Lonely Lion

The traditional Thanksgiving Gantt chart.

”$10 / month” sounds pretty long-tail-y to me. That’s what I pay for Backpack. It’s a reasonable price for a great service. There’s a small number of similar-ish apps popping up here and there, all with slightly different takes on payment. The last one I ran across is from the Signals v. Noise weblog, called Giftbox. It’s a neat idea.

It just makes me wonder how many of these kinds of apps the market can realistically bear. I listened to the Basecamp IT conversations podcast, and was pretty inspired by the idea of building a simple app that somehow makes some small thing easier for some smallish group, however, I’m starting to wonder if the model will actually work for long. It certainly works if you’re 37signals and invent it, but for everyone else…I’m just not sure how many “do one thing really well” applications an individual is prepared to pay for.

One thing I like about these apps is the subscription model, instead of advertising. It makes it look cleaner, and it becomes an investment for you as a user. That said…you…reader…how much would you be willing to pay per month on these sorts of apps?

Currently, between my wife and I (both Backpack subscribers) we’re at $20 / month, plus $35 / year for Flickr. I think it’s realistic to say that we’d be willing to go to about $50 / month for these sorts of applications. That would buy us around two or three Backpack priced applications.

Hmmm.

I don’t have any answers. It will be interesting to watch this market develop…at some point I’m assuming that the number of available apps will outweigh the number of people willing to pay for them, and the market will eventually center itself around a handful of recognizable names. Which then sort of negates the whole concept that all this Web2.0 stuff is targeting.

One possible answer would be to start to target very specific markets with apps tailored to them. You’d limit your market, but could probably charge a bit more. Rather than being Flickr, and charging $35 / year, you could be “Flickr for bird watchers” and charge $5 / month.

Eh. It’s a lot of speculation.

Ben Bangert posted documentation for his Routes package. It’s a great looking package from what I’ve seen so far. I haven’t had a chance to play with it, but I get the impression it’s going to be very useful. URL translation to controllers is a pretty useful tool. The documentation is at http://routes.groovie.org/manual.html

I popped in the Google Analytics tags on this weblog and Camri’s jewelry site this morning. So far, ~40 hits here. You folks are coming from all over the world, which is pretty cool. I see at least two people in Australia, several in South East Asia, a bunch in Europe, all over the US, with the two biggest blobs in Chicago and Kansas. Midwest represent!

I like pictures. Thanks Google.

Also, you may have noticed the “Ad-Whore” box in the sidebar. This isn’t the first time I’ve flirted with ads on the site. It’s really more of an experiment than a money making thing. Especially considering the Google ad’s net around a buck a month. Which, granted, is pretty sweet cash, but still…it’s hardly worth the effort. I’ll probably pull them down at some point, but for now, it’s fun to play around with.

We have a room, we have a date, and we have speakers! In a very positive move, ChiPy, the Chicago Ruby Users Group, the DePaul Linux Users Group, and the DePaul Computer Science Society have teamed up to bring David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Rails) and Adrian Holovaty (one of the creators of Django) together for Snakes and Rubies!

This is a pretty exciting event, it’s going to be a great opportunity for a lot of different Chicago area users groups to get together on a common topic. This has been a theme for me over the past couple of months, trying to emphasize where the local users groups are the same, instead of encouraging little language wars. This sort of event is a great step in the right direction.

Last night’s meeting worked out well, despite it’s relatively last minute nature. The three presentations (Ian Bicking on RulesDispatch, Robert Ramsdell on the random module, and Fawad Halim on PYRO) were great.

I was pretty impressed with RulesDispatch. It seems like it could be very useful as a concept. I’m still not totally comfortable with decorators, but the actual RulesDispatch piece was neat.

Robert’s random presentation was also really interesting. He dug deeper into the random module than most of us ever have. I didn’t know you could sub-class random to use your own random algorithms.

Fawad’s presentation on PYRO was also pretty cool. It seems like a good set of tools for doing complicated dispatching of messages.

