- The layout does render correctly at 1024x768 (iPad).
- Some of the drop downs do not work when tapped.
- Make the movie detail page URL more SEO friendly (include the title instead of your internal ID).
- Don't force users to download images & titles from a few dozen other movies when looking at the movie detail page.
- Focus on being mobile friendly. I can imagine a site like this being most useful when I see a poster or trailer at the local theater and want to remember it. In that situation, I'm on my phone with a slower connection (or one that is capped).
- You're building a site with lots of utility, not a content site. I'm not sure links to half a dozen social media services will serve your users (along with forcing mobile visitors to download all that JavaScript).
- Movie release dates vary greatly across countries. Even the US, smaller independent films will have slow roll outs over longer periods of time. Some bigger films will premier in NY and LA weeks or months before being released in a wider market. And not all films will be available in all areas. Your site gives no indication of any of this at all.
She's also got a repo called "Kittydar" (Face detection for cats in JavaScript). This is someone who loves her language of choice and is just spinning out some fun projects with it. I think that's great.
Rewriting sed in JavaScript is cool. Even as a one-off, proof of concept, "I did this because I could." I mean, why not? Isn't that what the so-called hacker "ethos" is supposed to be about? She never said her version was better. She never evangelized its use over the traditional *NIX tools.
In the early 1990s, some crazy bastard decided to riff on the Unix kernel. About a decade later, another nut decided to rewrite the encyclopedia, and encouraged people to help him do it. Then another crazy wrote a programming tutorial using bizarre illustrations while eating a lot of chunky bacon. Why not? All three of those projects could have been considered pointless. We already had kernels. We had encyclopedias, and god knows, plenty of programming books.
I have the urge now to follow in Heather's footsteps, waste my own time, and write a version of sed in PHP. Or maybe Perl. And then write a wrapper for it in Applescript. Because, why not?
It's become a full blown CMS and its own platform. Half the media sites out there are running it, or hosting with Wordpress Pro. Then there's a horde of casual bloggers managing their own installs.
Granted, there's movement away from this kind of publishing model(Facebook, Twitter, G+), but as long as Wordpress is still the go to, "set it and forget it" app on $5 webhosts, PHP will not die.
> We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java --
Hey now. Let's not forget everyone's first love: Perl. :D
It's still quietly running quite a few big sites out there, and is currently enjoying something of a renaissance with frameworks like Mojolicious & Dancer, not to mention the releases of 5.10-5.16.
The most striking thing is the across the board drop from one age group to the next. That to me is the more interesting story here.
Curious about Survata' methodology. Neither the author nor their website go into a great deal of information about this. (I mostly want to know who crafts the questions, as it's easy to inadvertntly skew survey results).
As an aside, linking to Survata's homepage not just once but three times in a ~600 word post makes this thing, aside from its casual observations, feel like an 'advertorial.'
Figures in similar communities were older (Larry released Perl in his early thirties, Guido was pushing forty before Python gained traction). They also didn't come up in the era of YouTube, twitter, and archive.org.
Thirty years ago Ruby-style drama would have played out as drunken rant at a post-conference hotel bar, or a snide comment on Usenet, or on an obscure mailing list. Not quite the same.
The Ruby guys didn't have the benefit of age, experience, or a certain amount of professional obscurity.
Also: I'm not an expert, or a lawyer, but it's my understanding that you can't copyright titles, but you can trademark them, or portions of them.
The guys (IDW?) that publish the "For Dummies" book series regularly enforce the trademarks around their name and cover design.
Hollywood often gets around the copyright problem by trademarking some film titles (this is why it's always "Disney's The Lion King" and not just "The Lion King.")
Love the idea, the context, and the execution. It's a great project. Not a fan of the name.
Zed Shaw has a well-established series of "Learn $topic the Hard Way" online books, with Addison Wesley publishing a 3rd edition of his "Learn Python the Hard Way" this spring. He is building a brand and a business around this name.
I'd be surprised to learn that "Learn ... the Hard Way" isn't trademarked, but even if it isn't, it strikes me as disingenuous, misleading, and potentially confusing to name your work after his.
As far as I can tell, Mr Shaw has nothing to do with this project, but then the "Learn Linux the Hard Way" name might, to some, imply that he does.
