Web Things Considered

I really enjoyed last year’s Webvisions with some interesting talks by Stewart Butterfield, BJ Fogg, Molly, Thomas Vander Wal and more. It looks like this year’s is rounding into form as well with Dan Cederholm, one of my favorite designers, coming to town.

In the local reviews race, it looks like Zipingo is trailing badly. Yelp, Insider Pages, and Judy’s book look to be going strong except for a recent drop-off for Judy’s book.

I’m not exactly sure how I missed Trixie Tracker’s launch last month, but the great thing about this blog and PDX Web Innovators is that I’m making some great connections with people here in Portland and this new network is a great place to learn about new things.

Anyway, I mention Trixie Tracker, because I’ve been following Family 2.0 applications like Trixie Tracker, Minti, Amiglia, and Families.com. I’ve had similar ideas in these areas, so it’s been interesting seeing them pop up.

Trixe Tracker attemtps to solve a piece of what I thought was missing in the existing apps; baby tools (tracking, sharing). You probably figured I’m big into tracking, being that’s what NetworthIQ is all about. Trixie Tracker doesn’t take care of it all though, I think there’s still some good opportunities in this area. But, Trixie Tracker appears to be a very useful app focused in on babies eating, sleeping, and you know what else schedules. The graphs and charts look very cool. I think it’s a bit too spendy (personally, I’d consider say a $20 annual subscription), but I respect them for charging off the bat for it. I’ve come to the conclusion (excuse me for stating the obvious) that if you’re going to bootstrap, charging is the best way to go. You may get away with a freemium business model, which is where we’re heading with NetworthIQ, but a pure ad-based revenue model will be a tough climb (NetworthIQ was never intended to be a pure ad-based model, but that’s all we have at the moment).

I enjoyed the launch post, this hits a bit close to home:

“It’s really hard to do anything else when you’re taking care of a baby/child/toddler”

and

“I could reliably count on writing about 3 or 4 lines of code a week.”

I know the feeling well, as idiot me managed to wait until we had a baby to get inspired enough to start building something. The absolute worst. timing. ever.

They even use a pretty similar “Track. Share. ….” slogan I coined for NetworthIQ. Just a coincidence? Who knows, I’m either flattered or know there’s somebody who thinks like I do. Either way is fine with me.

Update

Missed Cingo and MyHomePoint the first time around. Both are trying to provide tools to keep families organized. I’ll have to check these out a little more. For myself, I might really like them as I’m still trying to nail down a calendar app (even though there’s no shortage of them). But I’d have a hard time convincing my wife to keep it updated.

Update 2

TechCrunch has word about another parenting site in the works, Maya’s Mom.

Update 3

JotSpot has released JotSpot Family Site, which looks to be an easy way to get a family web site going, complete with a calendar, blogs, maps, etc. (via MOMB). They make no mention of ‘Wikis’ which is a smart move as I’d guess that a large percentage of people know what one is.

Update 4

A couple new ones to mention:

• MothersClick - I’ll indulge with a link even though they issued a press release mother’s day weekend when the app isn’t even available yet. I thought that was a bit tacky.
• Ookles - Billed as Flickr+YouTube+Riya for parents. The current intro page is incredibly annoying though. They’ve got a long way to go.

Update 5

Rachel Cook from Minti has started a blog, family2point0, to track these apps. Look there for new stuff.

With the Apple Boot Camp announcement today, I think there are no longer any doubts about what my next laptop will be. Not that I have any idea when that will be. I’ve been wanting to switch to a Mac, but now that I’ll (easily) be able to run Windows for ASP.net development, the decision is made easier. Time to start saving for a PowerBook.

Last night, I wrapped up a series of blog updates that have been a long time coming. As always, things are never as easy as they appear to be, but everything appears to be working fine now. Here’s a rundown:

• Moved web hosting to Dreamhost. I got a screaming deal, like $20 for 12 months of hosting. I’ve got a number of domain names I can play around with, so the unlimited domain capability is great. There was a bit of trouble with the permalinks, but managed to get it fixed pretty quickly. I had been running on a Windows/IIS host. But running PHP apps on a Windows host always seems to be a pain. For my ASP.net experiments, I’ll just use our Fourio account.
• Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2. After Josh mentioned how easy it was, I figured I shouldn’t wait any longer. I had to wait until after moving hosts, as trying to move hosts and upgrade all in one would have been a recipe for frustration. One great thing now is that apparently Wordpress 2 now handles /index.php/ style permalinks and the non /index.php/ style at the same time. This is great since I can use the latter going forward, but still have my old links work (and I don’t have to fight with mod_rewrite).
• Redirected local feed to FeedBurner. For some reason, Bloglines is convinced my feed lives on the site, even though the alternate url and feed links both point to the feedburner feed. Plus, even if you manually enter the feedburner feed in bloglines, it changes it to the local feed here, which just seemed downright odd. I submitted a ticket, but they never fixed this. So, it was time to force the issue by just re-directing the feed. I used Steve Smith’s Wordpress plugin, and eventually got it working. There was confusion around how to get Wordpress to automatically update the .htaccess file, and it took an hour or so of messing around with it to get it working.  Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher firefox extension was a big help in testing this, since the rewrite rule serves the feed to FeedBurner and re-directs everyone else to the FeedFurner feed.  (this is why I’m a big FireFox fan, there are so many useful extensions)
• Added the recent entries listing in the sidebar. Fortunately, this one was easy. I think it’s nice when you can get a quick look at what an author writes about. I’m surprised this isn’t included by default in most wordpress themes/templates.

Hopefully, that’s enough blog work for now. Time to get back to work on more important things.

The next PDX Web Innovators is tomorrow night, April 5. It will be great to catch up with everybody and meet the new faces. See ya then…

Over at MOMB, Saurier has released a couple of new features. The Hot 100 and Top 100:

The Top 100 – a list of the 100 most popular betas (and alphas, and pre-betas, …) based on the number of how many bookmarks there are in del.icio.us; this list will be updated biweekly, and

The Hot 100 – which is a kind of mini-zeitgeist and displays the most popular betas (and alphas, and pre-betas, …) based on how many bookmarks there have been added within the last 7 days; this list will be updated every Sunday.