I’ve attended hundreds of sales pitches and client meetings, nearly always as a supplier to a larger organisation. On a few occasions in my early career I recall being faintly berated by colleagues for my behaviour. Not for doing anything aggressive, derogatory or suggestive, but for humorous remarks that were deemed inappropriate – just...
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Tags: ability, business, humor, humour, professionalism
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Whenever a new term enters the Internet lexicon, arguments inevitably follow about it’s meaning and scope. Engineers argued about what was or wasn’t technically ‘Ajax’ technology or ‘Web 2.0’ design, and content strategists are facing a similar problem pinning down the scope of their relatively new industry. Most recently, the concept of a Minimum...
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Tags: adwords, minimum viable product, MVP, startups, testing, web apps
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One of the early chapters in my book (A Practical Guide to Web App Success) discusses the factors that influence the success of an app, such as the idea, the quality and speed of execution, and the wider context in which it’s situated: the competitive landscape, the levels of technology adoption, the financial climate...
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Tags: ideas, inspiration, web apps
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Back in March I told you about a couple of projects I’d written in two days over Christmas, and have done nothing with since. I just happened to be checking our AdSense account for the first time in a while, and noticed that one of the projects – stereotype – was now generating £2.50 a...
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I made a decision at the start of this year to blog and tweet less. Talk less, do more. Up until now it’s been fairly easy, but I’ve had to interrupt my writing of the last few chapters of the book to write this post. A couple of days ago Seth Godin wrote about...
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We’ve just moved in to an apartment in Chiang Mai for one month. The work desk is a little narrow, so after unsuccessfully scouring the local stores for a laptop stand, I improvised. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves (but in case you can’t make it out, it’s three rolls of toilet paper).
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That’s quite the mouthful. Let me start with a huge caveat: I’m not an expert on this, and much of it may be incorrect. I studied Bayesian statistics about fifteen years ago in university, but have no recollection of it (that sounds a bit like Bill Clinton: “I experimented with statistics but didn’t inhale...
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Tags: bayesian, classification, learning, n-grams, php, sentiment, stemming, twitter
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At the end of August 2010, all Twitter apps that use Basic Authentication to post/query the API will no longer work. Apps need to migrate to OAuth authentication, but this can be a little tricky. I’ve created something for my particular use-case that you might find useful too. I have a number of automated...
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Tags: api, authenticate, basic authentication, conversion, convert, credentials, migrate, migration, oauth, twitter
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As part of another project I’m working on, I’ve built something that extracts palettes from websites – not just hex codes from the CSS, but the proportion of ‘on screen’ colours, including images. I’ve built a palette – with proportions – for a number of popular websites. Can you guess which is which? Here...
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Tags: colors, colours, palette, websites
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If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll know that about four months ago, I experienced problems with 123 Reg – the same problems that many other people have (and still do). I haven’t experienced problems since because, basically, I’ve switched to the excellent Dreamhost. It’s been a while, so I had forgotten about...
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Tags: 123 reg, 123reg, astroturf, auto renew, autorenew, scam
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