Written by lifehacker

When getting things done involves making phone calls, you want to spend the least amount of time and money on the horn as possible-and several tricks and services can help you do just that. With the right tones, keypresses, phone numbers, and know-how, you can skip through or cut off long-winded automated voice systems and humans, access web services by voice, and smartly screen incoming calls. Check out our pick of the 10 best telephony techniques for getting more done in less time over the phone.

10. Avoid the cost of calling 411 with GOOG 411.

Instead of calling regular 411 to get information (and an extra charge on your phone bill), Google by voice by calling 1-800-GOOG-411 to get a street address or phone number. Some Lifehacker readers say GOOG 411 works better than others; if you haven’t tried it, here’s a YouTube clip (courtesy of Google) on how to give it a try.

9. Get out of annoying calls and meetings with SorryGottaGo.com sounds and the Popularity Dialer.

Interrupt a long phone call or meeting (or date!) with two interesting services: SorryGottaGo.com (original post) offers a myriad of sounds you can play while you’re trapped on an endless phonecall that give you the perfect excuse to hang up. (Like, someone’s at the door, or you’re out of change to feed the naggy public phone.) Along the same lines, schedule an interrupting call with the Popularity Dialer (original post) an incoming calling service that can make you seem “in demand.” (Do we actually recommend these two services? Maybe not, but it’s nice to know they’re out there when you’re desperate.)

8. PayPal money via voice call.

When you owe your buddy 12 bucks on the dinner bill and you’re out of cash, call 1-800-4PAYPAL (1-800-472-9725) to send him the money on the spot. (Your phone must be activated on your PayPal account for this to work). Here’s more on how to send and receive money via phone with PayPal.

7. Email yourself reminders, blog, and set Google Calendar appointments by phone with Jott.

“Do everything you’d ever want from the phone” service Jott supercharges your ability to leave yourself a reminder voicemail. Jott will transcribe your voicemail to self and email it to you, as well as post to your blog, add events to your Google Calendar, and more. See Kevin’s full rundown on how to get things done over the phone with Jott.

6. Avoid annoying calls with a custom silent ringtone.

If your cell phone supports per-caller ringtones, reader Jim suggests selectively silencing the low-priority incoming calls with a dead air ringtone. Here’s how to make a ringtone from any MP3 on your mobile.

5. Ring all your phones from one number with GrandCentral.

Sick of missing calls to the office while you’re home or vice versa? Set up a free GrandCentral number that can ring all your phones at once from one number, or selective phones based on the caller-like your cell phone, office phone, and home phone. GrandCentral’s got scads of neat customized phone features; see Adam’s tour of how to consolidate your phones with GrandCentral.

4. Skip the greeting and get right to the beep with one keypress.

Long voicemail greetings are tedious to sit through, but on many services, specific keypresses can skip you right to the beep. Hit 7 or # to bypass that long greeting, and save time and money on your cell phone bill.

3. Name that tune.

Dying to know what song that is playing on the car radio? Call 866-411-SONG and hold your phone up to the speakers. Just 15 seconds (and a small fee), and 411 SONG will send you a text message with the song name and artist. (This only works on cell phones with SMS capabilities.)

2. Swear like a sailor to skip directly to a human operator.

When that Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system’s making you navigate an endless menu of options, put your potty mouth to good use. Some IVR’s are programmed to listen for naughty words and speed you along to human help when they hear them. Adam gave this trick a try and dropping the F bomb did indeed zap him right through to a human. We suggest using this trick when you’re not within earshot of your co-workers.

1. Trick automated phone bots into thinking your line’s dead.

If you’ve got automated phone marketers or political campaigns or debt collectors ringing your phone at all hours, trick the system into thinking your phone’s dead. Add the U.S. Special Information Tone signal for “vacant circuit” to the beginning of your voicemail greeting to automatically unsubscribe your phone number from bot call lists.

How do you save time and money getting things done on the phone? Let us know in the comments.

Written by Holy Taco

Because sometimes you just have to call shenanigans.

8. AINTITCOOLNEWS.COM

It started out as a cool website where you could find unbiased reviews and information on upcoming movies and television. Now it’s owner and operator, Harry Knowles, (who looks like what would happen if an Orange Julius and a pile of tires had a baby) is so bought and sold by the studios that when he reviewed the movie Daredevil, he said this:

“Not since Christopher Reeve nailed SUPERMAN has an actor so beautifully capture the image, soul and charisma of a character drawn from the pages of comic books.”

Really? I’ve taken shits that have more charisma than Ben Affleck in that movie. Every other critic HATED it, yet Harry gushed on for 3000 words. If you don’t believe he’s sold out, check out this screen shot from his review section of the site we took yesterday. Every review is positive. Don’t be fooled by “The Mist” headline-it’s actually Harry verbally fellating it.

