amassed lust Blog of Raymond Angel; Startup Enthusiast, CEO

I recently finished up reading my copy of Patrick’s book Managing Online Forums.

I’m especially glad that I did read it end to end because it had some of the most useful, insightful, and practical advice related to managing online communities that I’ve ever seen in a book.

In the book Patrick brings forth his real-world experiences running a plethora of major and successful forums and communities online.

You will learn about launching your community, attracting people to it, picking the right software, setting guidelines, keeping the site interesting and much more.

Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards is by far the most comphrensive book for community management I’ve read to date and I highly suggest anyone who is considering starting a community or even season veterens pick this selection up because it has something inside it for everyone.

My sister is looking to get an iPod touch and I thought I would take this opportunity to try out the Fundable service and blog all about the experience for everyone to read. This is a startup with a pretty neat idea and seems a bit similar to ThePoint.com

Maybe a side by side comparison is in order? What are your thoughts?

People pledge X dollars and only if the full amount of the collection is met do people pay. So if 30 people pledge 10 dollars and you need $410 and the collection ends then no one pays. However if 41 people all pledge $10 then the collection ends and the people who pledged are billed.

After setting up a Fundable goal for my sister’s iPod you really should pledge a few dollars I had already found a few things I’d like to see changed.

The first and most obvious thing is that the site offers NO WIDGETS. Sure you can post it to Facebook but what good does that do me… I want a widget. Something I can put on my blog, something I can share with the world. Allowing me to email the link to my friends isn’t enough.

Also I made the first pledge for her to get the iPod touch. After PayPal got done accepting my information it redirected to the Fundable website to a broken page. Apparently this was just a random hiccup though because I refreshed and everything was alright.

What do you think of this sort of “digital collection plate”? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

P.S

I’ll write a full review once the time expires on getting my sister an iPod touch and then look at ThePoint.com and see which one wins in the end.

A lot of people have been talking about all of the hype surrounding WordPress 2.5 and how amazing it is going to be with the new design and all of the new features.

A lot of people have also been talking about how much they hate certain aspects of WordPress 2.5

Most of the complaints have been about the WordPress 2.5 ‘Write Post’ page which I will of course speak about later in this post I find that I have far more complaints.

The first one being the new “Widget” section of WordPress 2.5. I have mixed feelings about this section. I find that I myself understand it but when I was showing it to people who are not experienced bloggers they were confused for a good thirty seconds before they understood it.

I know a lot of people who aren’t very computer savvy and yet still blog. The majority of them use TypePad which is a great product if you are just starting but one that isn’t known for a lot of customizable power.

One feature that every person I know that uses TypePad enjoys is the way TypePad handles themes for blogging. It has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. You want a widget moved up or down on your sidebar? Easy enough… drag it from the bin and move it around on the sidebar until you find the place you want it.

For a long time it was the same thing with WordPress. You could easily drag and drop the items you wanted to and from the sidebar and then up or down.

The new setup is just confusing to those who are just starting.

In the original pre 2.5 setup you would select the items you wanted and drag them to either sidebar 1 or sidebar 2 and sometimes if your design had it even a third or fourth sidebar. This was intuitive.

I always, always, always use people that I know aren’t savvy with technology to test ideas on. I brought in a few of those people such as my mother and some friends to sit down and attempt to use the old WordPress and then the “new” WordPress and then observed as much as I could to make sure I wasn’t just plain crazy on this.

In the first situation I sat my mom down with 2.5 and asked her to move some items around on my sidebar. She was able to determine she wanted the design system and once she understood what the word widget meant that the widget section is the part she wanted.

My mother has used TypePad because I wrote a major book about the platform. Her first attempt was to drag and drop what she wanted to the sidebar. It didn’t work. After about 25 seconds she realized she had to click the Add buton.

Next I told her I wanted the widget to below the comments widget and so she started looking for the ability to do so. Again she wasted about 20 seconds to find that she could drag and drop the items up or down.

She was confused as to why she could drag and drop on one section but not another.

