Disqus - Latest Comments for ryanw

Re: State of RSS Readers

ryanw — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:51:41 -0000

Thanks for the round-up Julien. We've been working on memamsa ( http://memamsa.com/start ) which probably falls into the "Consuming RSS in other ways" category. With memamsa you can track RSS/Atom feeds, Twitter users/lists, and Hacker News activity with a topic, either topics you create or topics you trust created by others.

Re: Urban Airship Meeting Rules

ryanw — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:45:33 -0000

Except I'm finding that people don't like to read emails or reports as the distractions grow, no matter how short, targeted and infrequent they are. It's the one hesitation I have with #5. Though on the flip side, repeating information that has already been well distributed and read is even worse.

Re: New Boulder Startup Genome Map

ryanw — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:43:17 -0000

Is this a different dataset than the new http://www.bdnt.org/ that features a map as well?

Re: Return Path Launches Email Intelligence

ryanw — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:02:24 -0000

I came "this close" to joining Return Path, great company. It's a decision I'll probably regret one day. Glad to see their still cranking out good things.

Re: Denver Startups – Get on the Map

ryanw — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:25:20 -0000

Thanks for the idea to FullContact and for mentioning it Brad. I created one for Portland too, which as you know has a couple of Foundry companies.
https://maps.google.com/map...

I just moved back to Portland after a year in Boulder, so this was a good way to get re-acquainted. Also, since many people compare Portland to Boulder in terms of startup community, it's interesting to see how density compares.

Re: Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API

ryanw — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 17:00:31 -0000

I love simple RESTful APIs spitting out JSON as much as the next guy, but industry standard? I don't think so.

Re: Making your ASP.NET Web API’s secure

ryanw — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:35:31 -0000

I'm really confused by this statement, "For many applications, OpenID or oAuth can work fine. But for a Web API, it really does not work."

oAuth is designed specifically for API usage while OpenID fits more into what you were saying as far as not working well for Web APIs. By combining the two and claiming that oAuth doesn't work is a dangerous statement. It is pretty much the standard for RESTful API authorization. Plus, it's based on tokens as you go on to write about.

Now, I would agree that oAuth is complicated and requires an interaction with another party, so from that standpoint it really depends on the use of the API as to whether to use oAuth.

Re: My biggest Temptation

ryanw — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:53:17 -0000

Moving can be such a big distraction, I can see why it is so high on your list. No amount of tips and tricks can help with such a big life change, at least from my experience. I went through one last year and am doing it again, back to Portland this time, in a few weeks.

How is the house hunting going? Hopefully as that one gets checked off the relaxing can start to creep in again.

Re: A Logical AND With @ In A Mainstream World

ryanw — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:07:14 -0000

I still get annoyed that Twitter even implemented this, personally I would like to always see who people I follow are replying to. Scott Hanselman has a nice post that visualizes how this works too, complete with venn diagrams
http://www.hanselman.com/bl... .

Re: Twitter Buys Summify for the Next 500 Million Users

ryanw — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:27:32 -0000

I enjoyed the Summify product and will be sad to see it go. For whatever reason, their emails had the most interesting stories, while other similar services seemed to have more random crap or tried to get to clever. Plus, the emails themselves were also the nicest formatted of the bunch (know about it, xydo, etc) reading particularly well on the iPhone.

Re: Java remains most popular language -- thanks to Android

ryanw — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:01:30 -0000

Where is the link to the Tiobe site? You fail at the web.

Re: TechStars Mayhem: Celebrating a Community

ryanw — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:08:33 -0000

I thought the evening was great up until the "smack down" part where TechStars companies pitched themselves and their jobs. The tv show will be a must watch for the rest of the season. Maybe it's because I've only been here a couple months, but the smack down felt like one big inside joke. I don't think I'd want to work for any of those companies.

Re: Google Relents on App Engine Pricing (Sorta): Is it Enough?

ryanw — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:02:46 -0000

I've built a number of apps on GAE over the last couple years and with these changes, have decided to move off it. If I'm going to have to rewrite anyway to optimize, might as well rewrite on a more portable stack. Plus, with little demand for GAE development skills, what motivation is there to stay? I think GAE only makes sense now for a specific project that has scaling needs, not a general purpose application framework.

Re: Google Ups Pricing as App Engine Leaves Preview: Bait and Switch?

ryanw — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:00:54 -0000

I've been developing on GAE since it came out and have decided to move on based on the recent changes. I don't appreciate the bait and switch, but it seems like a pretty clear business decision on Google's part. My thought is they've decided that App Engine doesn't work in its current slot in the marketplace. It's become a hobby playground for developers attracted by the "free" price (that's me!). Even with that price and that market, it still has not hit a critical mass of developers, and there is still very little buzz in the development community for it. Have you searched for jobs that want App Engine skills/experience? Very few of them out there.