7. PEREZHILTON.COM

I know, I know, how does a site that scribbles little droplets of semen coming from Britney Spears’ mouth, jump the shark? By doing stuff other than that-that’s how. Suddenly, Perez Hilton thinks people give a flying fuck about things he has to say other than celeb gossip, and he’s started commenting on politics and music. Right. The only thing we want him to comment on is why he won’t shut the hell up. Here’s a rule: If your site shows a close up picture of Lindsay Lohan’s vagina, you’re not allowed to comment on Hillary Clinton’s stance on health care reform.

6. JUMPTHESHARK.COM

JTS used to be a nice, straightforward website. Users would vote on when a classic TV show turned the corner and started to suck. It was a harsh, brutal, and clear-cut commentary on the TV world. Then it got bought by some big corporation and became my 12 year old sister’s diary.

Dear TV shows,

I like you. I wish everything in the world was TV shows. I like TV shows more than I like sunsets and pretty ponies. Do you like me? I hope you do. Please don’t ever die. You are my favoritest!

Love,

JumpTheShark.com.

And that’s why the site sucks now. If you don’t think they’re biased, then why is half of their homepage taken up by some guy talking about “exciting show spoilers!.” Take a look on the right of this screen shot.

5. ALL PAY PORN SITES

Can you remember the last time you paid money on the internet to masturbate? I can’t, and let me tell you-I masturbate a lot. With youporn, porntube, redtube.com, and the like, there’s enough free porn out there to satisfy all of China, if it was only inhabited by thirteen-year-old boys with portable lotion dispensers. Why should I pay $9.99 to get on a pay site when I can find a free site, with a search engine, that allows me to type in “boobs, huge, two girls, volleyball, Jeopardy,” and get 48 videos? Don’t try to answer that because you can’t.

Nothing kills a boner like trying to type the three digit privacy protection code on the back of your credit card.

4. CNN.COM

Remember when cnn.com used to be about news? Now half the headlines are either about some dude who found out he was banging his long lost sister, or a story about a cat in Des Moines, Iowa that made a 911 call that saved Christmas. Again, below is a screen shot of their top headlines on the homepage from yesterday.

3. EBAUMSWORLD.COM

This used to be THE site for funny videos and pictures. In fact, there was a rumor that Eric Bauman was offered 100 million dollars for it and said no. That prompts me to start a new rumor: Eric Bauman is mentally retarded. If you’ve made your entire fortune from stealing other people’s videos, how do you not forsee that maybe other companies might take your business model and kick the absolute crap out of it? Answer: See rumor I started above. Too slow to realize they should update every day and change their interface, eBaum’s finally got the hint last year, but it was too late and no one cared.

2. MYSPACE.COM

Yes, Holy Taco has a myspace page, and every day I get the following friend request from some chick in a bikini named something like “Nadia”. “Hey, I noticed you were on the site, just wanted to say hi! Myspace won’t let me show my naked pics here, so come to my website!” If If I wanted porn, I’d go to a website or look in between my dad’s mattress. And who could forget how awesome it is to go to someone’s site, wait 15 minutes for it load the customized background picture of a unicorn flying, only to find when it does load, John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World” immediately begins blasting out of my lap top. Somehow Myspace has tricked people in to thinking that everyone GIVES A SHIT about what their page looks like. This picture below makes my head want to explode.

1. AOL.COM

AOL used to own the internet. They were like the smoking hot chick in high school that everyone wanted to bang. Now you go back to your ten-year reunion and they’re the overweight hag, who’s carrying a child and asking you if she can “bum a smoke” as she attempts to lick some dried mayonnaise off her face. AOL’s been so bought out by large corporations and networks that their news coverage and search engines are total shit. Look at this screen shot from today of their “hot searches.” Really? Comanche Moon, a TV movie on CBS is your top hot search and you call yourself a reliable search engine?

Written by By Myatt Murphy

Up your burn with these scientifically proven fitness tricks.

Tired of plugging away at the gym without seeing the pounds disappear? We found simple tricks that will transform your usual regimen into the ultimate fat-blasting routine. Whether you use just two of these strategies or all seven, our insider tips will help you get the calorie-burn you deserve.

Know this: “You’ll be able to comfortably work out longer and harder if you’re cool,” says Len Kravitz, PhD, coordinator of exercise science at the University of New Mexico. “Being too hot stresses your body out, so you don’t perform as well.” Translation: You burn less fat.

Do this: When exercising at home, put a fan in front of your workout area. Hitting the gym? Wait to use the treadmill that has a fan built into the console.

Know this: “Wearing a heart-rate monitor makes it easier to burn more body fat by showing just how hard you’re really working,” Kravitz says. “Keeping your heart rate in the right zone prevents you from slacking off, so you make the most of every minute.”

Do this: Invest in a heart-rate monitor and wear it every time you exercise. We love Life Fitness’s new Dual Watch and Heart Rate Monitor ($60; at CVS stores nationwide). It’s simple to program and use. It doesn’t require an uncomfortable chest strap-just touch the face with your fingertips. And it comes in a variety of sizes, too.