Edited to add: I do not have a dog in this fight, just pointing out a potential conflict.
It's not a blog, but a collection of weekly email newsletters.
At the risk of sounding like a shill (because I'm pretty sure Mr Cooper posts to HN), I have to say these are each brilliantly done. There are separate newsletters for JavaScript, Ruby, HTML5, and Dart (but sadly no Python).
Great way to keep up with changes in these areas once a week, and pretty much the only third-party emails I not only look forward to receiving, but actually open and read.
I think he buried the lede: Social login buttons can hurt brands.
This'll date me, but I'm still amazed that so many companies eagerly slap other company's logos on everything they do. Even if it's just a blog post.
This page is a case in point: Facebook's brand appears four times. Twitter's appears a dozen times (more because of the comments). Mailchimp? Just once.
This might be pedantic for this thread, I have to point out that Clerks wasn't really a "self financed" movie. At least in the sense that the final product you saw on theaters and on DVD was not paid for by Kevin Smith.
Smith did spend around $30k of his own money on production costs. The bulk of that was for film stock. (Similarly, Rodriguez spent $8k of his own money on Mariachi.)
Now, here's the kicker: Neither one of them spent a dime on film prints. They signed deals and let the studios take care of that. This is significant because if people talked about Clerks' or El Mariachi's budget in those terms, the numbers would be in the rane of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To put it in perspective: Would you say you "self financed" your startup if a big multinational paid for all the servers and bandwidth from the get go? It's sorta like that.
Saying it in interviews makes for a better story ("College dropout makes major movie for $8,000!") but it's not really accurate.
The problem is that this space gets oversaturated easily and the fallout is quick and brutal. Remember the Jaguar? 3DO? Dreamcast? The Phantom?
All of them had fan support and all of them failed in the marketplace (and the "open source" Phantom never even made it to market).
There's less vendor lockin with consoles now. Fewer titles are platform exclusive. Online services are much important than they used to be (notice there's little to no mention of this in the promo video). The question becomes bigger than, "How does this console compete with the Xbox?" (which is already a HUGE question), it becomes "How doe this console compete with Xbox Live?".
This product is going to be openly competing with big, established players with lots of cash and decades of experience. And it's not just the big 3 console makers. They're competing with SmartPhones and iPad gaming too, basically any electronic gaming experience you can having sitting on the couch in your living room.
Fans of hackable linux boxen and hardcore gamers are always super enthusiastic, but I don't think that demo is large enough to help a company succeed in the way this company needs to succeed.
It's more likely that some of these are defensive applications, to lock competitors from getting them (eg: blog, tunes).
Winer is right, and I'm surprised nobody is writing about this or calling much attention to it. There's enormous potential marketing value behind domains like "beatles.music" or "harrypotter.books" or "superman.movies".
With the advertising and reach of companies like Amazon and Google (or even Warner and Sony), I think these new domains have the power to split the web, and potentially turn .com, .net, and .org into something of a ghetto (sorta similar to how .biz and .name might be viewed by Joe Consumer now).
On the other hand, it may well be meaningless. I'm continually surprised to see big companies use facebook.com/[companyname] in their advertising too.
That's the part I don't get: Foxconn is the world's biggest manufacturer of electronic components. They count Amazon, Dell, Motorola, HP, Nokia, Microsoft, and Apple among their clients.
- The layout does render correctly at 1024x768 (iPad).
- Some of the drop downs do not work when tapped.
- Make the movie detail page URL more SEO friendly (include the title instead of your internal ID).
- Don't force users to download images & titles from a few dozen other movies when looking at the movie detail page.
- Focus on being mobile friendly. I can imagine a site like this being most useful when I see a poster or trailer at the local theater and want to remember it. In that situation, I'm on my phone with a slower connection (or one that is capped).
- You're building a site with lots of utility, not a content site. I'm not sure links to half a dozen social media services will serve your users (along with forcing mobile visitors to download all that JavaScript).
- Movie release dates vary greatly across countries. Even the US, smaller independent films will have slow roll outs over longer periods of time. Some bigger films will premier in NY and LA weeks or months before being released in a wider market. And not all films will be available in all areas. Your site gives no indication of any of this at all.