a blog by pud

How To Cure Poison Oak

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:31:00 -0500

I had really bad poison oak a few months ago. I searched high and low for answers and tried lots of solutions.

Here’s how to cure it — or at least tolerate it til it goes away, which takes 2 weeks or so.

First: Stop wearing the same pants, change your sheets and towels, etc. If you think you still have the oils on your body, wash with Tecnu (over-the-counter poison ivy oil remover, available at drug stores). You can also wash your clothes in this stuff.

Second thing: Go to your doctor and get prescription steroid pills and cream. It’s the only thing that works, period (all the homeopathic and OTC stuff is bunk).

Bonus: Expose the area to SCALDING hot water (in the shower) or a hot hair dryer. For the first 10 seconds you’ll have a feeling of intense itching, followed by an almost-orgasmic feeling of relief. The itching will mostly stop for a few hours. Repeat as necessary. This feeling is one of the things I miss from having poison oak, oddly.

If you’re reading this and have poison oak or poison ivy, good luck. I remember being just shy of suicidal when I had it. It may get worse (and appear on more body areas) before it gets better.

Why Google's "Search, plus your World" Is Doing It Wrong

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:53:00 -0500

Google search recently integrated Google+ such that that your Google+ profile always shows up as the #1 result when someone Google’s your name.

In theory it makes sense. Users now have a way to control their search results. And Google+ wins because those people are encouraged to actually use G+ now.

In practice, it’s awkward.

As Google hoped, the new G+ integration made me want to update my G+ profile today. My most recent G+ status update, “Hello,” was posted 2 months ago.

Today I Tweeted and Facebooked something about my recent mountain biking trip, and the resulting poison oak. Lots of nice replies from people on T & F. Figured I’d post the same thing on G+.

Wait!

Do I really want a story about mountain biking injuries being the #1 result when people Google me?

“Hey, I’m gonna look up this guy Philip Kaplan and learn more about him. Let’s see… oh interesting he has poison oak.”

No.

I don’t mind if any of my profile pages from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or even G+ show up first. But I’d rather not have any single status update from these services appear as my #1 most crowning achievement when people Google me.

Instead, I’m encouraged to make a single G+ status update like, “Hi. I’m Philip. I’m 36 and and entrepreneur. I live in San Francisco, CA. I went to Syracuse University, and majored in…… [rest of bio]”

And then leave it that way forever.

Product Placement In Music Videos

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:44:00 -0400

Back in the days of MTV, all logos and brand names were blurred out of music videos. MTV did this to stop advertisers from being able to get on the air without directly paying MTV.

Today, music videos are mostly shown on YouTube, and not MTV. And YouTube has no such restrictions.

So if you’re an artist like Avril Lavigne (I’m a fan… guilty pleasure), with a good track record of getting lots of views, you’ll do well.

Sony must have paid a lot to be in her latest video, “What The Hell,” (embedded at the end of this blog post) with 3 product placements. I especially love the random hand at 3:18 that pops up holding some sort of Sony camera (or phone) type thing.

There are also several shots of Avril promoting her own brand of perfume and clothing.

I don’t think this is bad. Just thought it was fun/funny.

Video embedded below (direct link):

Copy (as in, words)

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:46:00 -0400

Lots of people take good copy for granted. Just like everyone thinks they can sing and do photography, everyone also thinks they can write. But there’s a difference between the way that you sing, and the way someone like Celine Dion sings. Same too, with copy.

Here’s a great slideshow where a professional copy writer critiques someone else’s website and gives great suggestions. I found it inspirational.

The author of that slideshow just launched CopyHackers (which I just read about on Hacker News). I think they write books about copy? (ironically, it’s not immediately obvious what they do from looking at their website.)

Did You Get The Last Email I Sent You?

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 20:32:00 -0400

People often ask, “did you get my last email?”

What a fun, paradoxical question.

I don’t know if I saw the last email you sent me. And I have no way of knowing.

I may have received email from you in the past. But I have no way of knowing if the last email I saw from you, is the last email you sent me.

Right?

IIS 7 SSL Certificates In Amazon ELB

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:50:00 -0400

Trying to load your SSL certificates into Amazon Elastic Load Balancer and getting this error? ”Error: Invalid Public Key Certificate”

Here’s how to get them working, if you use Microsoft Windows IIS.

First, go to the AWS Console and create a new load balancer.

Then add “SSL” to the list of protocols. You can come up with a cool name for your load balancer, or just keep the default, “MyLoadBalancer.”

Now Amazon asks for your private and public keys. This is the stuff that was driving me batty. Hopefully this tutorial saves you some time.

Okay, keep this AWS Console window open in the background — we’ll come back to it later, after we export the public and private keys from WIndows.

First, go to your Windows Certificate console. If you don’t know how to do that, instructions are here.

