epoweripi's comments

What about ads tagged along with every email? gives me one more reason to not switch over any time soon away from gmail...

if you know SQL well, start with that.

If you think non-relational makes sense for your use case, try it out for smaller, non-critical parts of your system till your understanding grows. you can then decide more confidently

its got the five most beautiful constants in one formula e, pi , i , 1 and 0 and hence i chose it for my handle :)

Great tool. I heart it.

Will be nice to see more languages thrown into the mix. Sometimes you want to get out of english to explore more options. Will definitely use it more.

for a one man army, I think its pretty neat what you've put out as v1.

Some gripes: - Please allow me to see content without a signup. it will help in SEO too.

- You can put up this on your hompage :) http://www.cafecourses.com/courses/3-course-creation-101 and invite people to take up more courses (if #1 is done)

- Related courses will help when looking at a particular course (you already have tags and search, so I think it might be easy to do this)

- Your login form is a bit too intrusive for my taste. Why do I have to check my email to continue using the service? (I dropped out at that point and didnt get to see a course) I didnt mind a signup for testing ur service but checking my email was a blocker. I have 2 emails (both on gmail) and one I dont check at all. Used for experimenting. To see that inbox I have to signoff from my account and log in there, wade through spam to find your mail.

I have always been skeptic of family being a part of the founding team of a startup. Anyone with thoughts/experience on this subject?

Life is hard as it is and if one more gets involved it will completely shake up family life unless ofcourse you are very disciplined and leave work at _work_. During financially tough patches it may impact even more as one house should not depend on such shaky source of income.

I completely agree with the comment above.

I never worked on UI all my life and when I started learning the infamous 3 - html/css/js - it opened up a whole new world.

I think I actually like it now, though it was tough initially. I know I am not stellar at good looking UI, but I can whip out "passable" designs which you wouldn't puke at.

More tips for an all dev team:

- I found the typography defaults that blueprint css has, to be sane and easy to tweak.

- Use good icon sets (psptuts, smashing magazine) - dont reinvent the wheel there.

- Read. Read. Read. - ALA, smashing mag, psdtuts.

- Practise. Practise. Practise. whatever you have read.

- Enjoy doing it. Once you add passion to the mix, life gets easy.

- I would prefer if the logo is to the left than right - esp given that I am not on a wide screen

- A simple intro line would help. It took me 20-30 secs to realize what all those articles were (Can the source be at the top and not bottom) and then tie to the nav.

- The site loads too sloooow. A quick peek into the HTML shows 11 js files being loaded - I think concatenate+minify will help.

- It will be nice if I can customize(pick) my sources.

Firstly - its a neat idea! I liked it.

I gave it a spin and here are my comments: A. Are the similar products really similar products? (Eg. http://www.browseology.com/#v=iZ9o4v&g=/amazon/item/Sony...) (this is a pouch but the similar products are more camera realted and not camera pouches)

B. It will be nice to show the prices along with similar products.

C. I am on a 1024x768 resolution. it overflows on the right It _may_ be better to show the similar products below the prod description or somewhere where it does not overflow out of the screen.

D. On typical shopping sites, I can "browse" more products.. I felt that lacking on your site. i.e there was nothing much to browse after I clicked on a search result. On top of my mind: Can you show the last few suggestions from the best experts on that catergory? It may not be abt the specific camera(product) in question but I would like to surf and see more stuff before buying. Personally, I will follow him/her only after seeing a few suggestions - making it visible may help user engagement on the site.

must have been smoking pot..

I was a backend guy and was faced with the same dilemma. I thankfully listened to the engineer in me (at that time we had our UI work contracted out and was not shaping up well). It took a while to get a good grip of HTML, CSS and JS. They are the tripod on which today's web UI is balanced. In the end I think it was the right decision to learn it all!

Moreover if no core team member knows UI - then either get one or you become one, becoz sooner than later you will repent outsourcing it fully.

Have you tried a local payment gateways that accept international Credit cards?

That might be easier. From my experience in India - most payment gateways suck real bad and at some point you will need to contact them for support.

It surely makes it easier to get support locally than overseas esp. with all the timezn diffs.

Sounds a lot like ruby's hpricot.

Wish I saw this earler - I am already in the middle of a project (screen scraping of course) using hpricot.

Sounds weird, but the only reaason to pick ruby for me was hpricot and not RoR :)

I agree with the comment above. But there is a large rural population in India that 'thinks numbers' in the native language.

May be the article is true only for numbers in the CJK (Chinese-Japense-Korean) languages.

Atleast in the 3 Indian languages I know, numbers are bad in all of them - as bad as it is in English.

I'm just thinking out loud.

Elders a.k.a old people in a normal society are respected because they have been in the 'system' longer, irrespective of their accomplishments. That to me is one form of karma (Age)

Also, ppl who have accomplished a lot irrespective of age are looked up as role models in the society : the form of karma that most social sites capture - contribution.

Similarly bad acts reduce one's karma - independent of the good he has done - Hans Reiser comes to mind.

The total karma could be a function of (age, +ve contribution, -ves). The age can be based on some condition like page views/logins done etc. - passive contribution OR can be unconditional too (today - creation date).

Active contributions can be also be classified into major and minor. Say a particular post generated > 1000+ points. It has to be given importance irrespective of age. Smaller events can be dampened - just like in the real world - no big deal. Same goes for -ves too. murder != pickpocket.

my view, karma = function (age, major +ve, minor +ve, major -ve, minor -ve)

and only the minors need to be decayed.