New stuff on Curious Reef
Kevin Day, November 22nd, 2010I’ve been working a lot on Curious Reef lately, and here are some headlines to report:
- There are new forums for general learning discussions
- The 400th homework assignment was submitted
- A new class has been started: Owning the Internet
Things have been busy for me, so if you want to see what I’m up to, you’re best off checking out Curious Reef.
Curious Reef: Exploratory Social Learning
Kevin Day, April 27th, 2010My learning website, Crunch Course, now has a new name: Curious Reef. It’s the same site, just a new name. Check it out now.
Introduction to Algorithms is starting on May 1st. It’s a popular course at MIT, and all of the content is freely available on Open Course Ware. You will have to buy the book, but it’s a highly recommended one for CS students.
Lots of other great classes too. Here is the full list of all classes.
Sahara: Blank Django Project with User Auth
Kevin Day, April 24th, 2010Sahara is a django project I’ve created that includes basic user auth stuff by default. It doesn’t add too much, but if you know you’re going to be adding user authentication this project can save you an hour or two of repetitive tasks.
You can check it out from BitBucket:
Amazon S3 and CloudFront Response Time
Kevin Day, April 8th, 2010If you’re evaluating whether to serve static files from Amazon S3 or their CDN, CloudFront, here is some data I’ve collected for each of their response times. The graph below is the result of two tests I set up in Binary Canary:
It’s a bit hard to read, but it says that CloudFront’s average response time is 164 ms, and S3’s response time is 338 ms. The test pages I set up were small 60 byte HTML files.
There are technical factors that need to be considered when choosing one or the other, but it looks like you can shave off about 160 ms by choosing CloudFront instead of S3.
i’m not cool enough in the cool way
Kevin Day, February 8th, 2010I don’t know why, but I can’t stop thinking about the redesign on thesixtyone. You have to go there to check it out. Do it, I’ll wait. There’s music, so if you’re at work… turn the volume up.
(waiting…)
It’s just so fun it makes me smile.
It’s made me rethink web design completely. There’s so many cookie cutter websites that have a header w/logo, navigation links, content in one column, sidebar in another, blah blah blah.
There have to be more types of sites that can be gutted and redesigned in a way that’s both useful and fun.
This format also is great a great candidate for Chrome’s “save web page as app ” feature. I now have an application icon that opens up thesixtyone in a chrome browser without a url bar. Just like an application. And it launches about 10x faster than Rhythmbox loads, which is a locally installed music app.
Right now I’m listening to My First Earthquake, “Cool in the Cool Way“:
They even have a link to a free download of the song, which is cool.
I’ve bought a couple other songs from Amazon MP3 from artists who don’t yet have downloads from t61.
Check it out and think about that design next time you put together a website layout. I know I will.
Create a robots.txt if you haven’t yet
Kevin Day, February 5th, 2010I have anecdotal evidence that Google is more likely to crawl and index your site if you have a robots.txt (set to allow googlebot) than if you don’t have any robots.txt file.
For Crunch Course, I’ve taken my time setting up a robots.txt file. Partly because I didn’t think it would help much and partly because it takes a couple steps to do it in Django.
As a result, Google’s cache of Crunch Course is about a month old.
I finally got around to adding a robots.txt yesterday, and I’m now getting a bunch of 404 errors from the googlebot for old links that I’ve since changed the structure of. That’s indicating to me that it checks for a robots.txt frequently, but it is much more likely to actually crawl the site if it has the green light to do so. Of course it could also just be a coincidence, but that doesn’t make for a good blog post.
So there you have it, indisputable evidence from one data point that Google is more likely to crawl your site if you have a robots.txt than if you don’t.
Bulletproof Web Design Now on Crunch Course
Kevin Day, February 2nd, 2010If you want to get serious about HTML and CSS, you have to read Bulletproof Web Design, by Dan Cederholm. It’s a must-read for any web professional.
We’re just starting to go through the book chapter by chapter on Crunch Course. There’s more than 40 of us now, so you’ll have a lot of people to learn with.
Crunch Course Now Live
Kevin Day, January 10th, 2010Crunch Course has been updated and is now live. It’s a community where people can learn together and give feedback.
You don’t have to be an expert in something to create a class. Just be willing to organize some material and gather others.
I’m the creator for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There’s seven people in it so far.
Check it out now. Join or create a class.
[Edit: thanks to reddit, it now has 567 members! Incredible.]
Contact Management Software
Kevin Day, November 22nd, 2009There’s a lot of contact management software out there. I don’t know if it’s just me, but none of them seem to fit the way that I work. Just managing the contacts for my fantasy football website quickly becomes overwhelming.
That’s why I’m developing Launch Pulse, a new kind of contact management application. It’s going to have about 1/20th of the features of all the other programs out there. And yes, I am aware of Highrise by 37Signals. Fewer features than even that. I’m not sure yet if it anyone else will feel the same about it, but I like using it already in it’s alpha state.
How is it different? It won’t sync with your Outlook or Gmail contacts. It isn’t tied to your email system at all. But it is flexible. I think the initial target audience will be people using Customer Development because it requires talking to a lot of people and managing responses and feedback. However, I think it could later be expanded to manage contacts for weddings, job searches, and anything else.
It’s not available yet, but you can leave your email address on the website (no spam) to get notified first when it enters public beta.
How Cloud Computing Can Help Your Business
Kevin Day, July 28th, 2009It took me a while to finally post the slides, but here is my presentation on cloud computing from Ignite Cleveland in May 2009.This presentation is really high-level and non-technical. When I get time, I’ll write a post about some cool log file data mining that I did with Elastic MapReduce to get the data presented here.
