Back in 2005ish, I worked for the digital agency that built and managed all of Campbells Kitchen's online properties, including the Campbells Kitchen recipe database. It might seem trivial now, but at the time it was at least a few years of its time in terms of using the power of databased driven webapps.
I also personally built the first ever CSS-based layout site for Campbells - it was the marketing site for V8 Juice. Up until that point, everything was still built with tables holding sliced images.
At the same time, the internal computers at Campbells corporate offices ran IE5.5, which had terrible CSS support.
So I literally built two versions of the site - one that would pass muster on their outdated internal computers, and another would drag them into the era of modern layouts and accessibility.
I learned SO MUCH working on those sites.
It looks like the current CK website has been turned into a Wordpress site so I assumed my original work is long gone, but it's very cool to see the legacy of Campbells Kitchen database I worked on kicking as an API.
It's like having a precompiler for everything that does live-rebuild/reload, and creates deployable builds of front end code.
None of the individual things that Hammer does automatically is actually hard, but the fact that I don't have to think about firing up a bunch of watch commands before getting to work is awesome.
I came here to say that your long-form copy is quite good!
One very small change that you can make to get more people INTO the long-form copy is to "lead with the pain" in that paragraph. For example, in the opening paragraph, you open with "Make your AngularJS, EmberJS, or BackboneJS website Crawlable by Google" and then after some picture-painting for the reader, you go in for the kill with "Right now Google can't see your website. You could change that in just a few minutes."
If you swap those two sentences, the entire package becomes a lot more persuasive. There's a boatload of similar opportunities through the rest of the page that should be pretty easy to spot, too.
I bought a copy. It looks nice, but I had to add it to the pile of Stripe "add-ons", app or otherwise, that don't do the ONE thing that I'm constantly trying to figure out manually (and I imagine other SaaS owners would, too):
Based on CURRENT subscriptions, how much money can I expect to collect over the next X days? Stripe tells me about transfers that are scheduled, but I can't look past money that's already been collected without manually pulling down a bunch of subscription data and trying to figure out how much we're going to be paid on each day in the future.
I'd be happy for this to be a command line script - I just haven't managed to figure out the best way to do it!
This is actually an awesome idea -- almost like a forecast of the money you'll earn? Should be simple to do it programmatically. I'm going to add something to our feature list to explore this.
There's a service called Dig my Data that will do some cool predictions and analytics from your Stripe data. Things like churn rate and revenue over time.
I've got a question about the current dashboard: by default, "Today's Volume" seems to include more than today. "This Month's Volume" also seems to include more than this month (the range goes to the end of this month). How are these figures actually calculated?
Edit: you can email me directly, alex@indyhall.org, if you'd like to talk more about this off-forum.
Yeah I was thinking the exact same thing the other day. The churn rate on my app is so low that it would be pretty accurate. I'll try and build a ruby script this weekend.
To start, practice not comparing your insides to other peoples' outsides.
Everyone else is just as afraid as you are. They're just better practiced at not making decisions based on fear.
Decision making & your emotions are always at odds. Learn to make decisions based on reality instead of the way you feel, and you'll start to see the world in a very different light.
Not writing; speaking. Now it's not as if I deliberately employ sesquipedalian graphology for the express purpose of obfuscation. But I've spent a lifetime developing a rich, meaty vocabulary, and I'll be damned if I'm going to talk like a public high school sophomore with a sub-20 ACT score.
I am (or at least was) an experienced assembly programmer. I'm familiar with numerous obscure x86 opcodes that take dozens of machine cycles to execute.
This knowledge comes in handy when reading other peoples' code, but I don't use those instructions myself. Why? Because I know how to achieve the same effect through carefully-scheduled combinations of smaller, faster opcodes.
Exactly the same principle applies in English composition. Use an awkward or unusual word, or a flowery modifier? That's an L1 cache miss. It'll cost a few cycles of wasted execution time, if viewed in terms of the reader's attention span. How about a word that sends the reader to the dictionary? That's an L2 miss. Those can waste thousands of cycles.
You can tolerate a few L1 misses here and there, but those L2 misses that have to be fetched from DRAM will make your "code" run like shit.
One of my team members actually ran out on her lunch break to buy a dictionary. She told me this a month or two after the fact. She needed to look up something I'd written in an e-mail. I apologized for causing her to go to the extra effort--and expense--but she wouldn't accept it. She enjoyed the verbal challenge and the sense that came with it of becoming a more literate person.
Good communication is not always about passing the message in the optimal way.
You may have built up a huge arsenal of words, but it is still important to choose the ones that best get your point across to your intended audience, whether simple or complex. The real challenge is being understood, not using awesome words, and there are plenty of circumstances where the simple words will not be sufficient for what you are trying to do.
One of the neat things about storytelling, in the verbal sense, is that, when done well, it's not just repetition of words. There are inflections, emphasis, physical gesture, posture, facial expressions, and a plethora of other nonverbal factors that go into communicating one's message. I can use words like "lugubrious" or "palliative," and by expression and action, communicate their meanings to my listeners nonverbally.
I don't think using a rich vocabulary is in diametric opposition to being understood. I think you can achieve both ends simultaneously.
You're actually a big sack of chemicals, mostly water. It's actually remarkable that those chemicals manage to form such complex and remarkable things as habits.
Back in 2005ish, I worked for the digital agency that built and managed all of Campbells Kitchen's online properties, including the Campbells Kitchen recipe database. It might seem trivial now, but at the time it was at least a few years of its time in terms of using the power of databased driven webapps.
I also personally built the first ever CSS-based layout site for Campbells - it was the marketing site for V8 Juice. Up until that point, everything was still built with tables holding sliced images.
At the same time, the internal computers at Campbells corporate offices ran IE5.5, which had terrible CSS support.
So I literally built two versions of the site - one that would pass muster on their outdated internal computers, and another would drag them into the era of modern layouts and accessibility.
I learned SO MUCH working on those sites.
It looks like the current CK website has been turned into a Wordpress site so I assumed my original work is long gone, but it's very cool to see the legacy of Campbells Kitchen database I worked on kicking as an API.