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freebs

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It really is sad. The worst part is, employees are treated poorly at many companies. I feel like it's even worse during and after a recession because employers know people are desperate.

I have been working on mplyees.com, a site where employees can share what needs to change publicly and anonymously. Hopefully we can bridge this divide since employee happiness is key to a successful business.

"the biggest challenge for side projects is marketing"

This is so true. I, as well as a few others I know, have built some pretty cool things that have never gotten the attention they deserve.

I've built a good base for mplyees in about 4 months. Marketing it and getting it out there will take a lot more time unless I get lucky.

Agreed. I have a 64 GB iPhone 6 and over 1k songs synced to mobile on rdio. Rdio only takes up 8.4 GB, but total I have 31.1 GB used. I would have to go back to the radio if I didn't have that space, as I would probably be out of my 4 GB data plan half way through the month.

Whispererly 11 years ago

I thought about this a while back. I'd imagine it would be better to not use DMs and just have them create an account on your site so as to not tie them together. I had thoughts about twitter eventually banning the account, so you'd probably need an account creation script (possibly use the handle of the account being mentioned plus _w added to the end). It would also be a good idea to add language filtering and check the tweet against a database of abusive words so as to really slow down the abuse. I thought about this as an employee feedback tool at first, but everyone could use a little anonymous constructive feedback. Keep at it, many of the problems can be solved with a little creativity. Good luck :D

I used terminal.com the past few weeks. It had a couple quirks that were easy to get used to. It was stable until this last weekend where it was very slow and timing out the entire weekend. Sent them a tweet and support email on Saturday, they finally tweeted me back on Tuesday. Kind of frustrating but it is a fairly new service. I'm hoping that services such as Nitrous and C9 are much more stable since they've been around a bit longer. I guess I'll find out...

It looks pretty awesome! I think it could be even better if you allowed notes to be attached to a particular web element.

Also, imagine the possibilities if you could attach categories. Say you have someone new joining a team, you could essentially give them access to a category and they could see all the notes. It would be like Slack channels except you have the context built in :D

Side projects 11 years ago

You can start by putting together a list of ingredients you like. Many of these will be common ingredients for multiple recipes and go together in different ways. Nearly every time I go grocery shopping I get these things because my SO and I like them.

EG: chicken, beef, tomato, onion, peppers, mushroom, cheese, rice, quinoa, pasta, potato, carrot, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, corn, sauce, etc.

Make sure you have a good stock of different spices, salt, and pepper.

Start with something simple like just chicken pasta and each meal add in something from above suited towards your taste. As you run out of ingredients you'll realize you can still make good dishes. If you run out of pasta you can skip it completely or sub it out with quiona.

I often play the "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" game :D

You can make 100 landing pages with interesting content on them, but if they are using words that people don't use when searching, they are less likely to be surfaced at the top of the results.

Those pages can be scattered across the site architect and have improper linking. They can have improper titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. Often times writers can't grasp these things, or they are so overworked with pumping out content that they simply don't have the time for them.

SEOs can be more technical, and can also make changes across a large site or networks of sites. EG: Missing the city and state from the h1 of every vehicle landing page for hundreds or thousands of vehicles on a thousand dealership sites can have a dramatic impact.

In this sense many SEOs also have the skills to be what we now call Content Strategists. People that do research, plan, and keep the content teams moving in the right direction.

I agree with you that this definitely a rendering content in JS problem.

Most of the SEO experiments with increasing page speed from bad to average or great have shown a very small increase in rankings. We're talking one small signal in the whole algorithm. In this case, trying to go from average or good page speed to great page speed just for rankings is quite foolish.

If they want page speed to be the best it can be, and they absolutely must render the whole page in JS, they should have at least tried to use PhantomJS or something else to render the page properly for googlebot.

There's always the traditional options that can increase speed: minimize the amount of JS, increase the quality of JS written, less HTTP requests, proper DB calls, image sizing, proper caching, etc.

Webmaster tools will tell you about duplicate titles even if there are only a few. A few duplicate titles won't penalize your rankings. Perhaps this is your case. I've definitely seen results for sites that have had 60% of their page titles as dupes.

You also have to realize that it's very important on what you are changing the them to. You should have done keyword research to see how often people are searching for particular terms. If you changed the title to be a non-duplicate but used some obscure words that a normal person would never use, you won't see many results.

Titles are just one piece of the pie, they should be consistent with everything else on the entire page, including the meta description, headings, content, image alts, links, etc.

Very good point. Just beware that you need to have a minimum of 25k (not including the money you are trading with) to get around the pattern day trader rule. If you don't have the 25k then you must wait for 3 days for your cash to clear after exiting a trade. This greatly reduces the number of trades you can do and your strategy. You may want to exit a trade after gaining 10% in one day but then that money will be tied up for 3 days. If you have a total of 5k you can kind of split it up into 1k trades so you can still make a few trades until those 3 days are up.

Marketing and lying about a crappy product does the company no good. People will either pick up on it right away, or leave soon after using/buying it.

Good marketing teams will evaluate your product VS the competition and use the good parts for communicating the message. Amazing teams will also take the bad parts and bring them up to the product teams so they can confirm weak parts and put them in the queue to get looked at.

Marketing a bad product will only last so long.

Yep, this is how marketing is done these days. I'm glad someone on HN is appreciating good marketing. I often see devs refer to marketing as snake oil, simply because they've been exposed to bad marketing. Marketing is just like programming, it can be good or bad.

This works until you run into those clients that contact you every day with changes because they want to get their money's worth. Even when you try to reason with them, they are usually the same clients that throw a tantrum.

Charging by the hour is fine if they are already hosting their own site, just make sure you charge enough. When clients know they are being charged hourly you can immediately see their thought process change from "I need this useless feature X this week" to "that feature isn't worth an investment yet".

If you're taking on more work than you can handle just keep increasing your rate.

I'm not a designer either, but I also prefer the solid colors with illustrations to boot.

At least they recommend using an overlay with the image, many don't do this or don't tint it enough to make the text readable.