Thanks for this very useful tool! It became an essential part of online meetings with my team -- it's been working great for us. We love the simplicity. For me it's missing only a single feature: ability to draw basic shapes like lines, rectangles or squares.
I don't understand why people think his lifestyle is generally incompatible with having a girlfriend. Of course it is incompatible with most people in the western world, but it seems some people think it is more so with women. Someone care to elaborate?
Society expect women to own more: beauty products, clothes, shoes... There is simply a lot more pressure on women to invest and diversify their appearance.
But there are women who live with far less too, even if more than what I depicted in this post.
Is a house actually necessary? I've been content with living in a rented flat so far. Or is that mainly an American thing where outside of larger cities space is abundant?
Depends on your situation and how long you plan on living in one place. In the US there are tax advantages to home ownership, my mortgage + property taxes are currently less than what I would pay for rent for a comparable house. Situations differ by individual and region. Some places like San Francisco are seeing rents go through the roof, while some places like Berlin are still very reasonable.
A litte suggestion: It would be very useful to have author name (with a link to bio probably) next to the submission title.
Knowing who will give the presentation is as much important as knowing its title.
The voting is deliberately anonymous at this first stage. There will be a final round where the speakers for the talks are displayed along with their submissions.
What do you guys think is the best price/feature ratio for that kind of service? I can't find any detailed feature listing on the website, but it seems you can't offer much for ~$1 a month.
Do you think 15 minute interval is enough? I assume the checks are made from one network location only (can't find details on the about page), would anyone be confident of the results with such setup? Is there any re-check in case of failure? API access? Etc.
I think this service might be popular with amateur bloggers/website owners. I don't think it would satisfy businesses that consider downtime a profit loss. I think they might be looking for a bit more advanced solution.
P.S.
I'm a bit biased here. Since I started my own website monitoring project it seems that everyone else and their dog are also running one... :-(
Good news is that my service becomes recognizable in Poland and I'll be launching it for the rest of the world soon :-) Hope to get some feedback here when that happens.
Very good questions, and ones I had to think about quite a bit while building my MVP:
15 minute interval: I had to make sure the site was scalable in the beginning. My early testing data tells me that, for my target audience (as you say, probably not larger businesses at this point), 15 minutes is a good interval—it's better than most free services, but not so frequent as to incur extra expense on my end for bandwidth and database growth.
One location only: This is a compromise I have made for now—I have built the service in a way that I'll be able to add another node or two for the back-end checks once I get enough users. But for now, if the main server is down (hasn't happened yet, in four months of testing, but it will...), I only have a small bit of contingency, and don't have a hot backup.
Re-check for failure: Yes; if Server Check.in notices a site is down on more than 50% of node checks (once I have more than one node), it will check the site once more after a minute before sending a down notice.
API access: I don't have it yet, but I'm going to be building it (everything I've done on the site already has API data structures in place—I just don't have any of the interface or any kind of authentication system in place). I'm working on a mobile app that will be free for users, and will need the API up and running before I can launch it.
From my experience, going from one to multiple monitoring nodes gets way more complicated than expected; make sure you have your timestamps across the nodes right, especially when you decide to go down with the interval to 1 minute or less.
Also, investing time in a testing setup where all scenarios can be tested paid off greatly. Having scripts covering all edge cases lets you sleep better when you have paying customers :-)
Thanks, and am in full agreement with both the difficulty of multi-node sync and testing. I have test coverage of most of the front-end, but I need to do more with the backend to make sure what is working great now works great a year from now.
That's what "lead generation" in Mila(http://mila.com) is doing: tweets matching vendor's products/services are presented as potential leads for the salesperson to act upon. When you tweet "looking for a cool new shirt" Old Navy would see your message and could give you a coupon.
Thanks again!