Then find your SSL certificate.

Right click on your certificate -> All Tasks -> Export…

You’re going to need both the PRIVATE key as well as the PUBLIC key. So you’re going to have to go through this wizard twice. Just select one of these radio buttons, then go with the defaults (next… -> next… -> next…) until you end up with 2 files (1 file for public, 1 file for private)

Now you need to convert those files (your public and private keys) into a format that Amazon likes (“Standard PEM”). To do that, visit the SSL Converter at https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-converter.html

Now you have two converted files. Just open them up in a text editor (rename them with a .txt extension if that’s easier for you), and copy and paste the contents into the form back in the AWS Console.

Then just go with Amazon’s defaults.

Hopefully, Amazon accepted your certificates.

Tip: If you got your SSL certificate from GoDaddy (and maybe this affects other certificate authorities too), they’ll give you a file called “gd_bundle.crt”. Paste the contents of that file into ELB’s “Certificate Chain” box or Safari on the iPhone will give you an error along the lines of “Cannot Verify Identity.”

Fucking Sue Me

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:33:02 -0400

So,

It was 1998 and the dot-com boom was in full effect. I was making websites as a 22 year old freelance programmer in NYC. I charged my first client $1,400. My second client paid $5,400. The next paid $24,000. I remember the exact amounts — they were the largest checks I’d seen up til that point.

Then I wrote a proposal for $340,000 to help an online grocery store with their website. I had 5 full time engineers at that point (all working from my apartment) but it was still a ton of dough. The client approved, but wanted me to sign a contract — everything had been handshakes up til then.

No prob. Sent the contract to my lawyer. She marked it up, sent it to the client. Then the client marked it up and sent it back to my lawyer. And so on, back and forth for almost a month. I was inexperienced and believed that this is just how business was done.

Annoyed by my lawyering, the client eventually gave up and hired someone else.

Dang.

But lucky enough, another big company came knocking. A fortune 500 company needed an e-commerce site. I wrote a $400,000 proposal (ahh, the boom days…). The client okay’d it and gave me a contract to sign.

This time, instead of sending it to my lawyer, I sent it to my Dad — a lifelong entrepreneur.

“Just sign it,” he said, calmly.

“But it has all kinds of crazy stuff in it!” I replied. “It says I’m personally liable if anything goes wrong! It says I owe them money if it’s late!” and so on.

“Just sign it,” he said.

“But what if something happens?? What if the site crashes? What if I’m late? What if..??”

“Do you think any of that stuff is going to happen?” he asked.

“Probably not. But what if it does?”

“Then you know what you do?” he said. “Tell them, ‘fucking sue me.’”

He was right. I got the job, they paid, things went well, nobody got sued.

Then there was the time I wanted to hire my first full time employee. I was apprehensive to do it because I only had enough money to pay him for 2 months, unless I got another client fast.

“Worry about that in 2 months,” Dad said.

He worked for me for several years.

This lesson in total disregard for risk served me well. They say entrepreneurs are risk takers. I think of myself as too lazy and irresponsible to fully understand the risk.

It works for me.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here.

Why Must You Laugh At My Back End

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 06:05:00 -0400

Disclaimer

I’m not a trained engineer or sys admin. Never even finished a book on it. But I’ve launched (and sold) a few things that have become popular (ref: here and here), so sometimes people ask me about my back end. Which ends up in blank stares, or worse.

OS:

Windows Server 2008. As for why not linux, I prefer working in a GUI and I’m pretty fast with it. I also read recently that Windows is now oddly more secure than its competitors. But I’ve personally never tried to hack either one (through the OS, at least) so I wouldn’t know. As for price, EC2 charges only slightly more for Windows than Linux - it’s roughly $20/month vs $15/month for a micro instance. Or 16-cents a day extra to use Windows.

Web Server

IIS 7. It does a lotta stuff. SSL not a problem. Htaccess not a problem (via “URL Rewrite”) free extension. Virtual websites not a problem. Extensibility not a problem (there are ISAPI plugins for everything). It even has a thing that thwarts DoS (though not DDoS) by denying floody IP addresses.

Language

CFML. I really like programming in CFML (a programming language, “ColdFusion Markup Language,” as opposed to ColdFusion, a commercial CFML interpreter made by Adobe). I know it’s not “cool” like Node.js or Clojure or even RoR. It’s got an old vibe. Not just because it was the first made-for-web programming language (tho it’s modern & updated frequently), but because whenever I meet other CFML coders, they’re always old dudes.

You can write CFML in tags like or you can write it in script with semicolons like Javascript. You can even write Java. ColdFusion runs in any JVM, and all Java code & extensions work great. But 99% of my stuff is CFML. CFML can spit out JSON if you want, and even contains Javascript libraries for doing AJAX, form validation, and other neat tricks — but I use Jquery for that nowadays. Some people cite Adobe’s high price tag (it’s insanely expensive, like over $1k/server), but there are free, open-source alternatives such as Railo or BlueDragon. I’ll probably use Railo for my next project.