Know this: “Warming up for five minutes before each workout helps you lose more weight,” says Heather Dillinger, an IDEA Health and Fitness Association elite-level personal-fitness trainer. “It not only makes your muscles more pliable but also increases their range of motion, so you end up using more muscle fibers as you exercise.”

Do this: Choose a warm-up routine that hits all of your muscles, not just your legs. The easiest option: Do three to five minutes of low-intensity walking while pumping your arms back and forth.

Know this: “Saving your energy for the end of your cardio workout may prevent you from losing as much weight as you can,” says metabolism expert Dixie Stanforth of the department of kinesiology and health education at the University of Texas at Austin.

Do this: Instead of starting out slow and then finishing up strong, do your high-intensity cardio early in your workout. After doing your warm-up, try exercising at a high intensity for 15 minutes before slowing down to a more moderate pace for the last 15 minutes.

Know this: “Two smaller workouts can be more effective than one,” Stanforth reveals. That’s because every time you do high-intensity exercise, your metabolism stays revved for an hour or more afterward. Splitting up your workout boosts your metabolism twice, giving you additional calorie-burning time from the exact same routine.

Do this: pide your workout into two smaller, high-intensity sessions-preferably, doing one in the morning and one at night.

Know this: If you’re convinced that you’re melting fat while exercising, you’ll make a mind-body connection that will actually help you lose fat faster, Dillinger explains. In a 2007 Harvard study, participants who believed they were getting a good workout showed greater reductions in body fat than subjects who performed the same activities but didn’t feel like they were really exercising.

Do this: The next time you do anything active, remind yourself every few minutes that you’re giving it your all. This little mental move may moti-vate you to push yourself harder, leading to even greater fat loss.

Know this: “The less time you rest between sets when strength training, the more calories you’re likely to burn,” Dillinger notes. “Keeping rest periods short keeps your heart rate at a higher rate, which naturally increases the number of calories you’re using.”

Do this: The best rule of thumb is to take only a 30-second break between sets (meaning you’ll need a watch with a second hand).

Written by themishmash

1. “Don’t hate me because I am beautiful. Hate me because I did your Dad.”

(Photo by Ed Hoover).

2. Tony Robbins channels Herv? Villechaize.

(Photo by Knightwise).

3. Too much information.

(Photo by Mark Perman).

4. Even scientists deface bathroom walls.

(Photo by Houston Marsh).

5. If toilet bowls could speak:

(Photo by Dan Means).

6. I’m gonna throw up now.

(Photo by Shawn Murphy).

7. Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol.

(Photo by Craig Wood).

8. That damned Stephen Hawking; what did we tell you about scientists?

(Photo by Natalie Price).

9. Is he bragging or complaining?

(Photo by The Chrysanthemum).

10. Ya don’t say?

(Photo by Charlie Inman).

11. You asked for it.

(Photo by Alpha Omega).

12. Little Richard did call himself the ‘Bronze Liberace‘.

(Photo by Andrew Meager).

Collected by wallstreetfighter

All of the photos below are exactly as the shots were taken. Although it’s hard to believe (and many won’t anyway) but they are untouched.

This is done using a large mirror with a hole to put your head through. Then focus the camera on just the mirror. Simple, who doesn’t have a huge mirror with a hole in it laying around

Slow shutter, LED pen

Dye injected chicks in Bali

These photos taken from my favorite of the “Not PhotoShopped” Thread
at SomethingAwful. More photos and descriptions HERE

Written by Paulitics

I’m back from my vacation down in the United States, and will return to blogging with regularity as soon as possible.

To celebrate my return to this frigid, yet comparatively sane country, I felt it worthwhile to relay a list of five items which I saw during my travels which the locals thought was perfectly normal (I presume), but which freaked the heck out of me as a Canadian.

#5

A trucking company which hauls all manner of freight throughout the deep south of the U.S. which calls itself a “Christian company” (the very idea of which seems as bizarre to me as a “Christian dog”) and whichrequires that its trucks to carry religious and political messages. The messages I saw included:

It’s not a choice, it’s a child
and
God loved us so that he gave his only son.

#4

A breakfast creation in upstate New York called “Stuffed French Toast”. What does “Stuffed French Toast” entail, you na?ve non-American might ask? It’s French Toast (which, keep in mind is cooked in butter) stuffed with bacon, eggs and processed cheese (which they proudly call ‘American processed cheese’, I presume, to distinguish it from real cheese which could, after all, be French and/or offer unAmerican nutritional content). But here’s the kicker: on top of your “Stuffed French Toast” cooked in butter, you will find? a square of butter.

#3

A massive billboard in South Carolina just outside of Georgia which read:
“Victory is great, but honor is greater. Defend your Southern heritage.”

