Aug 20
My First NETTUTS Tut
Web Design tutorial blog NETTUTS published an article I wrote about Building a Facebook Appication Check it out!
New post here Friday.
About TheJoey.Net
TheJoey.Net is the weblog of Joe Casabona, a web developer who attends the University of Scranton, now for Graduate Studies. He is real bad at writing these about pages and hates writing in the 3rd person...more
**The layout is new and there might be some bugs. If you see any, please email me at Joe@Casabona.org
Archive for the 'Websites' Category
I’m a little bit surprised I haven’t written about Amazon Mp3 before as I use it quite frequently. My main grip about services like iTunes, the Zune Marketplace, Napster, Ruckus, and nearly every other digital music outlet is that their songs are protected by some form of Digital Rights Management (DRM). You can only transfer them x number of times. You need a username and password to listen to them, or in the case of Ruckus, download for free (as a college student), but only listen to them on your computer. Yes, there was EMusic, but last time I checked their collect was not as diverse as I would have liked. But Amazon Mp3 changes all of that.
Amazon Mp3 offers a full line of music, underground and mainstream, completely DRM-free. It doesn’t expire, there isn’t a set number of transfers, play it on any Mp3 player as much as you’d like. This is the way digital music should be. If I have a CD, I can rip that onto my computer and do with it what I want. Why shouldn’t digital music be the same. But beyond that, their deals are amazing.
Amazon Mp3 offers two types of deals I use regularly (and use twitter to follow): Daily deals, where for a day they will sell a digital CD significantly cheaper (like $2 or 3) and Friday 5, where from Friday until Monday, they pick 5 albums to sell for $5 a pop. Plus, setup couldn’t be easier. Install their downloader, which links to your favorite music player, and when you download mp3s, they automatically get added to your music collection.
I really feel Amazon got digital music right. Freedom, easy of use, and low cost is everything I was looking for. If any online service will get me to stop buying CDs, it’s this one.
It was in October of last year that I went to a couple of my friends and mentioned to them that I wanted to start a t-shirt company. I felt I had a couple of good ideas and enough business know-how to do it. They were the creative ones that could be the personality of the company.
Then nothing happened for a while. We kept track of ideas, but nothing more than that. Finally in February, we put out our first product for Scranton’s widely celebrated Parade Day. We did pretty well, especially considering the competition. But then we all got busy and put pursuing anything further off. Until now.
We decided to finally launch a site with some flagship designs, which you can find here. The site has been what I’m calling ’soft launched,’ which I guess you can equate to a beta. But everything, as far as I know, is working. You can order shirts! Now it’s time to promote and generate enough cash to pursue some other designs we’ve come up with.
If you’d like to help out, you can find all kinds of stuff on our Promote page. And as always, any feedback is welcomed. Since this is probably the most involved site I’ve done, I’ll be doing a write up of the design/programming in a later post. For now, let’s cross our fingers and hope for the best!
On a final note, we also want our company to be the middleman between people who want shirts and people who print shirts. So if you want to have shirts done, please fill out this form. We will do the artwork, and take care of ordering. We can also work something out for distributing if you’d like. Just let us know!
Update:
Special thanks to Bring Back the Stache! and Consumer Whore for the links. Much Appreciated.
Aug 01
Announcing 101 Things
About a week and a half ago I decided I wanted to start a new blog with something fun to post daily. I got the idea from Sean Blanda, who started the website Consumer Whore, a blog with something new to buy every day. 101 Things is simply a website that posts some activity to do every day- whether you are looking to pick up a hobby or are just plain bored. There are also featured posts that will change weekly and take a little longer to do.
Hopefully this takes off- I think it could be a fun website where people can try new things and share their experiences. This week (and next week’s) featured post is about how to start a blog. Today’s daily is “Solve the Rubik’s Cube.” Check it out- and if you have any suggestions, you can make them here.
Last week, popular web development website A List Apart (ALA) released the results of it’s 2007 Web Design Survey. I’ve spent the last few days reading over the 82 page document and found a good amount of the results interesting.
- Over 80% of the respondents were White Males
- 48% came from the USA
- When asked if they were excited by their field, 43.6% said Fequently, 35% said Very Frequently, meaning 78.6% like what they do most of the time.
- About 20% want to start their own business as their next move.
- Of that 20%, 89.9% were men.
- 47.9% are in the salary range of $20,000 - $80,000, where 52.3% have been in the industry 5 years or less.
- 1/2 of the people in my age group (21-24) make less than $20,000. Something to consider is most people who graduate college are 21 or 22.
- ALA found that Job Satisfaction increases with age. I think this is because when starting out, (for me anyway), you’re not doing the cool and exciting stuff you’d like to. My internships consisted mostly of fixing HTML, and not any real development.
- Of those who saw an age bias, Under 21 and 21-24 combined made up for 70.2% of the respondents.
- 22% of female respondents saw gender bias, where only 1.5% of male respondents did. (NOTE- that is 22% of the females, which made up ~16% and 1.5% of the males, which made up ~84%).
What was most surprising to me was how big the gap between male and female respondents is. I knew the computing field is male dominated, but I didn’t think it was that one sided. This survey also gave me a pretty good idea of what I can expect as a salary once I get out of Grad School. You can download and review the results here, and if you are a web professional, I strongly recommend it. It’s extremely informative.