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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: LockerPulse
Why We Made LockerPulse Completely Free
We’ve done away with the Premium Accounts on LockerPulse and have instead moved to an ad-supported model. This was something we had discussed for a long time, even prior to launch, and knew might be the best path for success for the site. The #1 factor in the decision was simply that the limited ads that we’ve tested out have performed surprisingly well, while the Premium Accounts have tailed off after a promising start. Being featured in the Chrome Web App store gave us an additional wave of data and feedback to help make the decision easier. We anticipate launching … Continue reading
Chrome Web Store Launches, LockerPulse “Popular”
Earlier this afternoon the Chrome Web Store launched as part of Google’s Chrome Event. As soon as I went and checked, LockerPulse was listed as a “Popular” app in the news category. Very cool. If you are a Chrome user (US only unfortunately) I’d very much appreciate you taking a few minutes to install and review LockerPulse by going to the LockerPulse app page. Hopefully we can ride the wave and get as many people as possible to check out LockerPulse during this initial rush to test out the Chrome Web Store. Now, the not-so-cool part is that there are … Continue reading
New LockerPulse Features – Search Engine, AJAX Crawling, and Custom Wallpaper
Over the past two weeks we released a couple of important features for LockerPulse. As I touched upon when I returned from my trip, we’ve got a few interesting opportunities in the works so I’m spending as much time as I can building out the software. The first thing we tackled was a custom wallpaper feature. Users can now upload a background image of their choice, or choose from our various background images. This is one of those things that doesn’t appear to be that important, but when you’re using the site multiple times per day it adds a nice … Continue reading
A Big Week for LockerPulse
Last week we completed our revamp of LockerPulse. On Wednesday we launched our re-design, on Friday we completed our source project, and I spent the last few days tying up a few loose ends and debugging a few minor issues. By my count, in total there were about 40 changes – design/UI improvements, feature improvements, and fixed bugs – and 567 new news sources added, bringing the total number of sites that we’re indexing to around 1400. If you’re interested in checking out the Premium Version, this link is good for free access for life for the first 100 people … Continue reading
An Interesting (Positive) Trend Among Sports Content Providers
One of the great unknowns with LockerPulse was how the content providers – those actually creating the news – would respond to it. Would they love it? Hate it? Nothing it? In my eyes, we’re doing things right. For all practical purposes, we’re simply a RSS reader, albeit one with an editorial team that selects RSS feeds for you to chose from…because most people don’t know how to or don’t want to…which is the whole point of the project. We aren’t doing any scraping of their content, which has been getting some iPad apps in trouble lately (see: Is Flipboard … Continue reading
LockerPulse Month 3 Update
We’ve been working hard on LockerPulse, but I haven’t posted about it much since we revamped the home page a few weeks after launch in response to some of the initial feedback we received. I’ve got a lot of small updates, none of which constitute enough for an entire post so I figured I’d just lump them all together into one: Server: Stable As I mentioned in June, obscurity is your friend. It took over a month to get right, but by seeing the true technical demands of the live site we were able to tweak it and get it … Continue reading
Obscurity is Your Friend
Last month during the Facebook privacy backlash, Jason Fried from 37Signals wrote a great post about Diaspora, the “open source” Facebook that raised $200,000 on Kickstarter before even beginning their project. They received publicity from mainstream media outlets like the NY Times and the fund raising took off. His argument, one that I agree with, is that Diaspora is taking the wrong approach: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise. In particular, I found one of his points to hit home: The spotlight is … Continue reading
The LockerPulse “Thank You” Post
With any web project it just makes sense to utilize a lot of the existing software out there to help speed up development time. With LockerPulse in though, I feel particularly indebted to several of the libraries that we use. Many are open source, some are not. Either way, we would not have been able to develop a full fledged RSS reader in such a short time without these projects that have been being developed for years. In almost every case we had to hack things up to get them just the way we wanted for our usage, but the … Continue reading
The LockerPulse 30 Day Update…on Day 15
I’m breaking my own rule about waiting 30 days before issuing any updates to a new web project, but it’s with good reason. Mike will be heading to China for a month-long vacation starting Saturday and I wanted to work with him to push out the changes rather than try to go at it solo (things tend to come out much better when we do that…) There were also several common threads in the feedback we received that pointed out some problems that I wanted to try to fix sooner rather than later. I do feel a bit bad about … Continue reading
How the Last Few Days Unfolded (hint: I’m spent)
The launch of LockerPulse has left me completely drained. These last few days have been out of control. It was a lot of long hours leading up to the launch, but man, once the site went live I didn’t have a second to rest my brain. I’m not sure I have a coherent post in me right now, but I also don’t feel like doing anything else at the moment, and I haven’t posted much lately, so I’m gonna give it a try. Launch Day The launch day (Wednesday) was supposed to be pretty simple. Since this wasn’t an existing … Continue reading