#2

A letter to the editor pasted proudly on a business door in Key Marathon, Florida by the business owner discussing how immigrants today are a disgrace to immigrants from the start of the 20th Century. The letter details how people need to read history because in 1901, when the business owner’s grandfather came to the country, he didn’t ask for any government handouts like modern immigrants are asking for. So modern, non-English-speaking immigrants are greedier than the immigrants from 100 years ago and thus do not recognize the value of hard work and don’t appreciate why America is great. (I’m not concocting a straw man here, this is, as best as I can recall, the structure of the argument). Apparently, nobody told the letter-writer that in 1901 NOBODY got government handouts (other than cheap land which WAS aimed at immigrants) because there weren’t significant government social programs until after World War II.
I guess the purpose of the letter was for other people to read history, not for the letter writer to read history.

#1

Casa D’ice, a restaurant located near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which features political messages as their signature claim to fame. Among the political messages they put up under their restaurant’s name and proudly reproduced on their website include:

Written by lifehacker

Even in this golden age of Big Internet Companies Acquiring Everything In Sight, there are still a few independent, small webapps out there that don’t get the attention they should for their useful functionality. Every once in a while we get tired of writing about the same big name webapps everyone knows about, so today we’re turning the spotlight away from the obvious greats and taking a look at online tools that may have flown under your radar. Here are our top 10 picks of of underhyped webapps that should get more attention than they do. Photo by AP.

Note: There are hundreds of little independent webapps out there, and while we’ve tried many of them at least once, this list is slanted toward the products I use personally because they filled a need I (or someone close to me) had. Your list might look a lot different than this one?so tell us what we missed in the comments!

10. Qipit

Cameraphone image scan to PDF via email
Snap a photo of a whiteboard or document with your cameraphone and email it to Qipit.com, a webapp that scans your photo to a PDF document and stores it online automatically. Qipit ain’t the prettiest webapp you’ll ever see, but it does a great job of capturing meaning from low-res images of text. You can also fax images of documents from Qipit, too.

9. Ning

Social network creator
Build your own social networking community site with Ning, a WYSIWYG web site creator that offers user registration and profiles, polls, blogs, photo albums, and boards at your own URL for free. While at least one LH reader complained about Ning being slow to load for highly-customized communities, it’s still mind-blowing that Ning’s made creating a dynamic, user-driven web application as easy as snapping together (virtual) Lego pieces.

8. Jott

Voice to text reminders, blog posts, and calendar events
If you ever call your answering machine to leave yourself a reminder message, Jott’s for you. Call Jott to leave your message instead, and get it transcribed and sent to your email address. You can also call Jott and send your voice message to your blog, Twitter account, or add events to your Google Calendar via Jott as well as other services.

7. Anywhere.FM

Music library hosting and web playback
Stop toting your iPod or entire iTunes library around on your local hard drive: instead, upload unlimited MP3’s to Anywhere.FM and listen from your web browser from anywhere. At some point Anywhere.FM may start charging for storage and playback, but while it’s free, it’s a convenient way to get your tunes on the go.

6. Doodle

Group polling for scheduling large events
When organizing a recent reunion event that involved upwards of 80 people trying to figure out what the best date was for everyone, Doodle’s group polling app saved the day. Set up a Doodle poll with possible dates and times for any kind of gathering with lots of attendees, and email out the Doodle URL, where each person can enter what times they can make it, and see who else is available when.

5. Netvibes

Browser start page
When Lifehacker alum Rick Broida ran his start page showdown, Netvibes was the clear winner. Set up your web dashboard at Netvibes, a sleek, drag and drop, customizable start page that gets all your crucial information in one place the moment you launch your browser. Here are a few ways to trick out your Netvibes.

4. Zoho Suite

Web-based office suite
While Google Docs seems to be the first product people think of when online office suites come up, the lesser-known Zoho Suite offers more apps and features. See how Zoho stacks up against Google Docs.

3. Meebo

Web-based instant messenger
Chat with your buddies across multiple IM services without installing a thing using the Meebo web-based chat client. Great for folks in IT lockdown, Meebo lets you log in and chat with buddies on AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, and Jabber/GTalk.

2. TiddlyWiki

Personal, one-page wiki
Even though it’s been around for years, we still have a huge crush on the thumb-drive friendly, magical Javascript personal wiki TiddlyWiki. While TW isn’t a hosted webapp like the others, it uses a web page to store your information locally. TiddlyWiki has to be seen to be believed, and it’s also spawned many offshoots like GTDTiddlyWiki. See how to get organized with GTD TiddlyWiki.

1. Remember the Milk

Task manager, reminder system, personal organizer
Among the slew of web-based task managers that have flooded the internet in the past couple of years, Remember the Milk stands head and shoulders above the rest: its modern interface and deep feature set make organizing your to-do’s actually fun. Here’s how to organize your life with Remember the Milk.

Which of your favorite webapps don’t get the attention they deserve? Tell us about ’em in the comments.

Written by Left of Zen

Albert Einstein Quotes

1. The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

2. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

3. Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

4. The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

5. If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

6. I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Fredrick Nietzsche Quotes

7. In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.

8. A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

9. Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

10. Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

11. Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Mark Twain Quotes

12. Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

13. Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

14. I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.

15. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

16. The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

17. “Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”
Voltaire Quotes

18. Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

19. If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.

20. Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.

21. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

22. The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.

23. It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

24. There are men who can think no deeper than a fact.

25. Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

26. Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

27. By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

28. Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Plato Quotes

29. One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

30. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

31. This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

32. Courage is knowing what not to fear.

33. The measure of a man is what he does with power.

Winston Churchill Quotes

34. A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

35. If you are going through hell, keep going.

36. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

37. It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

George Carlin Quotes

38. Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

39. A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

40. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man?living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

41. You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.

42. Reminds me of something my third-grade teacher said to us. She said, “You show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.”

43. I never fucked a ten, but one night, I fucked five twos.

44. What year did Jesus think it was?

45. The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

46. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

47. “No comment” is a comment.

48. If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.

49. The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Steve Martin Quotes

50. Boy, those French: They have a different word for everything!

51. There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.

52. Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

53. I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

54. You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies – all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

55. First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

56. Why is it we don’t always recognize the moment when love begins, but we always know when it ends?
* As Harris K. Telemacher in “L.A. Story” (1991)

Steven Colbert Quotes

57. “To sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush?I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You now what, I’m a pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough?Somebody shoot me in the face.”
-Roasting Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ dinner

58. On this show, your voice will be heard – in the form of my voice.

59. There’s a phrase we live by in America: “In God We Trust”. It’s right there where Jesus would want it: on our money.

60. Folks, the President needs a break. He’s like a Black and Decker cordless Dirt Devil vacuum. If you don’t recharge his batteries, he can’t suck.

61. I’ve always been a big fan of beauty. Sure, you can’t judge a book by its cover but who wants to have sex with a book?

62. Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me “sir”.

63. Asia: Four little letters, three billion little people.

64. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay. I have plenty of friends that are going to hell.”

65. Jesus forgives sinners, not criminals.

Jon Stewart Quotes

66. I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.

67. Insomnia is my greatest inspiration.

68. We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There’s just one problem – it’s in North Korea.

69. We declared war on terror-it’s not even a noun, so, good luck.

70. Here’s how bizarre the war is that we’re in in Iraq, and we should have known this right from the get-go: When we first went into Iraq, Germany didn’t want to go. Germany. The Michael Jordan of war took a pass.
Jon Stewart’s Stand-up performance at RIT, 2005

Bill Maher Quotes

71. Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease.

72. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

73. Religion, to me, is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don’t need.

74. They’re talking about banning cigarette smoking now in any place that’s used by ten or more people in a week,
which, I guess, means that Madonna can’t even smoke in bed.

Jerry Seinfeld Quotes

75. Men want the same thing from their underwear that they want from women: a little
bit of support, and a little bit of freedom.

76. Dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them’s making a poop, the other one’s carrying it for him, who would you assume is in charge.

77. There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, “I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.”

78. Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they’re killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? “Sweetheart, let’s make up. Have this deceased squirrel.”

Larry David Quotes

79. Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man – there’s your diamond in the rough.

80. If you tell the truth about how you’re feeling, it becomes funny.

81. I’m surprized Hitler didn’t round up the toupee people.”

Dennis Miller Quotes

82. A recent police study found that you’re much more likely to get shot by a fat cop if you run.

83. The average American’s day planner has fewer holes in it than Ray Charles’s dart board.

84. “The only way the French are going in is if we tell them we found truffles in Iraq.”

Jay Leno Quotes

85. Here’s something to think about: How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?

86. The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot have a nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.

87. Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you’ve met your New Year’s resolution.

88. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.

Rodney Dangerfield Quotes

89. My father carries around the picture of the kid who came with his wallet.

90. Oh, when I was a kid in show business I was poor. I used to go to orgies to eat the grapes.

91. I’m at the age where I want two girls. In case I fall asleep they will have someone to talk to.

92. A girl phoned me and said, “Come on over. There’s nobody home.” I went over. Nobody was home!

93. Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

Sarah Silverman Quotes

94. When God gives you AIDS – and God does give you AIDS, by the way – make lemonAIDS.

95. I was raped by a doctor. Which is, you know, so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.

Chris Rock Quotes

96. Every town has the same two malls: the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to.

97. I live in a neighborhood so bad that you can get shot while getting shot.

98. If a woman tells you she’s twenty and looks sixteen, she’s twelve. If she tells you she’s twenty-six and looks twenty-six, she’s damn near fourty.

99. “You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to
go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named ‘Bush’, ‘Dick’, and ‘Colon.’ Need I say more?”

100. “You won’t be able to take your eyes off the next four presenters: Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz.”
Chris Rock while hosting the Oscars

101. Gas is getting so expensive I’m gonna ride a mexican to work.

Written by dominiek

This is about how I spend 24 concentrated hours spread out over 4 days during Holidays to build the online service Wigitize.com. It is part of my ongoing learning process on how to run a successful web startup.

Even though I’m a super pimple-faced code-geek, I strive to be a creative entrepreneur who can utilize modern day tools and navigate the chaos to build cool stuff. What I tried to do for this project is use some new methods/tools out there to solve practical problems in my weakness area: design, frontend coding, system administration and SEO.