Which basically had proven my initial thoughts that the new design for handling widgets in your theme is a blunder. They don’t stop with that though.

I have a great deal of posts set as drafts at any given time. I often start having thoughts about a blog post but because of the nature of my job will need to stop writing and take care of something. One feature I love is the ability to simply hit Write and then have my drafts appear at the top so I can click them and keep working on them later.

In 2.5 that is no longer possible.

To get to a draft you actually click the drafts link on the dashboard.

This actually makes more sense to have all my drafts show up in one place and will most likely prove to be beneficial to newer bloggers and less tech savvy individuals but it will require an adjustment on my part and I know I’ll get used to the new way in time.
Everyone had issues with the Write Post page. When I read all of the negative blogs I was assuming that they simply didn’t like change and that the new layout couldn’t be that bad.

Again… mixed feelings with this section.

The new design is much more focused on the actual writing process and less so on the meta and additional tasks that goes with writing a blog entry. I assume this is because a lot of users don’t modify WordPress and simply just use it to post quick entries.

For power users such as myself who make sure each post has a tag, often times add custom fields and other various meta information I find the new layout to require more clicks and as such time consuming and awful to an extent.

Honestly though this is another issue that I think given a bit of time will become a non-issue as I slowly adjust my WordPress habits.

A great deal of complaints have also been focused at the navigation and tabs at the top of the admin panel. I personally have no complaints with the new setup. The new tabs are simplified, the process of moving from one task to another seems more logical and the design overall seems easier for a new user to pick up and begin using.

The new color scheme feels a bit like a Six Apart product and I’m not sure I approve of that
The colors are pleasant and easy on the eyes but after a long period of time writing the same post (such as this one) it gets old quickly and doesn’t feel like home as the old scheme did. The good news is that plugins will be able to change the color scheme and I’ve heard rumors that you can revert back to classic in the settings but I’ve yet to see that option if it even really exists.

The new dashboard actually makes a great deal of sense and I haven’t seen or heard many complaints about it as of yet but I’m sure some elitist will have something negative to say.

Overall my first impression of WordPress 2.5 is mixed. I think a fresh new look is required but I’m not sure that the changes are going to make blogging easier for newer users as the design firm behind it claim.

Who knows… maybe I’m an idiot who knows nothing of blogging though.

I’ve been dual-booting between Linux Mint and Windows Vista on all of my machines for a while now trying to make the adjustment to using Linux full-time.

I still find myself switching between the operating systems often. For somethings Linux works best, for others I still have to come back to Windows.

Linux is a “your mileage may vary” kind of operating system.

Choice is great. I have a great deal of choices in Linux… but sometimes I have so many that it just ruins the experience for me.

A good example is how applications are installed on various distros.

For most you actually have to compile the files before you install them. I’ve actually found myself getting pretty acquainted with the process and it isn’t terribly hard but can my fiancee or my mom do it? Certainly not.

I know that the great part about Linux is that we have choice… however this is part of the problem. With so many choices no one can decide on a standard for installing applications on Linux that the regular average computer user can sit down and do.

RPMs, DEBS, these are things that the average user just doesn’t understand… nor do they want to.

So what can the people pushing Linux truly do?

Honestly I’m not sure. Getting people to agree on anything in the Linux community is going to be about damn near impossible.

My experience with the community is another “milage may vary” sort of topic. Sometimes I’ll ask for some assistance and people are quick to jump up and either give me the answer I need or at the very least point me in the right direction of a tutorial that I couldn’t find even after a great deal of searching.

Othertimes they can all be egotistical assholes. They believe they are better then everyone else because they use an “alternative” operating system. Sure buddy… that makes you so much “cooler”.

I’ve found that someone like my fiancee or my mother won’t have much luck finding help all of the time for issues they may have. If I decided to set either of them up with a Linux system I would myself have to become more familiar with the innerworkings so they have someone that can help them.

