I periodically do video tutorials for the various applications that we package at JumpBox. The idea is to not just make the software easier to work with, but also to provide the instruction and motivation to help you get over the hump of doing something productive with it. With the one I did this morning we just hit the two-dozen mark and I felt like it was an appropriate milestone to do a “table of contents” post. In no particular order here are the videos (hover over the graphic to see the title and classification):

We have a nifty new feature that allows you to work alongside the tutorial by launching an instance on demand using only your browser. There’s nothing to download or install and you pay only pennies per hour for the time you use it. To learn more about that service go here. And if you find the videos useful and want to be updated as new ones come out, subscribe to our blog and tell a friend.

I like to support artists as much as the next guy but the fact is when you’re in a startup what little money you earn goes towards essentials, not luxuries. But having bare walls is uninspiring and a few small comforts go a long way. So I came up with a fairly inexpensive method for solving this problem and figured a I might as well document it. My goal was to get a giant 6′x4′ color print of a beach scene on my bedroom wall for as cheaply as possible.  This is my $35, two-hour solution that yields a satisfactory (albeit somewhat ghetto) alternative to buying an enormous single-piece print for hundreds of dollars.

Find the art

So first you’ll need to find a digital photo to use that’s hi-res enough where it won’t look completely pixelated once you blow it up to scale. I used the Flickr search and scanned through hundreds of beach scenes before I found a couple I really liked. Sorting by “Most interesting” made the search quicker (btw, you have to click the “all sizes” link on each photo to find one that has a resolution of 2000 pixels or more). Once you have a pool of candidates then you have the difficult task of boiling it down to the right one.  I decided if this is going to be a photo I’ll be living with every day, it was worth “living with it” as wallpaper on my laptop first to see how I would like it over time. So I installed an app on my Mac called “Desklickr.”  This is  a neat little donationware app that lets you automatically swap your wallpaper periodically and feed it with your Flickr photos that you’ve favored. 

Prep the art

Once you decide on the one you want the next step is to cut it up.  Photoshop is the ideal tool. You’ll probably be printing panels of the scene on 8.5 x 11″ paper so first thing is to size the image appropriately.  Use the Image > Image Size option to scale it, uncheck Resample Image and set the width to the target width of the desired final print (in my case 6″ or 72 in). It will tell you your resolution (your res will be pre-ordained as it’s not resampling the image):Next you need to grid out the scene and slice it up.  Whatever your individual panel size is (again mine was 8.5″x11″) make a selection box that is exactly that size and put it in the upper-left corner.  Make sure that under the View menu both Rulers and Snap are checked. Now all you do is drag the guides from the rulers across to the boundary of your select box. This is a little tedious but as long as you have the snap settings enabled it’s not bad – drag a ruler, then drag the box, drag a new ruler, etc.  Do this until you’ve gridded out the entire scene like so: 

Now you’ll have some scrap on the right and lower edges. Crop the picture until it has only full panes (in my case a 6×6 grid). If you want to make any color adjustments to the image, now is the time.  You can get crafty and use the paint effects if you’re looking to simulate a watercolor or pastel piece of art.  Once you have it looking the way you like, it’s time to slice it up.  My antiquated version of Photoshop has a slicing tool that unfortunately assumes you only ever want to output .gif files for use on a web site.  Gif’s mean unacceptable compression for our situation though so we’ll need to bring the image into Imageready and use the slicing feature there. Once in Imageready simply do Slices > Create Slices from Guides to get this:

Do File > Save Optimized As and choose “Images Only” (as HTML has no place in the real world). That will output a bunch of .jpg’s in a directory. That’s all we need now in order to print it up.

Print it

I printed mine at Kinko’s. If you have the patience you can use their online print tool to send the job but there’s no convenient way to add a bunch of images in one step. I found the bandwidth of burning a disc and delivering it via car to be faster than their online tool for this job. I printed on standard paper and instructed them to cut the white strips off the sides so that there was no bleed.  The entire order of 36 color prints cost under $30. 