Good stuff all around.

I’ve been impressed with the functionality I’ve seen in a handful of typo blogs, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I like it so far.

Edited to add:
After spending some time with Typo, I’m still liking it. The only oddness that I’ve run into so far is not giving an RSS feed per category. I think that should be easy to hack up a bit. I use the category based feeds for things like Planet Python…I don’t want to bore the Python folks with my Baking tips.

Also, I realized after importing my posts from wordpress that they lost all the line breaks when being html-isized. I wrote my first one-off Ruby script to run through each post (via ActiveRecord) and re-interpret the text as Textile. That worked very well.

By “First”, I mean “The First Ruby Meetup I’ve Attended.” The group has been meeting for several months. It seems like this past meeting attendance really blew up, which is great for the group. There was a good mix of new-to-Ruby people (like myself), and a few folks that had been working with Ruby for quite a while. The majority of people mentioned Rails during introductions. It was a good meetup, and looks like it’s going to be a solid user group.

There was some more talk about a joint Rails / Django presentation in the very near future, which should be exciting. I’m not sure about calling it a “debate” though, what are we debating? The overriding theme of every user group I’ve attended has been “what sets us apart from others is our love of what we do.” Sadly, this is sometimes interpreted as “what sets us apart from others is our choice of programming language.” That, to me, is the wrong attitude. Spending time cutting down other like minded people, because of their language choice, doesn’t help anyone. A debate between the author of Django, and the author of Rails is counter-productive. Both guys saw a need for a new way of building a web application, both guys built a set of tools that are valuable to the new model web. Why pit them against one another?

I think competition is good, as long as we understand that we’re really tied together through our common love of the work, beyond our love of the particulars of our chosen tools.

Camri and I went to Ireland a few weeks ago, for a friend’s wedding. We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast in Dingle called the Captain’s House. Every afternoon we’d come back to the B&B and love the smell of baking for the next day’s breakfast. I liked it so much, that I committed to a renewed baking push for the holiday season.

So, last weekend I broke out our copy of The Joy of Cooking, and made a batch of scones. They turned out so well, that I made a second batch this past Saturday. Camri bought me a copy of Baking Illustrated as a Christmas present, but we agreed that it would be best served pre-Christmas for cookie baking. From that book, we made pretzels Sunday night. They turned out really great, and went well with beer and mustard. Good stuff.

I’m all hopped up on baking, and getting pretty excited for the Holiday cookie cycle. We built a list of key-cookie-events over the next two months, so that we’ll know what we need when. The next step is to build the list of cookies. I think I’m also going to throw in a few Pecan Pies, and some other non-cookie baked goods. Plus, we’re getting ready for our first Thanksgiving at home with guests. We had a just the two of us Thanksgiving a few years ago, but this will be the first time we have other people over. It’s sort of fun (and tremendously nerdy) to apply some project management skills to cookie baking and turkey stuffing.

In related news, Camri and I have used a pretty specific note card system to track different food things we like for the past year or so. We’re going to adapt it to a sort of blog. It’s going to be my first full blown Ruby on Rails project. The only thing that really differentiates it from a straight blog is that each post has special data associated with it, so if the post is about a wine we like, there will be different meta-data than if the post was about a cheese. It’s in the pretty early stages of development, but I’m hoping that we’ll have a site up and running by December 1. I’m also tracking hours against the site, to try and get a more objective idea of how long it takes to build.

Tonight is the Chicago Ruby Meetup. I’m going to be attending for the first time. I’m looking forward to it. As I’ve written, I’ve been enjoying Ruby so far. I’m interested in seeing what the community is like.

chiPy meets Thursday. Ian is going to present RulesDispatch, Robert Ramsdell is going to continue his exploration of the Standard Library, and Fawad Halim is going to present Python Remote Objects. It should be a good meeting. It will also be our first meeting here at Performics. If anyone is in Chicago, and plans on attending, send me an email at chris.mcavoy@gmail.com with the subject line RSVP ChiPy.