Community

The CFML community seems particularly close-knit. Just Google any problem you’re having and you’ll find an answer quickly, or a nerdy (old) guy who can answer it for you in like 5 seconds.

Framework

There are a million (okay, literally over 10) popular frameworks for CFML. I don’t use em (they slow me down, and I think my code is relatively clean and encapsulated) but if you like frameworks, here ya go.

Database

Xeround.com. Cheap and “infinitely” scalable. Truly elastic — there’s no concept of “instances” — it just grows and grow with you. As long as Xeround sticks around and does what they say they can do, I’ll never have to worry about scaling my database (unless I get huge, like Twitter size, at which I will need to figure something else out).

Web Hosting and load balancing

Amazon EC2. Micro instances. First, I setup a perfectly-configured application server. Then I generate an AMI for it. Then I usually launch 5 cloned servers and connect them all with Elastic Load Balancing. Huge day? Just launch 50 new servers, easy as clicking a button, then shut em down after the spike. And remember, each server is only $20/mo. And one of these days I’ll figure out Amazon Auto-Scaling, which does this all automatically.

I used to use large and xlarge instances, but recently decided that, with micros, I can get the same performance for the same (or less) money, but with about 5x the redundancy. So if one server fails, it’s less of a big deal because there are others.

And eventually this’ll all go “elastic,” so that a single “instance” can scale infinitely. I’m looking forward to that. Is that sorta what Heroku and Google App Engine do? Or do you still need instances?

Syncing

My cloned servers all sync with Dropbox. I couldn’t find any examples of anyone else doing it this way. But Dropbox is great. If I change a file on any server, it gets sync’d to all the other servers within seconds. Advantage over Rsync: Dropbox keeps an offsite backup of the previous versions of each file. So if you’re like “oh fuck,” no worries — Dropbox has the old version.

Backups (other than aforementioned Dropbox)

JungleDisk. It runs automatically every night and sends me an email with details so I know it worked. Sends backups to either an S3 bucket, or a Rackspace cloud bucket (or whatever they call them).

That’s it. My apps run themselves and are scalable.

Windows, CFML, Dropbox, Xeround, JungleDisk, Elastic Load Balancing… it’s like the weirdest kids in school decided to dance.

If you’re reading this, chances are you were a weird kid too. And you know what it’s like to feel a little left out. And even though you want to be cool, you kinda like that you’re not.

Thanks for reading.

Pud (@pud)

Getting Users For Your New Startup

Fri, 06 May 2011 05:09:00 -0400

The most frequently asked question I get from new entrepreneurs is, “How do I get users?”

Here’s most of what I know.

Credentials (disclaimer: I feel like a douche writing these, but in case you landed here & were wondering who this guy is…really, I’m just trying to help)

I made a blog with 5 million readers, an ad exchange that reaches more people than Facebook, a book that was #12 of Amazon, and a bunch of other weird shit that pays the bills and is popular. I’m an angel investor & advisor to dozens of companies and one university. On several magazine covers, and this (note view count — and several comments from people wishing their “dad was as cool” as me, sigh, #35butfeel14).

Preface

The best sites seem to take off magically by themselves. Truth is, every site needs a little kickstart to get to its first 10,000 to 100,000 users. Consider this a list of kickstarters. But keep in mind the saying, “nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing.” You have been warned.

Start controversy

In April, 2000, I launched Fuckedcompany.com — a blog that chronicled the dot-com bust. It had 5 million readers per month, a lot of revenue, and I eventually sold it.

Marketing started when I joined a large online community of web developers, not unlike Hacker News. ”Hey, look at this asshole, what a jerk,” I wrote, with a link to my own site. This started a heated debate about the site. It seemed like hundreds were participating — much love, some hate. I gracefully ducked out of the conversation & watched 24,000 new registered users join that week. There’s a line between contributing and spamming — I think what I did was okay.

With Blippy.com, we also chose to go the controversial route. Instead of telling people “this is a good site to tell friends the restaurants you’re going to” (which Blippy can do), we went with a more controversial message along the lines of “broadcast your credit card statements.” This resulted in a huge amount of PR and attention (more on that in the “press” section, below).

Keep in mind that your product doesn’t have to be inherently controversial to stir controversy. If you’re an electronica music artist, hang out with a folk music crowd. They’ll hate you, which is good. If there’s one new user for every 10 haters, I’ll take it.

Almost anything can be controversial. If there’s nothing that can be controversial about your product, it might be boring.