Hang it

The last step is to hang this sucker. This is the most time-consuming part of the project and to do it right requires that you lay down a grid on the wall to get it spaced correctly.  If only it was as simple as dragging guides in Photoshop…

For this step you’ll need thumbtacks (ideally 4 for each pane plus some extras for doing the grid) and thread.  Figure out exactly where you want the print to live and make sure it’s right because once it’s up, it ain’t movin’.

The best thing at this point is to tack up one or two of the panes and figure out the spacing you want between them. I found about a 2″ gap between them was right. Stub out a few and then mark the upper-right corner of each with a tack. Snake the thread back and forth making the evenly-spaced horizontal and vertical rows flush with the upper-left edge of each pane. You should get something roughly like this: 

Now it’s just an exercise in pain tolerance as you plug ‘n chug through tacking in the rest of the panes.  WARNING: now is no time for pride, get a thimble (or a bottle cap if that endangers your ego- some kind of thumb protection).  Tacking 150 pins into a wall I’m pretty sure is a twisted form of torture reserved for special criminals –  your thumbs will hate you for it (mine do days later).  After a solid hour of tacking you’ll wind up with an end result something like: 

The one thing I might recommend in retrospect is doing a proof with the entire image shrunk down to a single page in order to test how the colors will translate. This image turned out a bit warmer than it appeared onscreen. Fortunately it’s a sunset so that only enhanced the glow of it but the only true way to know how colors will print is to print out a small scale version first. 

There it is though: a starving entrepreneur’s pre-IPO substitute to expensive wall art. I’ll update this post with the post-IPO version someday ;-) Hopefully this helps a few other startup ramen eaters to fix their empty wall problem and get a much-needed relaxing beach scene on their wall to enjoy.

A solid one-two punch following the JumpBox for SnapLogic release last week, we put out another winner this morning. The JumpBox for Dimdim is now available and gives you a way to instantly deploy an Open Source online meeting system. My favorite feature of this one is the shared document capability – basically it gives you a real-time collaborative whiteboard with your Powerpoint or PDF in the background. You can mark it up with other people and discuss the changes with video/audio chat. Kudos to the people at Dimdim for producing a solid and usable Open Source alternative to the WebEx’s, Gotomeeting’s and Acrobat Connect services of the world.

I did another screencast to run through the basics on how to get started with it. That video is below and you can find a full time-coded table of contents to the video here. Enjoy.

We just released the SnapLogic JumpBox today. This is an Open Source app that allows you to easily integrate data from different sources (web pages, databases, spreadsheets, applications) and transform the data into something useful.

To demonstrate how SnapLogic works I made a screencast that walks you through the process of building an application start to finish. You can watch the video below and get a time-coded table of contents and all the resources I used here. The app we’ll build in that video is one that reaches into a SugarCRM instance, grabs the contacts and then compares them against a list of “enemies of the State” maintained by the Federal government. It’s a quick rudimentary app but gives you a free and quick way to start working towards OFAC compliance without paying exorbitant fees to vendors that sell that service.

While this particular app may not be all that relevant to you, it should get you thinking about how you could use this tool. Ponder for a minute all the mini-challenges you encounter in IT when you have these isolated systems with bits of data that need to be brought together in one place. What could you do with a tool that lets you wrangle records out of a MySQL database, scrape data off a web page, mash it up with data via a public web service and transform it into a web page or an RSS feed or a csv file or an email or… This is an extremely interesting JumpBox and definitely worth playing around with. If you want to tinker, skim the video to get the basics and then launch your own private instance using the orange button on the widget below. And visit SnapLogic.com to learn more about their offering. If you’re really into this stuff, take a look at Yahoo Pipes and compare how the two systems work. Happy tinkering!

Long story short: it’s possible. Not officially supported, but possible. Here’s the blog post that lists the caveats to watch for and here’s a hi-def screencast that shows the setup process from start to finish:

This is significant because right now the main options for deploying JumpBoxes on Intel Macs are two commercial products: Parallels and Fusion. Sun’s VirtualBox product is a cross-platform, open source alternative that now gives Intel Mac users a free deployment option. Please post any questions or comments regarding this topic on the JumpBox Blog post here. And if you like the screencast give us a quick digg to promote this capability.

