People either love or hate them. Many want to be them. Most small shop want to imitate them. Dharmesh Shah from OnStartups.com has a great post on Why You Shouldn’t Compete With them.

Here’s why I think you don’t want to compete with 37signals: It’s not about the fact that creating simple, usable software is really, really hard (which it is). It’s not because they have really bright people (which they do). It’s because the company is a marketing machine. 37signals squeeze more marketing value out of every dollar they don’t spend than any company I’ve ever known.

This is too cool. I’m not sure how practical it is, but it is a very well done experiment. Go ahead. Don’t click it now.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a couple of years as my primary blog aggregator. I have looked at a ton of them and, though desktop aggregators offer more features, I really prefer a web-based reader. It’s just easier to maintain what Ive read across multiple machines. Bloglines has simply dominated the web aggregator market.

The site is up and the countdown is on. RailsConf is in Portland this year from May 17-20. Better plan to buy tickets early as they sold out in a few days last year. (They haven’t annouced when tickets will be available yet.)

I’ve used TextDrive for web hosting for the past year. Overall I’ve been very happy. The server control is unparalleled in a shared hosting environment. My only knock is that their response time can sometimes be a little slow (1-3 days) for support questions. Thankfully I haven’t had very may.

I just found out that they are increase their service (and their price).

I’ll say it another way: $15 per month gets you web hosting (5gb, 5 databases, 5 domains, 5gb of bandwidth), online storage (5 users and 5gb), and email, calendar, address book, files and all the other applications in the pipeline (5 users and 5gb).

Seems like a pretty good deal. I’m especially excited about giving StrongSpace a try. Read more on their blog.

Just got back from Disney tonight. Man, that mouse will take it out of you. Four parks in four days. It was a lot of fun though. I haven’t checked email but once this past week. It was nice to be unplugged for a while.

I spent most of the night before I left for Disney migrating my “sometimes active” blog from Typo to Mephisto. Why? Not just because I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve had my eye on Mephisto when I found out that Rick Olsen a.k.a. technoweenie started working on it. I had lunch with he and some other Rails core team members at RailsConf. I have a lot of respect for the guy and the code he churns out. His plugins are some of the best around.

Overall, I like it much better. It’s not 100% stable, but then again isn’t even a 1.0 release yet. It has a clean and attractive design for the admin area. I like that it’s not just for blogs, but can be used for other web publishing sites.

The asset “bucket” is a great idea. You can upload assets, then add them to your bucket to carry them around and use them in various posts.

When I was at Rails Conf in June, I stumbled upon a great little service for monitoring the status of your servers, Montastic. This is a very lightweight, free service where you simply add URLs. The service pings each of your servers every 10 minutes and sends you an email if one of them is down.

So we’re finally taking that trip that every parent expects at some point. We leave tomorrow night for Disney World. I lived in Orlando for a few years in the mid-90s and couldn’t wait to leave. The heat and tourists were just too much. Now I get to be part of the problem. : )

Hopefully the kids will enjoy it. Be back next Wed. Peace out.

I was searching for some examples of DSL Ruby development and stumbled upn this little GEM. Backup is a DSL focusing on backups. It looks very well done, cut from the same mold (even using some of the same code) as capistrano.

I’ve been silent for a while. (Did anyone really notice? ; )) As it turns out, I have a new gig that is quite interesting. I left the .NET world and moved back into the ColdFusion world. The funny thing is that in the 3 months that I’ve been here, I’ve spent most of my time writing Ruby to automate some of their internal systems. It’s been a refreshing change. If you begin to see more about ColdFusion, don’t be surprised.