TechAddress Interviews SugarStats
Posted on September 19, 2006
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Tim over at TechAddress did a quick interview with me regarding SugarStats.com, what its about, progress in development etc.
“We had the opportunity to speak with Marston Alfred, the founder of SugarStats.com. To say the least, they have some extremely exciting endeavors going on and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Alfred and learn more about SugarStats.”
The exposure is definitely welcome as is the chance to tell even more people what we’re about.
Check it out here: Interview with Marston Alfred of SugarStats.com
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Posted on September 19, 2006
Filed Under Business, Daily Thoughts, Design, Marketing, Ruby on Rails, SEO, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Web
Ruby on Rails News, Links, Books and more
Posted on September 16, 2006
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Theres been a whole lot happening in the rails world lately, pretty exciting. I’ve found so many great links and info that I had to share them. If you have anything valuable to add let me know or if you find this valuable Digg it. Some are up on my Del.icio.us account as well.
Books
The Flexible Rails Book by Peter Armstrong is out. Atleast in Alpha PDF form. I checked out the previews and its looking good. This is definitely something I’m going to be looking into for SugarStats in the future. Within a few revisions after the main launch I want to upgrade the graphs (We’re currently using Gruff Graphs by Geoffrey Grosenbach) to use Adobe Flex and add a little more richness to the application. From what I understand Google Analytics uses Flex for its graphs.
Adobe Releases Flex 2 SDK for Ruby on Rails – Though not a book, here is some more Rails/Flex related info.
Rails Links and Resources
Cocoa Magic for Gruff Graphs – This could save a few people some time.
Ruby Memcache client enhancements – Always good
Capistrano 1.2 is out – Oh yeah, Capistrano Shell here I come!
Memcaching Rails and Act_As_Cached – Great article with a PDF to accompany it. I will definitely be looking more into this plugin.
Addicted-to-Caching Plugin – Another interesting cache plugin. Take a look especially if you rely on page caching.
Memcache basics for Rails – Since we’re on a caching role here… This topfunky.com article has been out for a little while, but in case you missed it you should give it a read.
UJS: Unobtrusive Javascript for Ruby On Rails Plugin Update – In case you missed this a few weeks ago, Luke Redpash and Dan Webb (perhaps some others?) have a update to the great UJS Plugin. I’m about to add this to SugarStats, I might write a post later on how I like it.
RailsConf Europe 2006 Wrap up – Here are some quick wrap up notes from Christian over at the xml-blog. This is part I and I look forward to part II. I wish I could have gone 
AJAX Scaffold Release as a Plugin – This is a great project and I’ve played with it before. I’m glad more projects are turning into plugin’s when they once came from generators. Richard White has really done some great work here.
Peepcode.com Releases TextMate basics for Rails Videocast- Geoffrey Grosenbach is at it again. I bought the first screencast: RJS Templates and it was pretty good. I learned quite a bit from it. I’m contemplating getting this one, who wouldn’t want to be more efficient in TextMate?
RailStat: Open-source web stats package released – RailStat is an open-source real-time Web site statistics package written in Ruby on Rails. Though its a generator (bleh), it looks interesting. I’m currently seeing what would be the best user tracking from within SugarStats, though I don’t need super advanced statistics.
Scruffy: Alternative Graphing Toolkit for Rails – Though we started with Gruff Graphs, this projects looks really cool. Especially the SVG image part, something Gruff Graphs could REALLY use. Along with multiple graph “blocks”. I’m pretty sure we might integrate this for some specific purposes, maybe for some small graph overviews in SugarStats.
Rails Sessions N Such – A great post over at Err the Blog about Rails sessions and the different options regarding their use. I personally use SQLSessionStore, unbeatable (except maybe by memcache 
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SQLSessionStore Released as a Plugin – Speaking of SQLSessionStore, its been released as a plugin! Making it even easier to install.