Linux has been great in the productivity department for me. I have found a plethora of great programs that keep me productive on Linux and it truly shows that Linux is becoming ready for the business and educational enviroment. As far as entertainment goes I’ve found the choices to be lacking.

A great deal of music and video software exists for Linux but not each program does everything and it often times takes me two programs to do things that one simple program on Windows could do but I’ve noticed that in this area a new program for Linux comes out nearly all of the time and that the developers are dedicated to making software that does everything I want.

Gaming on Linux has also been suprisingly pleasant. I’m playing World of Warcraft on my Linux box through Wine and I must say the experience has been VERY positive for me. I thought the game would run slow, the framerate would be bad or I’d run in to a lot of problems. Everyone makes installing it out to be some huge nightmare but I honestly had ZERO real problems getting it up and running on my Linux box.

As a matter of fact I’ve found that World of Warcraft not only LOOKS better on my Linux box then it does on Windows I get a much higher framerate then what I’ve been getting on Windows Vista.

I can run World of Warcraft at a higher graphics setting in Linux then I could on Windows and it looks better! I still can’t get over that.

With more and more software becoming avaliable each day I find myself pulled more and more to Linux because my system is more secure, seems a whole hell of a lot snappier, and most everything for Linux can be had for no charge.

Once the community learns to be more accepting of the new Linux users, some standards are established, and some more companies like Dell start offering Linux preinstalled you will see more and more people switching over to Linux.

P.S

The Linux Mint community has been the most pleasant community in the Linux world to date. When other distro communities were mean, hateful, and full of themselves the people in the Linux Mint community were understanding, thoughtful, and nice.

You might have noticed my lack of entries this month in comparison to the past two months.

I’ve been sorta AFK. I’ve been on the computer but I haven’t had the time to get over here to my own blog and post some of my thoughts and what not on all of the stuff that has been taking place because things at MOSH mobile have been os busy the past two weeks.

I have some blog posts coming up about Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3 beta 4, my experience with Linux thus far, a story about why I HATE my local Walmart, my attendance at a Hillary Clinton rally (who would have thought!!) and much more.

June is coming… and that means my wedding is quickly coming.

Wedding registries have been a big part that Tiffany has been working on. Recently we went to Kohls and took care of our registry. We have a lot of friends that LOVE LOVE LOVE Kohls and we both admit they have some great merchandise that we wanted to have on our wedding registry.

So we drove an hour away to our nearest Kohls store and setup a registry account.

The Manager asked for our drivers licenses for collateral so we could take the scanner and select the merchandise we wanted for our registry.

Four hours later we finally had completed our albeit short list. We double checked that the items we wanted were appearing on the scanner and then went back to the desk to get our IDs back.

About twenty minutes later because they had “missplaced” our licesnces (aka lost them!!!) we finally get our IDs back and after another series of interogations about finding everything we wanted they said it would appear online in about an hour.

We went out for dinner and drove the hour long trip back.

We spent about 8 hours of that day working on the registry. I actually took the day off for this specific task.

Leave it to a HORRIBLE retailer like Kohls to destory and waste all of that time.

Earlier today Tiffany called with an almost panic in her voice.

She went online to check our registry as she had prepared the invitations with information about our registry at Kohls.

When she got online what did she find… our wedding registry was totally and completly blank. Not a single item on it.

Yup… that is right… we wasted eight hours, I took a day off from work, we got our IDs nearly stolen by Kohls and we had our invitations already printed with information about being registered at Kohls only to find out Kohls has no information.

Moral of the story: Don’t waste your time with Kohls.

P.S

I’m forwarding information about this blog to Kohl’s. Will see if I get any response (highly unlikely).

P.S.S

We will NEVER shop at Kohls again and I’m taking the day off tomorrow to go register at Target.

So I just now recently discovered The Freelance Guru and I feel like an idiot for just now stumbling upon such a great blog.

By far one of the best blogs I’ve read to date it contains amazing one-liners such as this one:

Of course, by the time the primaries are over, John McCain may well be dead. But, based on recent history, the American public would probably still elect him anyway.

