Dec
16Promoting Stubmatic: Tips on marketing your start-up
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Posted: 16th December 2008
Tags: carsonified, Entrepreneurship, stubmatic, tips
Posted in Entrepreneurship
Comments: 4 Comments »
(Image by adactio)
I blogged 2 month ago (wow was that two months ago?) about how I was launching a ticketing site with my wife to rival Ticketmaster, Eventbrite etc in our spare time and I thought I would update you with some tips we have learnt along the way.
In the last two months we have been able to increase our membership by 60%. Considering we did very little promotion before this it wasn’t hard to do but trying to find tips online has been difficult. Some start-ups have blogged about their success and claim to have thousands of users sign-up, but are either very cagy about what they did to achieve this (if they even did achieve this at all) or make out users were queuing at their home page to sign-up! So through a little blood, sweat and tears we have started to make a little headway and although our user base is not in the thousands we are seeing a slow and steady growth which I feel is more important. So here are some tips (including are some we still need to do ourselves!)
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Dec
3Mate Framework for Adobe Flex
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Posted: 3rd December 2008
Tags: as3, Flex and Air, Mate, RIA
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 3 Comments »
I just wanted to share with you a great framework I have been using recently called Mate (pronounced ma-tay).
Developed by the guys at ASFusion Mate is a great framework that features MXML declared event handling, dependency injection and best of all it is really easy to use and implement (It even has a way of reusing your existing Cairngorm commands. Additionally in the next version there will be an infrastructure for mocking out your services and really provides a clean architecture for Flex apps.
The framework is provided as a .swc file you can drop straight into your /libs folder and supports both Flex 2 and Flex 3. The only downside to the framework is the documentation does not reflect the latest .swc and is a little light in places, however the forums are excellent and very active and there is a good selection of examples.
I will be blogging about this in more details soon, but wanted to share my initial thoughts and urge you to look at this framework as it is really worth it.
Nov
22Rails deployment is so easy these days
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Posted: 22nd November 2008
Tags: Apache, Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails
Posted in Ruby on Rails
Comments: No Comments »
I have been meaning to blog about Phusion Passenger for a while as about 3-4 months ago we migrated Stubmatic from using Apache / Mongrel Cluster to Phusion Passenger A.K.A. mod_rails.
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Nov
20Excellent OS X SQLite 3 Management & Query App
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Posted: 20th November 2008
Tags: Adobe Air, iPhone, sqlite 3
Posted in Flex and Air, Objective-C and Cocoa, Python Django, Ruby on Rails
Comments: No Comments »
iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases.
The application is simple to use, very user friendly and has worked well from the testing I have done. It costs just £10 and there is a free trial available so you can try before you buy.
Find out more and download here
Oct
20Creating a two-way binding between Model and Form in Flex
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Posted: 20th October 2008
Tags: ActionScript, AIR, Flex and Air
Posted in Flex and Air
Comments: 8 Comments »
A quick sorry to all my Flex readership for the lack of Flex related posts these last few months. I though I would drop a quick tip / class I often use to create a two way binding between a form to a corresponding class model.
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Oct
19Stubmatic - My Ruby on Rails site for grass roots venues, promoters, bands, theatres and clubs
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Posted: 19th October 2008
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Ruby on Rails, Start-up
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Ruby on Rails, Technology Rants and Raves
Comments: 1 Comment »
Getting on for 18 months ago, I wrote a fully-fledged Rails app for ticketing events. This is a very competitive industry but about 2 years ago I had the idea for this site, when I was looking into ways to sell places on a technical course I was running. There are lots of ticketing sites out there from the large solutions such as Ticketmaster to the smaller self-service solutions such as TicketWeb and Eventbright etc. The thing is, these all take a massive cut out of each and every ticket you sell. All these sites seem to think that this is okay and it doesn’t cost you anything as you pass the costs onto your customer. I beg to differ.
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Sep
15Please Help Me Win Carsonified’s Golden Ticket…
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Posted: 15th September 2008
Tags: carsonified, Web Design, web development
Posted in Misc.., Technology Rants and Raves
Comments: 26 Comments »
I am a big fan of Ryan Carson and the guys over at Carsonified. They have just announced a competition to send one person to all of Carsonified’s events for 2009. To win, all one needs to do is post a blog entry (this) linking back to Carsonified’s competition post and then get 25 comments. So, if you are a regular reader (or your first time here) and would like to help keep me up to date on what is happening in the world of web apps, design etc as well as send me on some Carsonified workshops, then please add a comment supporting me to that this post. If i win I promise to share my knowledge gained on here.
Also, if you are a blogger yourself and entering this competition, please comment so below and I will return the favour and add a comment to your blog post entry.
Thanks in advance to all those that comment..!
Regards,
Jon
Sep
8Cashbackguide.org helps UK customers save money online
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Posted: 8th September 2008
Tags: cash back, plugins
Posted in Technology Rants and Raves
Comments: 1 Comment »
I just wanted to drop a quick post to my UK readership about CashBackGuide a great site I found the other day. I have recently got into using Cash Back sites when making online purchases. The concept is a simple one, these site are registered as affiliates with the online stores you use and by visiting them before you make a purchase, they get an affiliate fee for redirecting you to make the purchase. Rather than keep this fee, they pass it on to you (taking a very small cut themselves). Cashbackguide offers a really nice clean interface that allows you to enter a retailer and check who offers cash back for that retailer, for example you could search for Amazon.co.uk and it will return a list of Cash Back sites that provide cash back, and how much they offer.
But this is not the killer feature! - The guys over at Cashbackguide have created plugins for both Firefox and IE called Cashback Guardian and basically if you visit an online store that has a cash back scheme, it will notify you before making a purchase and notifying you how much cash back you could get.
I think this is a great use of technology that helps save a few pennies and well worth a look.