Purpose of this article is to show my thought process on the multidisciplinary aspects of this project. Also to invoke the discussion on how these things could be done much better (correct me!) and hopefully also to educate other entrepreneurial minded hackers.

Wigitize.com, A geeky Idea

While working for my current client here in Tokyo, I’m often running into problems where I wish there was a third party web service that could solve them. For example: Uploading/Managing pictures for user generated content. We want to build cool shit, not reinvent the wheel.

Another one of these ‘problems’ – by saying problems I mean ‘important new features’ – was allowing users to import their blog’s RSS feed. When users input the URL of their blog, a listing of their most recent blog entries will be displayed, sounds simple enough right?

Several weeks before, I already wrote a feature that allowed users to display their latest Twitter ‘tweets’. Building this ‘passive twitter integration’ seriously did not take any longer than one hour! This is because Twitter provides a blog badge or widget. More and more sites are starting to provide these widgets making it easier for people to take their data and display it on their blog. And that’s great!

However, the most popular data feed format – RSS – does not have these widget benefits. Widgets rely on a smart technique called JSON which allows your browser to fetch the actual data. With RSS feeds you need relatively complicated server-side processing to display the data.

So wouldn’t it be cool if there was a web service that allowed you to convert any RSS/Atom feed into a embeddable widget? I’m sure some of you will suggest similar services now :]

A service like that should be:

• simple, with one big ass URL input
• smart, it should detect these data feeds
• integratable (another adjective!), by providing an API for other web services

Aahhh a new project has been born. Let’s open up MS Word and fill in our Prince 2 Project template. Herein we can properly plan for all things we need to be doing and all risks and?

Neh, just kidding! Let’s open up that bottle of wine and? just fucking build it!?

Design Mockup, 3 hours

For me, this is one of the more tricky parts. But fortunately, the project is simple and Web 2.0 designs simple too! Since I don’t aspire to be the next whoever cool designer, I will just give you my Idiot’s view of doing design:

• being able to draw is not a necessity
• always start by putting down your content first
• learn a bit about colors: Color in Motion, Vleere and Kuler (not cool but useful)
• don’t force making a design, do it in the evening when you find the creative flow – or in an onsen if you have a waterproof mac

The weapon of choice: Adobe Photoshop (CS3, the latest shizne!). (Any good web alternatives yet? 🙂 They say Photoshop has a steep learning curve and I agree. Still there are some things you can do to speed things up:

Learn the most important shortcut keys, you will use them a hell lot (ordered by usage):

• V, get the arrow key to start dragging shit around
• M, marker to select things
• T, text tool
• I, eyedropper to pick a color
• CTRL+T, transform current selection
• G, paint bucket to fill in stuff
• W, magic wand to select stuff of the same shape/color

There are some things you will be seeing a lot in particular when doing Web20-like designs:

When performing blending options on a layer, you should be playing a lot with the following marked options:

You can learn here and here how to make these babies:

Woops, I shouldn’t get to deep into the details. Anyway, based solely on the content a design like this rolled out:

The colors can be justified as soil and nature, yin yang, peace man!

Storing your Files in an online Project Manager, 30 minutes

After having made those designs, I’d like to throw them online somewhere right away. Preferably in a SCM repository like Subversion. Luckily, I remembered an article on ReadWriteWeb about such Developer Tools

Basically there are two startups that provide freemium SVN and project management hosting. I chose Assembla for disk space, but Unfuddle was a close second.

That said, 10 minutes later I could start throwing things into my very own http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/wigitize/trunk

Hell, it even puts changeset notifications in my Junk box!

Playing with Rails 2.0, 4 hours

Weapons of choice: RubyOnRails 2.0 and Textmate.

Note: If one piece of software is worth paying for, it’s TextMate – am doing so now

RubyOnRails is very suitable for me, but I’m not sure if it is that suitable for you. I myself have a clear CS-engineering background and am very comfortable with digging in deep. On the other hand, depending slightly on luck, you can do a lot with this framework by just modestly hacking away and watching a screencast every now and then.

Rails is quite controversial in terms of scaling and production-ready. However, I think things are changing fast and as I will show you later. Serious innovation is done on how this framework plays with it’s systems layer and technologies like Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud

Like making the design, the coding also starts with content. First you jack in the important texts/inputs you have in your design and than you enclose them in the necessary ps so they can be CSS-styled later. In Rails this starts with making a home/welcome controller and writing the default layout: app/views/layouts/application.html.erb. Yes we are using the new Rails 2.0 way of html.erb.

A very important part of Rails I think is the config/routes.rb file. This file holds all your pretty URLs like: http://wigitize.com/json/for/http://dominiek.com/ . In a way routes.rb lays out all the abstract functionality of your web application. Rumors are that the routes part of the framework is internally the most complex one.

