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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: Programming
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 responsibilities. It always interests me to hear how other companies do things, especially because we’re starting to learn that we do things different than most. It’s not that our way is necessarily better or worse, but just that we solved the problem our way, which … Continue reading
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 uniformity and a little more focus on our content. I’d imagine that detailing is a rather unique industry in that people who read our content tend to buy more (as measured by several metrics, such as Google Analytics $index) than those who jump right to … Continue reading
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 new Detailed Image we weren’t sure what to do with people who were trying to place an order so large that we couldn’t return a shipping quote from the FedEx or USPS API. As you can tell from our shipping study, we take pride in … Continue reading
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 work. My partners and I are all fans of the sports show Around the Horn. One of the best parts of ATH is that the eccentric panelist Woody Paige always has a blackboard behind him with a random quote on it (see below). My favorite … Continue reading
Simple IP Geolocation Using Javascript and the Google AJAX Search API
I recently started looking into IP geolocation/geotargeting for some projects. By “geolocation” or “geotargeting” I mean serving different content to users based upon their physical location as determined by their IP address. Now, as we all know IP addresses are far from perfect so the best you’re going to get seems to be ~80% accuracy. That said, there are still a lot of great things you can do for those people if you know where they are coming from. An example for Detailed Image around holiday time would be showing different content to people who are past the safe cutoff … Continue reading
So You Want to Learn How to Program?
When I guest lectured at James Madison a few weeks back I was asked a couple of questions from students interested in learning how to program. I get those questions in various forms all the time. I decided to write a post about how I’d recommend going from nothing to programming a real live web site that can make you money. Well, that “post” became quite lengthy and I decided to start a new section on the blog. You’ll notice an “Essays” tab on the top nav now. I’ll probably put two types of posts in that section – how-to … Continue reading
One More Little Shipping Improvement
Oke had a good suggestion for our shipping estimate feature in the comments on yesterday’s shipping post: The only thing I will add is to also place the actual day with the date the package will get to the destination. In that case, people wouldn’t have to look at the calendar to see which day it actually arrives Honestly, that never crossed my mind…I was more focused on saving space. It totally makes sense. Seeing “Mon 9/14″ is a lot more helpful than just “9/14″. Anyway, I just put it in place, changing this… to this… Definitely an improvement. Thanks … Continue reading
Our Exhaustive Shipping Project – What We Learned and What New Features We Added
Today we launched some really cool new shipping features on Detailed Image. They were a cumulation of about a month long shipping project that we took on. It was really the one big thing that we wanted to make sure that we got done before the holidays. Shipping options are just so important to customers that you’d have to be crazy not to be regularly reviewing and improving how you ship. The Study Like most online retailers, we didn’t have a good understanding of how accurate our shipping quoting system was. We use the FedEx API, but there are scenarios … Continue reading
Z.ips.ME Launched!
After URL shortening service tr.im closed and then re-opened this week due to the public backlash, I thought it would be a good time to release Z.ips.ME, the URL shortener for PHP & MySQL that I started working on a few months back. We’ve been using it internally for our Twitter accounts and it’s worked fantastic. Of course, a few other developers had the exact same thought, so I doubt that this thing will really take off. As was discussed in that first post, the easily replicable nature of the project makes it the type of thing that probably isn’t … Continue reading
Understanding Competitive Advantages
Compared to our e-commerce auto detailing competitors, we have a lot of competitive disadvantages: less space, less available cash, less employees, and less control over vendors and distribution. It can be frustrating and intimidating when entering a new industry. The incumbents will try to use those things to crush you (or at least make your life more difficult). From the beginning we’ve been about finding different things that turn the tables and give us the advantages. We don’t want to play their game – we’ll lose at that. We want to play our game. We have lower expenses. We don’t … Continue reading