Other things to consider are.. Reserve anything with the name of your app included (e.g. twitter don’t allow users to create urls that include “twitter”). Reserve as many urls for authentication methods as possible, I only included a couple here, oauth and openid.

Here’s a published google doc, and a csv file, text, and xls.

As of tomorrow I’ll be focusing the weekly coworking meet on local startups, making a time for them to get together and work in the same space, meet each other, maybe collaborate, or help each other out.

So if you’re a startup, or you’ve got something you want to try and build, come along and say hi.

We meet upstairs at Cafe Delice (map) at 10am every Friday and tend to go on most of the day (but starting early is best!). We’re a small but very welcoming group, with varying levels of experience, and are all at different stages in the lives of our projects.

Signup on Upcoming.org.

There’s also a mailing list for chat between meets, once you’ve been along you’ll get an invite to join that too :)

1. Get Spotify
2. Create a playlist to share
3. Make sure your title includes the #mondayMix hashtag and your Twitter @username
4. Right-click on the playlist and select “Copy HTTP Link” (this is the bit you’re going to share)
5. Share it on Twitter, say something like “check out my #mondayMix, hope it gets you all going! http://is.gd/1Kefj”
6. The best bit – find other people’s #mondayMix’s by searching on Twitter

Here’s my playlist, it’s optimistically summer themed!

We were the first URL shortener to *not* create random strings for short URLS, instead allowing the user to create something memorable. This is good for a lot of reasons, something I’ll cover in another post.

They look like this http://icanhaz.com/josh instead of this http://tinyurl.com/yvarg9 (both resolve to my blog).

We’ve had 30,000 URLS created, and together they’ve been clicked on nearly 2,000,000 times.

So because things have been going great, and you’ve been poking us on every social network there is about features you’d like to see, we spent some time adding the most useful stuff…

User Accounts

Now you can save your URLS on your account. This lets you get some stats and edit the redirect in the future.

An API (vers.0.1)

Dave built the API to compliment the user accounts, for now it’s limited but does the core things you’ll need, here’s the docs. The simplest thing this lets us do is to allow third party apps to let their users create URLs on I CAN HAZ dot COM in their user accounts. This is obviously a good thing!

(app developers: If you’re building an app that allows people to create short URLs using I CAN HAZ dot COM, you can let users give you their API key rather than their passwords.. help us keep our users secure by not encouraging them to share their login details!)

A Shorter URL

We registered a shorter URL, icnhz.com, which can be used in place of icanhaz.com in any url you’ve created. And of course used as the URL in URLs created using the API.

Fan Wiki

We also started a fan wiki, which I guess I’m announcing here :) If you’ve done something with the API, or just something cool with I CAN HAZ dot COM, feel free to add it there. Remy has done a great bookmarklet, I’m sure it’ll be up there soon!

Reliability..

.. is something we need to work on. This is already being highlighted as an issue for all URL shortening services, and is something we’d like do make sure doesn’t become an issue for us. Essentially, if we’re down for any reason then all the URLs that redirect through us won’t work, or resolve anywhere. There is a *lot* of discussion about how to limit this as an issue, but something we can do right away is make our platform more robust, and move onto better servers.

Sponsorship

To help us get to a more robust state we’re going to start displaying sponsors on the homepage. This will be for a limited period, and a one-time-only opportunity! We’d love to promote other small projects and startups rather than anything else. If you’d like to get involved and become a sponsor, send me your name and email address in the form below and I’ll get back to you (rss readers, click here). We’ll be using Pistach.io to do this, keeping it all in the family :)

(there’s a couple of easter eggs too, see if you can find them!)

This weeks new section is Networks! There are a lot of groups that get together in Brighton and Sussex, many of them have sprung up in the last year. Many of which I hadn’t even heard of! Now I (and you) can keep track of it all.

We’re aiming to add a new section or feature every week for the first 6 or 7 weeks, subscribe to the minifeed to get a first peek.

All feedback would be awesome, we want the site to serve the community, so if you have any suggestions or there are things we missed, let us know..

And *big* thanks to all the people from the community who have helped us with content and ideas :)

update: we were just outed by Andy on the BNM, this might change the feature schedule!