So, they're abandoning grass-roots development of the platform and trying to steer the ship into the Enterprise Cloud discussion for companies that 1) can pay $$ and 2) need the scaling ability. In all talks about the new pricing, they link to this page - http://www.google.com/enter... - which is spartan and confusing, but does have a "Why businesses choose App Engine" link up top. Additionally there are the corporate targeted case studies.

I don't think that will work either. App Engine seems like a doomed platform to me.

Re: The things they say

ryanw — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 11:43:58 -0000

Hi Seth, I moved to the Boulder area last month, and I just saw your exchange with Aaron Klein on twitter and discovered you were an Ethiopian adoptive parent too. I think we've been pretty lucky so far in the way of negative comments received, but I know they will come over time, so good to be prepared. However, I do get the ".. is so lucky" one from time to time and it does make me very uncomfortable for the reasons you point out. They do mean well, and I try to explain how we are indeed the lucky ones.

Re: Introducing Codespace – shared (free!) office space in Boulder for geeking out

ryanw — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:45:51 -0000

Perfect timing. I'm moving out there next week and had been wondering where the co-working spaces were in Boulder. I look forward to checking it out.

Re: Designers should not use IDs when writing HTML/CSS (right?)

ryanw — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:37:14 -0000

I'm on the no IDs in CSS side. Using IDs will usually only lead to bloated css files. I think this summarizes it well and goes right along with your argument as well:

"In almost every case, classes work well and have fewer unintended consequences than either IDs or element selectors." -
http://www.stubbornella.org...

Also see (http://csslint.net/)

But more importantly, do you use dashes or camel case in your class names?

Re: New Policy: I Will Not Blog What I Can Tweet

ryanw — Thu, 26 May 2011 21:54:11 -0000

I think I trust your judgement on what's tweetable vs what's bloggable. But, I will say that with you as a blogger, if it's important enough to say, it may be important enough to make a record of it and give it a better chance of being read. It's too easy to miss tweets and tweets are certainly not nearly as permanent of a record. I say worth the experiment though.

Re: Tekpub’s ASP.NET MVC 3 - Suggested Outline

ryanw — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:08:55 -0000

I second the "why did MSFT introduce a new view engine (Razor) and should I switch to it?" question.

Re: ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed

ryanw — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:20:16 -0000

Versioning is another big problem with WebDeploy IMO. I use it for QA builds, it's nice, but it replaces all contents of the directory. On prod I want to install a new version but be able to quickly roll back if needed.

Re: ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed

ryanw — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:50:07 -0000

I'm glad you're writing about this, it's been vexing me for years. I'm currently using a combination of build server (cruise control.net and yes VS is installed on the build box), msbuild and msdeploy.

For QA builds (manually triggered in CC.NET), after building, I log on to the build server and execute the cmd file that the msdeploy msbuild target produces. I have 3 apps to deploy, so logging into 1 machine and firing 3 commands isn't too bad, though it took a couple days to get it this far. Before msdeploy I used UNC to push files to the QA server, but overall do not believe in UNC or FTP as viable solutions.

For production builds, I trigger another manual CC.NET build, but this time manually put the msdeploy-produced files out on the production servers, logging into each with remote desktop. I then create a new home directory, named for the version, and install the application through the IIS UI. Then, if the version is bad, I can simply change the home directory back to the previous version.

I gave this feedback to the msdeploy team last year and they were actually pretty responsive, but none of their ideas really work from a perspective of versioning when pushing a package remotely (build server or local). Hopefully that will improve.

I'm still waiting for a workable ssh/scp/rsync solution on windows too.

Re: ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed

ryanw — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:27:34 -0000

2 worrisome points to your solution. You'll want a build server the first time somebody has a local change that didn't get pushed/committed during QA and then it shows up in production.

Plus, this is the problem with deployment solutions on windows, everyone wants to use UNC or FTP. UNC breaks down easily in the mess of network/firewall configuration, amplified even more when deploying to a host not on the domain and FTP is insecure.

Re: Look Out Quora, InboxQ Takes Q&A Off-Site And On To Twitter

ryanw — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:40:47 -0000

I can rattle off at least 10 other twitter Q&A services, heck I built one 3 years ago (lazytweet.com) that I sold last fall, so not really a first mover.

But, that doesn't mean I can't like the product and how it's evolving the Twitter Q&A line. Congrats to Joe and the Answerly team on the launch.

Re: Some Tips for Better RRD Graphs

ryanw — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:55:11 -0000

Keep up the great posts. I'm curious, are you using a nagios plugin to capture sql server metrics? Which one do you use?

Re: New Twitter Is About 50 Percent Rolled Out — Where’s The Facebook-Style Backlash?

ryanw — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:42:17 -0000

I'm with you, I like the old twitter's simplicity too.