August 27th, 2009
Posted by scotti3g
Russell Brand is a very good example of how to build a brand. In Russell’s case, his brand is being a lothario. In the last year I’ve seen countless articles in the Australian media referring to Russell Brand as a lothario. Lothario Russell Brand blah blah blah… you get the picture. I thought only Shakespeare used the term lothario but Russell has brought it back to 2009.
There was even talk that the way Russ wooed a girl while waiting for a ferry in Australia was staged. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russ has marketing people pushing his lothario image.
Search for lothario in Google News or Goolgle Image search and you’ll no doubt see several Russell entries on the first page of each.
So what does all this have to do with this site? Well, if you’re developing a web app, an iPhone app or some other bit of software you can do yourself a world of favours by establishing your brand.
When you’re Russell Brand you can get the media to push your brand fairly easily. When you’re Joe Schmoe software developer you have to do things a little differently. Media outlets will generally be more than happy to publish articles about your product of service provided your article has a unique and newsworthy spin to it (and isn’t a clear promotional article).
As an example, let’s keep with the lothario theme. Say you have a dating web site you want to get press coverage for. Instead of writing an article saying “here’s my great dating web site and you can join for free”, you might write an article on celebrities that have tried internet dating. Or maybe write about how the number of people getting married who met on the net has jumped X% in the last 5 years.
Whatever your angle, make it interesting, make it memorable.
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Tags: branding
Posted in Marketing | No Comments »
August 22nd, 2009
Posted by Fred Wu
Disclaimer: The post indicates my personal opinion, all references about Envato are not official.
The word cloud is getting a lot of attention lately, almost like web 2.0. Marketing gimmick aside, I believe cloud computing does offer a tremendous amount of advantages over traditional computing environment.
At Envato, we use a number of providers for our server needs. We currently have servers with Media Temple, Slicehost and Engine Yard.
Even though Envato was already using Slicehost for some of their applications, I still did my fair share of research before making a suggestion to move away from Media Temple.
I have eventually nailed down to three service providers: Slicehost, Linode and VPS.net.
For Envato, we decided to go with Slicehost, because we already have some servers there, and they offer bandwidth pooling. We would have given Linode a deeper look if they had offered backups (their backups system is still in beta).
Having said that, I was very very impressed by VPS.net, so I decided I should sign up anyway, for my personal projects.
Let’s compare the three services: Slicehost, VPS.net and Media Temple.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: cloud, cloud computing, comparison, ispmanager, linode, mt, plesk, slicehost, VPS, web hosting
Posted in Server | 10 Comments »
August 5th, 2009
Posted by Fred Wu
If you are reading this blog, there’s a high chance you are a web developer, or a designer, or an entrepreneur. And if you are, you probably have heard of, or are a fan of Envato, the company behind the marketplace websites, the Tuts+ websites, FreelanceSwitch and other awesome websites. If you haven’t already, go check ‘em out, because well, they are awesome. :)
I am very proud to announce that, I will be joining Envato next week, as a full time software developer.
My immediate responsibility will be primarily focused on the Tuts+ network of websites. But if you know Envato, and if you know Collis Ta’eed (CEO of Envato), you *know* there will be more awesome websites/services popping out in the future.
It was such a wonderful experience chatting with the guys and gals at Envato. The Rails development team (lead by John Barton) also excels at Hacky Sack. :)
Want to know more? You can follow me on Twitter at @fredwu.
Here is a list of current websites under the Envato umbrella.
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Tags: developer, Envato, job
Posted in General | 3 Comments »
August 4th, 2009
Posted by Fred Wu
Latest release: v0.5.3
A few days ago I was asked to make a simple slideshow. My initial thought was, there must be a ton of solutions available for jQuery. I could easily draw inspiration from them.
I was wrong. Whilst there are a few nicely done slideshow plugins for jQuery, the majority of them are either poorly written or far too complicated.
So, I decided to code my own plugin from the ground up. Meet Slideshow Lite!
The plugin is only tested with jQuery 1.3, but it should also work on jQuery 1.2.
Features
- Unobtrusive JavaScript, simply load it and that’s it
- Clean, semantic HTML structure
- Easy to use
- Customisable
- Free to use or to modify (GPL/MIT dual license)!
Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: gallery, image, javascript, jQuery, photo, plugin, slideshow
Posted in Releases, jQuery | 42 Comments »
July 21st, 2009
Posted by scotti3g
I went to the Sydney PayPal Developer Days yesterday and have to say I was very very impressed. PayPal is clearly interested in growing their brand in Australia and what better way to do so then giving developers the tools to make PayPal easy to implement for their clients.
Free PayPal Certification
The big drawcard for the PayPal Developer Days is that you get a promotional code that lets you sit the PayPal Certification tests for free. That’s $300 USD worth of value. Given that I’ve been developing some solutions that use PayPal over the past few weeks I would have gone to the conference anyway, but the more I think about it the more I like the idea of being certified. Primarily I’ll be interested in seeing how much new business it can generate.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: ecommerce, PayPal
Posted in E-commerce, PayPal | 3 Comments »
July 13th, 2009
Posted by Fred Wu
If you searched Google, you’d find that messed up app icons is a common problem of iPhone’s 3.0 firmware.
Until Apple releases a fix (possibly in firmware 3.1?), there is a quick and easy fix. Everything is done on your iPhone, you don’t need access to your iTunes library.
1) Remove an app that has incorrect icon (preferably one that has no data stored on your iPhone, so you don’t have to worry about losing data).
2) Download and install the app again from App Store.
3) As the application is being installed, hold the power button and turn off your iPhone!
4) Turn your iPhone back on. You would now notice that all application icons are back to normal. The application you were installing is installed as well.
Hope this tip benefits some people. :)
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Tags: 3.0, firmware, fix, icon, iPhone
Posted in Software, iPhone | 3 Comments »