My friend Adam pointed me at this web based bug tracker:
http://www.tailshq.com/

And Ryan of DropSend is working on his new app, a marketing tool for newsletter owners:
http://www.heyamigo.net/

I’d sign up for both if you’re in the business of making or using webapps…

A couple of web widget.. erm, things.. have appeared. (are they webapps?). They essentially let you build, share and sell, small plugins (although i’m sure they’d hate me calling them that!) to sit on people’s websites..

WidgetBox, the web widget marketplace (placing itself as the big boy on the block)
http://www.widgetbox.com/

And then Jay has this going on:
http://www.snipperoo.com

Then sign up for mine too :)

This is my first app, completely independently. being built by myself and Nick.
http://www.pingbase.com/

update://

The day after i posted this i got an Odeo voicemail from Dan, the Tails developer…

But what if you’re selling Smart cars?

PingBase is a more efficient, modern and affordable car. A car designed for not only the driver but it’s environment and the cohabitants of that environment.

All these monitoring services certainly do their job, although I’ve not used them all, so what’s wrong with them?

1. The Price
   They are prohibitively expensive. usually charging around $10/month per domain or URL you want to monitor.
2. The Free Trial
   You might get a month for free or maybe longer but for a much lower level of service.
3. Access to data
   Few provide an API or even RSS, although around half offer multiple person notification lists of some sort.
4. They’re not designed for everyone
   Most are designed for web developers or large corporations, they ignore the needs of the majority of websites and their owners.

I think that last point may be the most important. Everybody and their fathers brothers have a website and they all need to know the uptime, or downtime of their sites. A persons blog is a very important thing. Some livelihoods are made from blogs as well as reputations built from them.

If your blog is down, you need to know! But you shouldn’t have to pay more than it costs you to have the website for that knowledge.

Enter PingBase, a modern website monitor built for you, your friends, your company or your rabbit.

If you want to monitor your blog, PingBase will do that, for free, forever. If you want more, then you can upgrade to the first level which will allow you to monitor 10 URLs for $15/month with the added bonus of receiving SMS (text messages) as well as email when your site goes down.

There is an FAQ that should answer more of your questions, and you can sign up to know when it’s launched from any page on the site.

I’m really excited to get this up and running, I’ve been looking forward to announcing it.. I know it’ll be a useful addition to many peoples online lives.

I realised quite early on what we were doing providing free wifi in brighton. people in brighton got very used to it and we started getting phone calls from them when they were out of town, “why isn’t it free? i thought it free in bars and cafes?”…

Andy’s right people have to come expect it for free.

The way we sold it to venues in brighton was to convince them that it was a value add to their customers. they give away free wifi, and they sell more coffee. coffee that the person was gonna buy anyway somewhere else. this way the customer isn’t spending any more but they chose your venue instead.

So yeah, of course the same rule could apply to airlines, just as hotels realised about 2 years ago (not many though).

Now, expand that. why don’t the councils get in on the act. give it away to the public as effectively a value add for paying your taxes. Of course some are. But not on a proper scale and not really thinking through all the implications.

Ubiquitous free wifi effects local business, your own local network, the local and national telcos, the list goes on. Most councils don’t want to become ISPs. They are also under pressure not to screw over people like BT by undercutting them.

Free Wifi is still quite a way off. but not for technical reason, more for political or simply not understanding the marketplace properly. Mostly people don’t see it as a marketplace.

So as a result of realising that actually being 26 isn’t so bad, i’ve decided to make sure that i feel the same about being 30 when i get there.

Firstly I’ve started taking more photos, something i used to do a lot of six or seven years ago. So I bought a new camera and started using my neglected Flickr account. So far so good, I’ve got almost a hundred photos up and I’ve found a bunch of people I know also using Flickr. I’ve encouraged a bunch of people to start using Flickr too!

Next I started finishing a document I started in 2005 about New Media’s place in developing countres. There is a need to organise the efforts of all the individuals and organisations working in this area, to minimse overlap and to encourage technical compatiblity. Of course there is also a great opportunity for business development too, but this has to be seen as a long term goal, the short term goal being to develop the businesses and infrastructure and to educate people in these countries about all the great stuff new media can do for themselves and their communities.

