I'm becoming unhappy with Blogger gradually day by day, so I'm starting to consider my options. Please, help me out. 
Thanks!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
ONE MILLION $
via youtube.com
THAT'S WHAT I CALL EXPENSIVE, BUT WORTH THE MONEY.
P.S. Yes, I'm over excited about them. :)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Experiments in lean pricing
I strongly feel that, especially for SaaS products, starting with free and figuring out premium later (all too common) is backwards. If you know you are going to be charging for your product, start by validating if anyone will pay first. There is no better success metric and it leads to less waste in the long run. Focusing on the premium part of freemium first lets you really learn about your unique value proposition — the stuff that will get you paid. You can then come back and intelligently offer a free plan (if you still want to) with more intelligence and the right success metrics clearly defined. Even if you think you have a one-dimensional pricing plan like I did (e.g. number of projects), you’d be better served testing it with paying users because pricing experiments take a much bigger toll than other types of experiments
via venturehacks.com
Great guest article by Ash Maurya, who went thru and telling about his experience with pricing experiments and how valuable can they be. Although I'm not very agree that free-to-paid approach is backwards most of the time, he's still very right that putting out your original intentions to charge is a great way to start working on your pricing scheme.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The Smashing Book
I've just finished this book. Well, my impression is mixed. This is a solid product from the reputable resource, however, I didn't find much for myself in it. It was a worthwhile reading though.
It's sold exclusively by the Smashing Magazine, and I had a chance to get it with 20% discount and free shipping my pre-ordering. It's a little bit on expensive side now ($29.90 plus shipping costs), but the print is great. (However, because of the format, I wasn't feeling comfortable reading it -- to tight and small.)
If you're in the Web business, and, especially, designing stuff, make sure to take a look at it.
Amazon Associates Bookmarklet
Amazon Associates Bookmarklet
A bookmarklet to convert any Amazon product page into a page 'tagged' with your Amazon Associates IDAmazon Associates Bookmarklet v1.1
To use this bookmarklet, follow these steps:
- Drag the above link to your browser's toolbar.
- Edit the JavaScript to reflect your Amazon Associates ID (i.e., change "justinblanton-20" to your ID).
- Click the bookmarklet while you are on any Amazon product page.
- Wait for the page to refresh and then, depending on your intended use, either do nothing or copy/paste the URI that's now in the address bar.
I've tested this only on Firefox and Safari, but it should work with most any web browser.
*Disclaimer*: I love Amazon. And I have Amazon Associates account that gives me a chance to send people to Amazon thru my referral links and get paid. I usually generate about 10 bucks in 6 months, so this is more like fun rather than a business. :)
Anyways, after getting tired of Firefox slowness on my Mac laptop and moving to Safari, I found that I missing the Amazon Affiliates plugin more than I thought I would. Even after Amazon has added a site bar on the top of the page, it still needs too much of clicks and keystrokes.
So I thought that I would do a quick bookmarklet to make a proper affiliates link for Amazon pages. However, Googling first, I found this link and it was working fine.
With one little issue - the link was still too long. Well, it's much shorter than what Amazon gives to me, but still long. So I tweaked the Javascript code a little bit to make it produce a better links:
Was:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0015T963C/iwhite-20/ref=nosim/
Now:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015T963C/?tag=iwhite-20
You can probably do well without URL shortener now.
Here is the code:
javascript:aid='iwhite-20';asin='';if(document.getElementById('ASIN')){asin=document.getElementById('ASIN').value;document.location='http://www.amazon.com/dp/'+asin+'/\?tag='+aid}else{alert('I\'m%20sorry,%20but%20an%20ASIN%20can\'t%20be%20found.%20Please%20make%20sure%20you\'re%20on%20an%20individual%20product%20page.')}
Sorry if it doesn't read well - I don't know all the tricks of Posterous' bookmarklet, yet, too. :) Enjoy.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Ruby Quicktips
Random Ruby and Rails tips.
This blog is dedicated to deliver short, interesting and practical tidbits of the Ruby language and Ruby on Rails framework.
Nice collection of tips and tricks on Ruby (+oR). Not that big (about 20 so far?), but nice thing to keep in bookmarks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)