Viral tricks

Address book importers, auto tweets, “send this to 5 people and get special access,” etc. I’ve never been a huge fan of this kinda thing but it’s popular.

One of my sites, Fast140 sends a tweet the first time you use it (with disclosure that it’s gonna do that). Another one of my sites, Mobog.com, has an address book importer that lets you invite everyone you know to join. Address book importers stopped being effective around 2007, I should actually just get rid of it.

If you’re building Facebook apps or something using Facebook Connect or Twitter, these kinds of tricks can still be effective, though the window is closing on that.

Affiliate programs

Pay people a commission to send you users. This only works, obviously, if you’re running a pay site.

One of my sites, HitMeLater.com, has an affiliate program. It works a’ight. Running a successful affiliate program is more work than it seems. You can’t just put up an affiliate link & wait. Instead, you need to find affiliates, nurture them, run specials & promotions. The best way to get an idea of how a well-run affiliate program looks, is to join one like this or this.

It’s possible to find an affiliate manager who will work for you for commission only.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The great thing about search engines is that you don’t have to do anything — if you have a good service or good content, Google will generally make sure people find it.

SEO tweaks can increase these numbers. But in the early days, SEO is generally a bad way to spend your time; gains will likely be insignificant.

My free email newsletter service, TinyLetter, is on the first page of Google search results for “free email newsletter” (see what I did there?). That generates a fair amount of business. All I had to do was give the site a good tag & Google did the rest. Press Press is one of the best ways to get users. The easiest way to get an article written about you is to tell a writer about a good story idea you have. Don’t write a press release. Don’t hire a PR firm. Instead, think of a compelling story you would like to read. Pick a writer who you like, and who you think might want to write about it. Tell them your story idea in 2-3 sentences. Contact them via email. If you don’t know their email address, guess. Also ping them on Twitter and Facebook. If the writer doesn’t respond, try a different one. But only one at a time — they won’t like you if you give the same story to their competitor. Also, don’t just pitch stories about your company. Ingratiate yourself with writers by selflessly giving them scoops & ideas for stories unrelated to you. Karma. Bad story idea: “I just launched a thing and you should write about it.” Good story idea: “Facebook fucked something up. Oh and it happens to relate to my thing.” Good story idea: “I just raised $20 million to launch a thing.” Good story idea: “My competitor raised $20 million, yet my thing is better.” Good story idea: “My competitor’s thing is unsafe and could possibly kill you.” Good story idea: “I’m not sure if my thing is legal.” Celebrity endorsement Ask someone famous (real-famous or internet-famous) to use your site. Have them tweet about it or make a YouTube video. Get in touch with them through their manager, PR firm, lawyer (a little Googling goes a long way), Facebook, Twitter, MySpace page (still effective), whois info, and so on. Consider offering them some combination of nothing, money, and/or equity. “Biz Dev” Get a bigger company to promote you. At Blippy, we got Sephora to <a href="http://www.screenmediadaily.com/news-sephora-blippy-social-shopping-community-product-reviews-retail-trends-share-recommendations-001400693.shtml">promote</a> us on their Facebook page to 1M+ fans for free, because we did a special Sephora thing on our site. BillShrink got T-Mobile to <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/billshrink-gets-major-marketing-love-from-t-mobile-heres-why/">say</a> “if you don’t believe that we’re the cheapest, go check BillShrink.com, an independent third party.” Think of something cool you’d like to do with a bigger company and contact someone who works there on LinkedIn, or Facebook via <a href="http://branchout.com/">BranchOut</a>, which is actually better and free-er for this (disclaimer: I’m an investor in BranchOut). Offline events Throwing parties is grueling, but has helped launch a small number of companies successfully. Offline events work best when your product has strong ties to the real world. Evite got started by throwing big parties around the country, with the catch that you had to RSVP using Evite. Yelp did something similar. The majority of launch parties (and SXSW events) are not effective for getting new users. Get creative <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-process-involved-in-launching-a-start-up-at-SXSW">Read about</a> Twitter’s famous flat panel displays at SXSW. I know a company that promoted a game called “Shrooms” by passing out bags of (innocuous) mushrooms at a gamer conference, almost getting arrested. Richard Branson drove a tank through Times Square to promote Virgin Cola in front of a giant Coke billboard (actually not sure if that worked). Hugh Hefner bought a mansion in LA and invited celebrities to hang out with naked people. Groupon does a boatload of ROI-positive online advertising (okay, not that creative but it works). YouTube let you embed semi-illegal content into MySpace pages. Facebook & Digg made widgets that got thousands of sites pointing back to them. Conclusion I hope you enjoyed this list of ways to promote your website. One final tip: As entrepreneurs, we obsess over our products. Try to forget about your product for a couple of weeks, and instead obsess over how to promote it. Thanks for reading. - pud </article> </main></body></html>