The problem we’ll solve in the next 18 min: there’s currently no easy way to subscribe to the 200+ local bloggers listed on Read Phoenix (short of visiting each blog and sub’ing the RSS feeds individually). In this tutorial we’ll build an app from start to finish that spiders the list of bloggers on that site, grabs the latest posts from each blog and provides a single, chronologically-sorted master feed of the most recent posts and filtering out auto-generated bookmark posts. Here’s the tutorial:

The assets for this tutorial can be found here:

What kind of useful mashups could you imagine creating with these tools?

Twitter (like Facebook or any social media app) is what you make of it. It can be a massive time sink devolving into useless drivel with your friends (“hey I’m eating a sandwich”) or it can be a way to engage in relevant conversations with strangers. I’ve been using a persistent search via RSS to monitor Twitter dialogue for people having trouble installing various Open Source applications. This allows me to reach out to potential customers on their turf and provide them an introduction to our product by speaking in terms that are relevant to their immediate need. Our greatest challenge at JumpBox is how to spread awareness of our product to people who would never think to look for a virtual appliance to solve their problem. This technique gives me passive recon that allows me to build a bridge from our offering to their specific situation. Here’s how you can do it for your product or service:

First think about the people you’re trying to reach- what is the pain you solve that these people might be complaining about? Are there key phrases or combinations of words that come up in conversation that identify them as qualified prospects for your product? Brainstorm a list of these terms or combination of terms and go to Twitter Search and test your terms:

*NOTE: Total time investment thus far = 1min. Once you determine that this is worth investing some time to connect with these people, you’ll need to create a Twitter account to be able to respond to them. I won’t go into how to do that (it’s extremely simple, visit twitter.com). If you already have a Twitter acct, I do recommend that you create a new one called “YourServiceRadar” or “YourProductRecon” rather than flood your current followers with what will be a bunch of unsolicited chatter about your product. I created one called “JumpBoxEars” for us.

Now this would be useful in itself to conduct searches periodically and respond to people but that makes for a lot of new work. Us nerds are lazy and prefer to do less work whenever possible. Here’s how you turn this active search process into a passive lead generator:

On that search results page there is an orange button in the upper right that will give you an RSS feed of those results in realtime.

Now all you need to do is scan through the newest results as they come to you and respond individually to the people you think you can help. You’re limited to 140 chars so you have to be very concise and couch your recommendation in pithy terms that make your product relevant to their situation. This is no time for marketing speak (there’s no room for it)- use plain english and connect with the person by matching their language (ie. if they say “sucks” you say “bummer”).

From their perspective you’re a good samaritan that was walking down the road, heard their problem and stopped to offer a helpful suggestion. If you’re into the Solution Selling methodology, this is key because they’ve admitted a need and that’s a critical moment where you have the invitation to intercede and solve it. This method of contact is about a kajillion times more effective than cold calling people out of the blue because you’re reaching out to help them with a problem they’ve expressed they have.

But wait, it gets better. There’s an bonus viral benefit to you here. If you truly do provide a helpful bit of info to this person in need, he/she will respond to you and say thanks.

Now you’ve just reached that person’s followers as well and have an unsolicited third-party endorsement and an amplified reach from your effort.

Hrmmmm, so how could we get even more lazy at this point…. I had a 3 x 35 matrix of terms I wanted to monitor (“problem,” “install” and “setup” for every application we offer). Now I could setup 105 individual feeds but that seems like a lot of work. With a little digging I found the Twitter Search Operators page which is a simple reference for all the Boolean and other operators you can use in your searches. I was able to reduce that 3×35 matrix to 1x by writing this query for each:

There’s probably a nifty way to reduce it down to a single query with enough creativity but I wanted to have a feed for each app so they would be grouped rather than intermingled.

UPDATE: I just found it’s possible to get an RSS feed of the replies to your recon twitter accoount. Click on the replies tab while logged in and you’ll see a link at the bottom for RSS. Because this is a password-protected feed you’ll not be able to use online readers like Google Reader and Bloglines. If you happen to be using Firefox, you’ll notice an orange RSS button in your address bar. Click it and enter your Twitter credentials and have it put the replies in your toolbar so you can easily check it. Initiating the conversation spreads awareness but you leave them hanging if you don’t followup on replies.