A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails – I thought this was a good article though it may seem like common sense to some. But sometimes you just need a nice fat checklist of this stuff in front of your face you know?
Rails Output Compression – A post on the new Rails Google forums with some good info on enabling output compression in Rails.
Productivity
HumanScale Freedom Task Chair – I’m pretty sure I found my next work chair!!! sweeeeeeet.
Bingodisk.com: 100GB WebDAV disk storage – I just ran across this, it seems the good guys at Joyent are up to no good again! But seriously, 100GB WebDAV storage for $199/yr. Hrm, not that there aren’t already 100 different online storage systems out there but this looks kind of cool. Its apparently sitting on a phat Sun Fire x4500 running Solaris 10. Mmmmm, talk about mass storage. Though Amazon S3 is still on the top of my list.
AutoAdmin: Auto-generated admin interface in a Rails plugin – For those of you wanting an easy admin interface for your models similar to what Django has. Though I created my own before this plugin came out for the simple purposes of SugarStats, I think this would have been great to have instead.
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Posted on September 16, 2006
Filed Under Analytics, Books Reviews, Business, Business Books, CSS/XHTML, Daily Thoughts, Design, Hardware, Marketing, PHP/MySQL, Productivity, Ruby on Rails, SEO, Security, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Web
Bootstrapping in South America?
Posted on September 8, 2006
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A friend of mine, a really brilliant guy named Pelle that I met at Reboot 8 has a great post about bootstrapping your business in Argentina. He’s living in Denmark but has been there for a month on work.
Things like this really peak my interest and seem quite viable in many situations. I know for myself, moving to Europe from the US probably wasn’t the best thing from a bootstrapping point of view as it is even more expensive here and I lost money on the conversion. But those are my particular circumstances and I also started SugarStats after I moved. But I do keep up with reading about other entrepreneurs going to more efficient locations for their startups and then returning to the states. Not only does this make for a great travel and cultural experience, but also a wise move financially of course.
One such company I’ve seen is Sproutit, the makers of Mail Room. They are actually from my hometown of San Diego, California and moved to Prague to bootstrap their business and develop their web application. They have become quite successful and have since begun their migration back to the states (this time the bay area I believe).
I would definitely love to travel to South America, hopefully just for pleasure if not for starting a business. From what Pelle says, you can find a lovely place for around $600-$700 per month! Not bad, especially if you take into account 3 course steak dinners for $6-$9. Sweet.
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Posted on September 8, 2006
Filed Under Business, Daily Thoughts, Productivity, Startup, SugarStats, Tech, Travel
Productive Weekend…
Posted on September 2, 2006
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I’m downloading 479MB of AOL search logs. What are YOU doing?
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Posted on September 2, 2006
Filed Under Analytics, Daily Thoughts, Entertainment, Marketing, Productivity, SEO, Tech, Web
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I'm Marston and here you'll find my rantings, rhetoric and other useful info. I dig tech, photography, quantum physics and organic food. I'm the founder of SugarStats.com and thats my days developing.
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- @chrisco Oh wow, nice. Congrats!! Don't have anymore beachfront property in Montana to sell me? :-( 1 hr ago
- @smn 2.0 has been working great for me, uses less CPU & Memeory. But it could always use even less.... 1 hr ago
- Back from a great lunch with @pelleb in SOMA. CalTrans isn't bad at all, kinda like the trains in Holland. Now back to work, conf call time. 1 hr ago
- Good move - http://taxcut.barackobama.com/ 23 hrs ago
- "For the first time, MBP has earned the EPEAT Gold rating" But I read it as "earned the EPIC Gold rating" EPIC WIN? 1 day ago
- Just off a great conference call with the JanRain OpenID guys. 1 day ago
- New MBP: "All engineered to standards that don't even exist yet!" LOL 1 day ago
- Multi-touch glass trackpad which doubles as the click button(s)? Who needs hardware buttons anyways? 1 day ago
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