Some quick hinters on Rails practices that will speed up things:

• Never do things like: link_to(”, :controller => ”), use Named Routes
• If something seems complicated, break it down into simple steps and write a unit test first
• Breathe consistentness, everything you code – even whitespace – has perfect reason. This also means applying Don’t Repeat Yourself all the time as a habit.
• Naming can be a bitch and you can take up a lot of time. Do your best and pick a name consistently, you can always change it later.
• In Rails, take Skinny Controller, Fat Model to extreme heights, it will make your life more easy
• Do it in AJAX right away, it’s often much more simple than supporting plain HTML CRUD in the first place

There is a lot of material out there available on coding Rails in general, so I will let go here.

These first two hours are basically setting up all the routes, filling in the HTML and making things work in a very basic sense. For wigitize that meant:

• hooking up the URL input to a feed detector and aggregator (most of that code is from here)
• making sure that the aggregated data is stored in JSON format (In rails that means calling .to_json on any Object, easy as pie!)
• adding a Widget model that can actually hold the URL, detected feed URL and JSON data:

I spend the next 2 hours seriously code-monkeying on the feed detecting and parsing part of the system. I will soon open source it under the name feedeater.

Style that HTML! 1 hour

Styling, already? Yes, I think it’s good to style quite early in the process. For me, there is one single argument: Flow.

When you are making something work it is nice when things already look quite tangible and usable. When you apply styling in an early stage you can see direct usable results of the things you are building, increasing the psychological state of the Flow.

Ok, so I also kinda suck doing CSS, but I learned enough to turn an image into a web page. These are my bullet point lessons:

• Develop for Firefox first, using the tool Firebug. If you aren’t using Firebug and doing web development you’re either slow or an imbecile ;]
• Always put in some basic CSS, I got some here and made it into my own html.css which I can include as a base all the time.
• Padding and margin: These things are great and you need a lot of them. However, padding often gives you shit so try to choose margin over padding. Also, choose margin-bottom over margin-top since everything tends to float upwards (Thanks Simon)
• Current fashion: Get some nice fonts going on, I’m using Trebuchet MS a lot for Wigitize and I mix it in with plain Arial.
• Current fashion dictates that you use a less fierce black for your text, make it #111 or #222.
• For mozilla/safari I’m using -moz-border-radius/border-radius, will never work in IE6 – fuck them, being a plain user is fine, but you’re not getting any round corners! Besides, isn’t Microsoft planning a forced upgrade soon?
• You only need tables for tables. They will make your life a pain and you will not be cool if you use them for layout. Other than that it’s fine.
• Little side note about AJAX: don’t use AJAX for navigation EVER! There are strong SEO and usability arguments against it (learned that the hard way, like most things in my life).

Spin it Baby! 2 hours

OK, I must admit that I spend way WAY too much time on this! However, when you’re doing things with AJAX, you need to put a spinner somewhere to indicate loading.

This so called spinner is pretty kickass and based on a piece of Javascript I wrote earlier:

Yeah Baby! It’s all hypnotic and stuff.

Note: As someone pointed out in the comments, on ajaxload.info you can get a lot of spinner images, like the one I’m using here.

Designing and Coding the Footer, 2 hours

I really like footers and I think they are becoming more and more important. Nowadays footers are used as sitemaps and often they are contextualized as well. These are nice examples of footers: last.fm and snooth.com

For Wigitize the footer is rather small since it’s a small site:

Making the JSON Embeddable, 3 hours

The embeddable Widget has the following code:

<p class="feed_widget">    <ul id="feed_widget_34"></ul>    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://wigitize.com/javascripts/wigitize.js"></script>    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://wigitize.com/feeds/34.json"></script>  </p>

• define a containing list (ul)
• include a JS library that has a special callback function, in our case wigitize_feed()
• include the JSON file that will call wigitize_feed with the appropriate data

Providing styles obviously complicates things a bit. When choosing a style, it will include a generic wigitize.css and assign a class to the containing p.

Near future improvements:

• Provide a ‘grab the grabber’ so that people can provide widgets of their own feeds (eg ReadWriteWeb providing a last-10 articles widget). This could have a lot of potential if provided in a simple feed-burner like button.
• Put in better default styles than the lame ass ones I have now.
• Option to include data (useful for photo feeds).
• Option to display other kinds of aggregated data, eg microformats.

Making things run in the Background, 3 hours

Running things in the background – dubbed backgrounding – is an important part of production ready web applications. It’s a relatively new concept, since web applications used to be less complex. Now however, we are marching towards the Semantic Web where web apps are expected to become intelligent (the Intelligent Agents are coming, just like in the Langoliers!). I think being able to make your applications autonomous now will already reap you benefits (to be continued as an article).

There are several ways to achieve backgrounding in Rails, but the far away most easy one is using BackgrounDRb. BackgrounDRb is a plugin for Rails that allows you to easily kick off background processes and schedule regular tasks. Good for our purposes: detecting and fetching feed data.

