Joel Spolsky is taking to the road next month to promote FogBugz (his company’s bug tracking system) on a 21-city tour through the US and Canada: Here’s what you can expect if you show up. There will be some really, really expensive coffee and maybe a muffin or something if the hotel in particularly cheap. If you come a bit early, it’ll be a great chance to meet some interesting software people in your city. I’ll show off some of my favorite features in FogBugz 6.0, but mostly, I’ll talk about the software development process in general. I’ll leave a…
The Onion has really stepped up their video production these days. My friend Pat turned me onto this one which digs on NASCAR: NASCAR Coach Reveals Winning Strategy: ‘Drive Fast’ (If the video doesn’t appear, click this link to watch: NASCAR Coach Reveals Winning Strategy – The Onion.)
This past week SixApart announced that the SplashBlog mobile blogging site will close down in a month. I’ve been following SplashBlog and its use as a mobile blogging client: In February 2005, SplashBlog.com launched as a free hosting service for SpashData’s SplashBlog mobile client (initial price $20). When launched, the client could post to either the TypePad or SplashBlog services. In September of that year, they released client version 2.0 which was now free, but only connected to their own SplashBlog service. The service was free for up to 100 pictures and about $30/year for an unlimited account. In March…
Kent Brewster (from the Yahoo Developer Network) has created another cool hack making use of the Flickr photos API: Ransomizr (Kent’s blog entry). Ransomizr makes use of the Flickr “One letter pool”, a collection of photos of single A-Z letters found in the real world. Type in a short message and it will be drawn in ransom-letter style. Kent also includes the HTML code snippet so you can use the result in your blog, MySpace, or wherever.
Earlier this week Yahoo! released a public version of an internal website performance tool called YSlow. Visit the YSlow page for instruction and downloads. YSlow runs on Firefox and requires the Firebug extension. I’ve used YSlow a lot to help improve the Messenger web sites, so I’m pretty familiar with its operation. I can see where some people using it on either personal blogs or smaller sites will be surprised a the somewhat harsh grading for things like using a CDN. For a large site with huge traffic like Yahoo, it’s a no-brainer, but for a small blog it doesn’t…