If you are looking for some laughs then check The Freelance Guru out. I can tell you it has become a daily visit for me.

Over the past few weeks Patrick and I have been talking about a plethora of business things.

He will be doing a presentation at SXSW this year to promote his book and he asked me if I knew of any good places to go for business cards.

I can now safely tell him two places to not go.

The first one is Overnight Prints. I just had a long-time friend use them and the cards were horrible. The print on them was misaligned and they needed these cards for a meeting with a VC. So yeah… not cool.

The second place is my own experience. Before heading off to Startup Weekend I realized that I was nearly out of business cards. In a bind I visited the online arm of Staples and saw they do business cards that you can send the design for online and then pickup in store.

So of course knowing I was in a tight spot with under a week I ordered 200 cards online. The quality can’t be that bad… could it?

I WAS DEAD WRONG.

I know that it is my fault for the most part seeing as how I could have ordered cards in advance and got them done somewhere local (more on that to come) but I’ve been really busy as of late working on closing something major for the company and haven’t had time to watch my “business card stock levels” very closely.

Onward with the point of this post though… which is to show you the “quality” you can expect at Staples.

I didn’t get the more expensive card stock because the site actually recommended the regular stock. I assumed the stock wouldn’t be all that bad… it isn’t… but it isn’t that great either.

The cards are TERRIBLE. Staples is TERRIBLE. The cards had the most piss poor cut I’ve ever seen.

See that white line at the top of the card? Yeah that is the way they cut it, boxed it, then sold it to me. Not all cards are like this but out of 200 cards a great deal of them had quite simply piss poor cuts.

I suspected the cutting would be terrible so I specifically asked for black card stock. That way if the cut was a terrible shitty cut it wouldn’t stick out as much.

If they were going to make the cards on white stock then why even bother offering the black stock?

The printing and cutting was horribly aligned on almost all of the cards, the color was inconsistent from one card to the next,  and when I ordered online I paid for 200 and it said they were giving me another 100 free because of a promotion. Did I get the extra 100 free? Nope… and when I asked later for them they told me that promo only applied if I asked for it when picking up.

Think about this for a second… if I asked at pickup they would have had to make the extra 100 cards. Does that make any sense? Why not just make the extra 100 instead of making just the 200 and then if I want to actually get what the site promised me not make me wait another few hours just to get another hundred cards.

Shit.

I’m going to tell EVERYONE I know that Staples for business cards is the BIGGEST mistake you can make. Even in emergency situations where you just need something to get you through they make the shittiest of the shity cards.

I promised that I’d give my full scoop on Real Rhapsody soon and today I plan on keeping that promise.

A while back I downloaded and installed Real Rhapsody on a fourteen day trial. I’ve had and used Real Rhapsosdy in the past but heard they had made several improvements. They also sent an email asking me to give it a second chance.

So I decided to be fair and give it another install and ignore my previous poor experience with the software and the service.

The install went fairly quickly but attempted to install Spyware on my system, thankfuly I caught it hidden away in the installer and was able to prevent it from infecting my system. Strike 1. Big strike 1.

After a fairly quick install I signed in using my account name and password found some tracks to play and started arranging them in to a play list.

Easy enough thus far.

I found the music catalog to be extensive enough but the player was already using a large chunk of memory and space on my screen.

One feature I found handy was the ability to make the player a small bar that when hovering your mouse over the right hand or left hand side it would display what is playing.

I however have the Logitech G-15 keyboard which normally displays what music I am playing on my keyboard LCD but out of the hundreds of applications I’ve used Real Rhapsody is the first one to NOT display this information on my keyboard.

The more I used Rhapsody the slower my PC  got. Strike 2.

The already large footprint of the Real Rhapsody software simply continues to grow the longer it is open. Even after closing the application the process keeps running for over thirty minutes eating resources.

Any software that I pay per month for that installs spyware on my machine is an instant DOES NOT APPROVE from me.

So Real Rhapsody… you are nothing but a REAL piece of crap.