As a result of this document being published i hope to form a group of influential new media and communications experts to lobby and work with all the major players. Many I’ve shared this idea with have expressed great interest and are committing their personal time to help.

Some of my personal projects have fallen to the side due to my current full time job at Comic Relief. But there are 3 projects that are almost ready for the prime time, and i’m quite excited about them. One is a community site with a wiki and mailing list centered around the co-operative movement. Another is a web app that I’ve been working on with a friend. We’ve both been very busy and work’s been slow on it, but it’s an idea that just needs to exist, so we’re making it! Thirdly is BrightonWiFi, a site that basically shows you where you can find WiFi in Brighton. It’s a mashup of Google Maps and WordPress. As a result of this project (only about 15 hours work) i’m going to release the WordPress theme back to the web, I think it’s a great use of the tech, it allows non-nerds to use Google Maps in an accessible way. Check it out…

So being 26 might turn out to be ok, I’m being more productive, I’m working on getting my sleeping patterns sorted, and I’m finally producing some of the projects I’ve talked about for years. Now if only I could make some spare time for relaxing and seeing the outside world more…

Trouble and Process

As well as finding the people or companies to work with, these are the some of the major required steps:

• Think of a domain name
• Register the domain name
• Understand the desired results from the site
• Work out what scale and functionality is needed from the host and server
• Build the site, upload the site, test the site, market the site
• Make the site appear in search engines (SEO)
• Keep the site updated
• Setup mailboxes or forwarding

Most people would not realise there can be so many steps, and this could be quite a daunting list of things to do!

The types of small businesses and individuals that I’ve dealt with over the last 10 years have simple needs, and don’t want to understand all the things they have to do.

One of things that I’ve found that makes life easier for people is to have a single point of contact for every aspect of setting up a website. With the usual exception of the designer or programmer. It can be complicated to communicate between host, registrar and designer without knowing the terminology. It’s easy to be given the run-around, or in extreme cases be taken advantage of. But the main thing is that the buck is often passed when something goes wrong. Obviously this is just frustrating for people that are engaged in something they don’t have experience with.

The Solutions

Most sites I’ve hosted, share some common technical specifications and business objectives:

• They have their own domain name, usually a .com or .co.uk
• All email needs to come to only one or two people, but there will often be several email addresses in use
• Because budgets are low, updates should be possible without a designer, so a simple method for this should be provided
• Bandwidth and disk space doesn’t need to be huge
• Ecommerce is not needed or wanted, usually the site is used simply for communication to customers
• One bill for all services

My Approach

• I don’t own my own server
• I don’t host email (usually advising to get a webmail account such as GMail)
• I don’t support Cold Fusion, ASP, FrontPage, .Net or Java. In fact I only support PHP/SQL
• I handle domain registration, site setup, and any questions personally

Being only one person i have chosen not to have my own servers or even to rent my own server, instead letting someone else deal with that. I don’t allow or support some technologies or any email boxes because I’m keeping things simple.

So by keeping my life simple and cheap, I am also keeping other peoples life simple and cheap. My model is many-cheap-simple rather than few-expensive-complicated. It’s easier to say too.

The Tech

I buy shared, managed hosting from three different hosts, two in America, one in the UK.

The servers are all currently Dual Intel P4, with 1Gb Memory and enough fast storage for expansion. No server is used by more than 10 people. Backups are done nightly. I monitor traffic, discs, and performance and any issues with the hosts are dealt with by me.

A Plesk control panel is available for people who want to manage their own databases or email forwarding.

Conclusion

As well as providing a simple hosting package, I’m the person that takes the calls and emails when people have a question.

People don’t want loads of stuff they will never need, they don’t want to spend their own time having to organise something they don’t understand. They want VFM, Value For Money. A bill that includes everything and doesn’t change. And they need someone helping them that understands what they want.

When we’re talking about amounts of money that are small, you can’t give somebody the earth, but you can give them what they need.

So that’s my model, what’s yours?