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, [...]
Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
How to Figure Out What to Automate
I think everyone who owns a web business wants to do as little work as possible to make as much money as possible. That’s pretty obvious right. Given that we’ve built our cart from scratch, we have the ability to automate just about anything that can be automated. So why don’t we? I get that [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Managing Out of Stock Products
Back when we were several magnitudes smaller, managing out of stock products was easy. If a customer ordered the product, we’d just send them an email and discuss with them whether they’d rather substitute a different product, get a refund, or have us hold their order until we got the product back in stock. If [...]
Making Shipping Estimates a Little More Obvious
Back in September when we did our exhaustive shipping project on Detailed Image, one of the more interesting features was a system we developed to estimate the ship date and arrival date of the package based upon the delivery location, time of day (before or after our last shipment time), day of the week, upcoming [...]
Programming or Design – Which Comes First?
Over the past few years, Mike and I have come up with a pretty good design and development process. I think the new Detailed Image site is proof of that. I mean, we built a pretty awesome e-commerce platform from scratch in less than five months while still performing most of our day to day [...]
New to DI: Ask a Pro Detailer, Weekly Free Product
After spending most of January getting rid of things (Tastefully Driven, Amazon, and international shipping), it’s time to start rolling out some of the new stuff. For the second time in less than six months, we just unveiled a major change to the Detailed Image home page. The intent is to have a little more [...]
How I Handle Customer Service on a New Feature
Graceful error handling is something that all good web developers pay attention to. There are too many weird scenarios out there for everything to work perfectly. Too many browsers, too many flavors of operating systems, and too many people that will do things that you never could have dreamed of. When we were developing the [...]
The Making of WoodyPaigeQuotes.com
One of our biggest initiatives moving into 2010 is to really evaluate all of our sites and all of the functions within those sites and decide what is worth the time and what isn’t moving forward. Clearly, one of the things that did not work was the Tastefully Driven forum. Except one thread that did [...]
