Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'Web/Tech'

Because Russian Money is Clearly Worth Less, Somehow

December 16th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, The NY Times Valiantly Attempts To Report on Technology, Web/Tech, Work

Link: Russian Facebook Investor Adds Stake in Zynga – NYTimes.com
Digital Sky Technologies, or D.S.T., an investment firm with offices in Moscow and London, is leading a group that is buying a $180 million stake in Zynga, a fast-growing San Francisco company whose online games, like FarmVille, Café World and Mafia Wars, are extremely popular on [...]

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How Not To Describe Your Platform

December 14th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Platforms, Web/Tech, Work

Link: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
We haven’t actually released new APIs; what we have done is that we announced a set of APIs on November 3rd, which was our adaptive suite. Adaptive suite APIs include adaptive payments and adaptive accounts. Then we also announced our authentications and permissions API. What [...]

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Technology Platform Content Strategies

November 30th, 2009 · No Comments · Platforms, Web/Tech, Work

A frequently-overlooked aspect of managing a platform technology product is creating a sensible content plan and executing on it effectively. This is not what you’d call a sexy topic: In a lot of ways, technical content is to a platform as horse manure is to a farm. Very few people get excited about working with [...]

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We All Have Our Sacred Cows, Mr. Benioff

October 17th, 2009 · No Comments · Microsoft, Web/Tech

Link: Microsoft’s Future, Beyond Windows 7 and the PC – NYTimes.com
“[Microsoft is] trapped in their own psychosis that the world has to revolve around Windows on the PC,” says Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce.com, which competes against Microsoft in the business software market. “Until they stop doing that, they will drag their company into [...]

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Plug-In Comment Systems Suck

July 18th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Web/Tech

I do a lot of commenting on other peoples’ blogs, so I pay a lot of attention to the user experience for comments. In the last year or so I’ve been noticing the rise of third-party plug-in comment systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate. I understand the value of these systems (single sign-on, presence, [...]

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Web Developers: Don’t Do This

July 15th, 2009 · No Comments · That's Pretty Messed Up Right There, Web/Tech

I’m not including the URL of this page in case somebody figures out how to turn this into an exploit, but in a way I almost wish somebody would, because after filling out these guys’ survey and getting this horrifically amateurish error message on the final page, my first impulse was to figure out a [...]

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The Associated Press Discovers Tagging

July 12th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, News, Web/Tech

The Associated Press is floating the idea of creating a tag taxonomy that would provide metadata about their news stories to automated crawlers.
Setting aside the fact that this would appear to be an attempt at creating their own niche set of copyright regulations, I’d be surprised if the AP will even be able to pull [...]

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Matt Mullenweg: “Wordpress Themes are GPL, too”

July 2nd, 2009 · 5 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Open Source, Web/Tech

Link: WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too
One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
I don’t see this doing much to calm the shitstorm over commercial Wordpress themes (missives from attorneys seldom do); it definitely draws a line in the sand and clarifies [...]

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Reasons to Not Start a Michael Jackson Moonwalking Flashmob

June 28th, 2009 · No Comments · The Funny, Web/Tech

Link: Rob Manuel: How I started the Jacko flashmob by accident
I have stuff to do, I have a newsletter to write and a meal to cook for my wife. She’d demanded Spaghetti Bolognese and tells me, “you cook the best spag bog in North London.” She delights in calling it “bog”, it’s her reference to [...]

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Comparative Pricing for Virtual Hosting Providers

June 25th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Amazon, Virtualization, Web/Tech, Work

Rackspace just launched a new suite of cloud computing (really virtualized hosting) products. We use a bunch of these products from different companies. We also have a consulting practice dedicated to Amazon’s EC2 offering, so I wanted to take a closer look at how the different offerings stack up in terms of price and features. [...]

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