I don’t agree with all of Zed Shaw’s big rant about the Rails community being a ghetto, but I sure do agree that there are a lot of idiots out there that produce things that can screw over your production apps. BackgrounDRb has become one of these projects and I strongly recommend that you do not use the latest code. If you start comparing code and read the mailing list you will see that a new guy has taken over Ezra fine project and I suspect that he has lowered the project’s level to pre-stable. I don’t hear any signals from the community and that worries me. Either I’m seeing ghosts or people are blindly accepting anything that’s marked as stable. In any case, I’m using Ezra’s version which works fine.

Finishing up the API, 4 hours

The Wigitize API for now is quite quick and dirty. There are two simple ways of using the API and examples are provided. In this area, a lot of improvements will be made down the line since it’s a key point in making any future freemium revenue.

Domain and Domain Email, 30 minutes

When I buy a domain I always buy a DNS managing package with it as well. This means that I can login somewhere and setup subdomains and set mail records. So the total price of Wigitize.com was 20$ per year.

Providing [email protected] email is easy, just get yourself a free Gmail for organizations account. In your Google Apps domain manager you can simply add your domain and in your DNS tool you set the MX record to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. Now you can use gmail and IMAP to read mails sent to your domain.

Setting up a Production Server, 1 hour

I was really eager to put this project on Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud until I calculated my monthly costs. Running costs alone for simple projects like these will cost you 60$ a month. Still I think it’s worthy to look into this once you scale beyond simple project.

After digging around I figured out that slicehost.com would be a good cheap second. For 20$ a month I have a 256 memory slice with 100GB in data transfer – awesome.

Setting up your slice takes 5 minutes with a credit card. This slice is essentially a virtual machine with an IP address, completely yours. And the best thing: you get an awesome web console to control everything! Adding a new machine is a no brainer.

Now, I’ve used linux/unix for a long time as a working station. Eventually I got lazy and switched to my current MacBook. Fortunately, you can be lazy for the systems side of things too. All thanks to a lovely tool called Deprec.

Deprec allows you to install the complete Rails stack with a small set of commands. Shortly thereafter you can deploy your application to your production server by typing cap deploy_with_migrations. Please note that for Deprec you need to install Ubuntu Linux on your machine which you can do as follows:

Deprec installs the Rails stack as: Apache, Mongrel cluster (default of 2 instances) and MySQL. As I’ve written earlier, NginX is a nice nano-alternative for Apache. I would like to see that in my Rails stack someday, but I’m not going to worry about that now. Clock is ticking!

Little Pimps and Tweaks, 3 hours

I think it’s good to prepare a little bit for the storm (and I felt like doing something else for a bit), so I’ve created a nice maintenance message for in case there are system/scaling problems. In here I think it’s important to give people an extra reminder to bookmark and come back.

Which brings us to another great service, addthis.com. AddThis provides you with a button that makes it easy to bookmark on multiple social bookmarking services.

Another one of those little tweaks was proper error checking and displaying it to the user. I am using a pink error message to make it look more friendly (maybe I should go even further and make it yellow or something):

Statistics and Search Engine Optimization, 1 hour

Statistics is another 10 minute no-brainer by using Google Analytics. However I’m on the lookout to find something more real-time like Mint (but than free). Any suggestions?

Note: I just added getclicky.com to get more realtime stats than GA

I found a blog which is solely about Rails and SEO which I thought was very promising but in fact doesn’t have much content. I do found something on how to provide different meta tags in rails which I applied right away.

After looking around a bit I also saw some discussion about whether to use www. or not. The way to roll with this is: you permanently redirect your www. domain to say http://wigitize.com. It makes sense, www is old and architecture centric, http://wigitize.com is less typing and pretty.

On that note, make sure that you always write pretty URL’s by practice. This means thinking them through extra carefully, because changing URL’s is painful after going live.

Wigitize.com was also chosen with SEO in mind. The word is a mis-spelling of the term widgetize and yields 105 Google results (at this moment). Additionally, it is a verb, which lubricates the prettiness of the URLs :]

Near future improvements:

• Making a list of ‘last wigitized sites’ and ‘most wigitized sites’, those pages can be accessed by the search spiders and thus associating external content with Wigitize.com. I think this might improve search rankings.
• Providing a sitemap.xml, would that help?
• Focus on the viral aspects of these widgets. For example a FeedB urner style button for on popular blogs.

Let’s throw it out there!

While writing this article – which took quite some time. Wigitize.com is already running and doing it’s job. However, I’m sure there are still some kinks to work out which I will do over the past coming days (eg IE6 support, SEO/viral tasks).

Also, I didn’t discuss anything about an important aspect: How to make revenue with Wigitize.com? I’m not sure yet, but since I’m solving a problem for myself, I’m sure others out there had it. Besides, the costs are extremely low at this point so I will worry about monetizing later. Although I would like to hear YOUR thoughts about it!

I realize that this is a geeky project and I must say it’s quite different than the web apps I normally work on. It was fun for me however to write down my thought process, especially on the non-tech parts of building which I find increasingly interesting.