It started as an idea from Robert Scoble.
I then made it an open wiki.
And today, the first ever cartoon based on ObsoleteSkills.com has been published in the Tampa Tribune.
First ObsoleteSkills cartoon, published in the Tampa Tribune
I wish a little that it was a funny cartoon, instead of one that is supposed to make you think, but either way I’m still pretty happy with how it turned out. As a side note, the main character is supposed to be based loosely on me.
I’ve been doing web development for many years now, and over time I’ve discovered a few tools that make my life easier. I’ve used these in personal projects and recommended them to others, and I thought I’d share them here. While I’m a web guy, most of these can quite easily be used for other types of projects as well.
To begin, tools for managing the development process:
SVN is an obvious requirement for any company doing development. The problem is, SVN takes time to set up and maintain properly, and smaller companies just can’t afford to spend this time taking care of it. Beanstalk provides a simple solution to the problem with off-site SVN server hosting, but the real beauty is not in just the stock SVN server – Beanstalk have a great web interface to enable you to manage your repositories and users/permissions, as well as see the latest activity in any repository and browse the source tree. The web UI also allows you to easily diff revisions and download files at specific revisions, and you can configure Beanstalk to send you emails for every commit in pretty HTML format with a full diff. With it’s reasonable pricing and great features above and beyond standard SVN, you really can’t go past it.
16bugs has a few bugs itself, but overall it is a great, simple, ‘web 2.0′ style bug tracking system. 16bugs has a fairly basic feature set when compared with some of the more mature products like Trac, but its hosted, web-based nature makes it a snap to maintain.
Google Sites provides a great, simple wiki solution. Sites was created out of Google’s purchase of Jot, and while I prefer the layout of the Jot version, Google Sites is almost as good. Both products take care of the core feature set for a wiki. I’ve used MediaWiki and PmWiki for various purposes in the past, but they can be a pain to set up and I’ve really only used the most basic features of them, which Google Sites easily takes care of.
The key thing you will notice about the above is that they are all hosted solutions. In a small, fast-moving company or for personal purposes, hosted solutions are often the best option to cut down on the time needed to maintain the various systems. Had I not already vested myself in the above, I would have loved to have checked out Assembla, which groups all these things into a single product (SVN, wiki, and Trac for bug management). Though if I did go with Assembla, I’m sure I would miss Beanstalk’s great web UI.
Now, a couple of tools for the development itself:
Originally based on Eclipse, my IDE of choice for the web is Aptana Studio. Aptana Studio was built for developing AJAX web applications, includes code highlighting and completion for HTML, Javascript, and CSS, and has plugins for PHP and Ruby on Rails. Plugins are also available to ease development for AIR applications and the iPhone.
Google’s MacFUSE, cutting through the highly technical descriptions, is a way for you to mount a bunch of file systems on your Mac computer. I use it to mount remote file systems on development machines via SSH, meaning I can work within my home directory on the server as if it was just another locally connected hard drive. This is invaluable when you don’t have a totally self contained local development environment, saving you the effort of having to transfer files back and forth to the server.
In a similar situation? What are your tools of choice?
In the month-and-a-half since I started the wiki at ObsoleteSkills.com (thanks again for the idea, Scoble), it has been linked to from a whole bunch of blogs and websites, generating almost 3 million visits. Big name sites including BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Daring Fireball have all given me the privilege of a link. What really surprises me, though, is the percentage of traffic generated from each of these sources.
Above is a graph compiled from the top referrers to ObsoleteSkills.com. Looking at this graph reveals a few surprises: most notably that the majority of visits didn’t actually have a referrer, meaning people are just typing the domain into their browsers or using bookmarks, etc. This would imply that a lot of the traffic is from returning users, which is great.
Slashdot and StumbleUpon were, predictably, the next biggest referrers. I was surprised to see how little of the traffic came from David Pogue’s blog, which would seem to be a fairly high-traffic blog, and from BoingBoing, which is one of the most popular blogs around. It is also worth noting that Daring Fireball only linked to the site two days ago, so this won’t be representative of the actual percentage of referrers it might send.
Just so that there is a bit of scale to the graph, the lowest referrer to ObsoleteSkills.com shown on the graph (Gamespy Humor) represents a little over 32,000 visits, and there are obviously a bunch more referrers not showing on the graph.
Note: I’ve mixed the spelling of referrer on purpose, see Wikipedia for details.
Inspired by an interesting blog post from Robert Scoble (yes, he does have them every now and then), I purchased the domain ObsoleteSkills.com and set up a wiki for people to document all those skills that the latest technology really makes obsolete. So far, skills that have been added to the wiki include things like adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV, dialing a rotary phone, and churning butter of all things. That is all great, and I hope that people enjoy it, but to register the domain I had to pay over four times more than I usually do, and in the process I had my eyes opened to a very dodgy system from Network Solutions.
I am coming into this on the tail end, as apparently Network Solutions had been called out on this previously, but the company undertakes a poor practice when a user searches for a domain: the company effectively registers it, and enters it with the status ‘clientHold,’ even if the user doesn’t actually register it. This DNS status usually means that there is a legal issue involving the registrant or a service on the domain, and it causes the domain to still be registered but not resolve to a server. The end result is that anyone wishing to register the domain, not just the person that originally searched for it, must go through Network Solutions to do it, and they can charge whatever they see fit.
This is exactly what happened with ObsoleteSkills.com. Someone, presumably also having seen Scoble’s post, would have searched for the domain using Network Solutions, but didn’t go through with the registration. When I went to register the domain with my normal registrar, it said it was taken, but I was able to register the domain through Network Solutions, albeit at a severe premium.
All this has been detailed quite well by Todd McKinney in his ‘Evil Still Lurks‘ post and a follow-up post.