So there you have it: near-realtime response to people who are suffering from problems that your products can solve. And a bonus reward when you do provide helpful info in that you get an endorsement from a trusted source that goes out to all of that person’s followers. This is all what you make of it. I invest about 10min each evening by scanning my TwitterRadar feed and responding to people I believe we can help. But if you invest a little time every day, it can provide a new fountain of pre-qualified leads for your salespeople and the opportunity to chime in when you know they need help. And even if the people you contact in the Twitterverse don’t become customers, they will at the very least be appreciative of your effort to offer assistance. And that kind of goodwill is priceless.

So what are the key phrases in twitter conversations that could identify your potential customers who are currently in pain?

If you’re a Scrabble fan and you’re on Facebook, odds are you have the Scrabulous app installed. It’s really the only reason to even log onto Facebook anymore. Game play is slick – it blows away the EA version they just launched (actually I tried to play a friend using their beta and it paired me with a complete stranger). Anyways, if you’ve followed the hoopla around this game then you know Hasbro has recently issued a DMCA takedown notice and Facebook just tonight complied taking the app offline. Sucks.

Now the good news: it’s still possible to play if you don’t mind going through a few extra steps. Basically they’re using IP address geocoding to determine your location – not the location you specify in your profile. All you need to do is proxy through an IP outside the US or Canada and you’ll get the Scrabulous application back. You will have to link to it directly using this link as they disable it in your application menu. There’s lists of anonymous proxies available via Google but they’re generally crap. The easiest way to find a remote proxy is using Tor. Follow the instructions on their site to get running with it. Keep the Scrabulous dream alive!

If you’re like us you have a slew of different ad campaigns running at any given time- newsletters, pay-per-click, stumbleupon, download directories, sponsored banner ads, auto-responders, etc. Tracking conversions means being able to identify the visitors to your site who ultimately complete the desired action and know which avenue brought them to you (and it’s useless to experiment across ad channels if you don’t track which ones are working). You can roll your own home-grown mechanism to track conversions but if you have a Google Adwords account, you already have access to their cross-channel conversion tracking system which will do this for you. Here’s how you can take advantage of it:

1. Signup for an adwords account if you don’t have one already.
2. You’ll need to add the conversion tracking code snippet to the thank you page on your site that the visitor sees when he/she completes the intended action on your site. Follow the instructions here to set it up.
3. Next you’ll create a new cross channel tracking campaign for one of your ad channels- let’s do it for your newsletter first. What may be confusing is that even though we’re in your adwords account, adwords could be one channel you can use this to track all your ad initiatives). Follow their 3-step wizard for specifying the details of this newsletter-specific campaign and get the landing page code and the tracking URL.
4. Put the landing page code snippet in your header or footer so it’s on every page of your site (you only need to do this once and it works across all channels that you track).
5. Lastly, look at the newsletter-specific tracking URL and grab just the part that says:
   “?gad=xxxxxxxxxxxx” and append that to any links coming from your newsletter. Rinse and repeat for each ad campaign you have running so that they all get a unique tracking URL.

You’re now collecting data on how each campaign is doing and you’ll know exactly which ones are performing well and which ones suck. You can see from our data below that we have a spread of 0% – 38% effectiveness depending on the particular channel – that’s critical info to know if you’re spending thousands on ads! Minor improvements in conversion can translate to huge savings in adspend as I explained here. Happy conversion tracking!

Tuesday night I did a presentation for the San Diego Java User Group on how to use Trac to manage the development a software project. Below is a video capture of that talk (~45min). We cover the big picture of what’s involved in effective project management, the qualities of what makes a good tool and then we walk through hands-on usage of Trac in a real project scenario to demonstrate how it fulfills these objectives.

I’ve also made the resources I used in the talk available for download including the slides, the notes and the final state of the Trac JumpBox from the demo so you can actually play with the exact data we used. Big thanks to Paul Webber for allowing me to present for the group. There were some great questions asked and I even learned some new stuff about Trac like the Mylyn Connector that allows you to interact with your tickets right from within Eclipse. There’s also a shorter video screencast that covers a subset of this talk (the screen is more readable than the projector in the video).