /drupal/index.php       [L]
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/drupal%{REQUEST_URI} -f
  RewriteRule .* drupal/$0 [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/trac
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/svn

Setting up attemptry.com. I've installed trac, subversion and now drupal.

Trac and subversion are known tools for me. Drupal is something new. We'll see how it turns out.