tower10

I run Techspace London (http://techspace.co). We have coworking spaces for tech startups near the Old Street roundabout. Contact me through the website - we can probably accommodate you for a couple of days.

I'll have a play around with swapping the vendor link / avatar ...thanks for all the ideas!

I'm trying to keep the homepage as free of clutter as possible but I do think this would add a bit of personality to the site (as opposed to the sterile, crowdsourced feel that you mentioned before). I'll have a think about a creative way to put this in.

Thanks for the feedback - really helpful. I've been thinking about adding a poll feature (e.g. "Which of these dresses should I wear for a party tonight?"). Making that the main focus of the site is an interesting idea.

Thanks for the feedback. I will have a careful think about anonymous submissions (obviously spam is a big issue). Anonymous voting is definitely on the cards.

Clicky link: http://retailfans.com

IE7 doesn't allow bookmarklets to be dragged to the Links toolbar, presumably due to the security risk. Instead, right-click and Add to favorites...

Most of the startups that are making money are the ones you've never heard of. This is a pointless exercise...however, here are some that I believe are making money that you may have heard of (happy to be corrected as I don't know for sure that they're all making money):

1. GitHub 2. eBuddy 3. Dogster 4. StyleDiary 5. ThisNext 6. Kaboodle 7. Stateless Systems 8. RedBubble 9. Wufoo 10. NationMaster

This is a gross generalisation. Plenty of startups are making money.

Self-referential fail.

No results for: kgb search engine

Time will tell but how am I going to remember to take another look in six months time? :)

The page doesn't reload when ony the fragment part is changed.

I prototyped a Rails-like framework in JavaScript using Rhino and Servlets and was suprised how feasible the whole thing seemed for a production website. JavaScript is perfectly capable for this IMO.

The benefits come when you start to re-use code on the front- and back-end. An obvious example is form validation business rules. Using the same models can be really handy in AJAX-heavy apps, too. It can be very DRY if done right.

I saw that someone recently wrote a V8 module for Apache - that could lead to some really interesting developments.

No offence but I'm not even going to read a scientific news story on The Sun :)

I bought mine new a while back (~$3000 AUD) from Apple. Just looking at eBay, they seem to go for a touch over $1000 USD at the moment. I figure they're a bit of a bargain at the moment since they're perfectly capable and have just been replaced by the shiny new model. I mainly develop Ruby Rails/Merb apps with TextMate.

Second hand (or refurbished), last gen 15" Macbook Pro. I use one of these for development, no complaints.

How about redirecting the first URL to the second? Updating the fragment part via JavaScript shouldn't hit the server so that wouldn't be affected by the redirect. If you did get into a situation where it inadvertantly redirects then you could just check the referrer to prevent that.

I was more than happy to download the Silverlight plugin (I didn't have it installed). After an apparent successful install (latest OSX) and restarting Firefox, I'm told the plugin's not installed. I don't know how typical this is but perhaps Silverlight's not ready for the prime time yet?

Music? It's a reasonable indicator of lifestyle choice (so good chance of bringing compatible people together), not male dominated and it could be multiple niches (adding up to something on a much bigger scale).

My first impression is that this doesn't do much that Firefox doesn't already do (ok, maybe Opera/Chrome style thumbnail quick start but I don't care too much for that anyway). There's no compelling reason for me to come back.

Maybe if you can expand on the shortcut idea, something along the lines of what Ubiquity is doing, then you might have something that appeals to the hacker crowd. Honestly though, I think you'll have a tough time creating something that goes beyond what all the other start page sites out there are doing.

Nice URL btw, like the alliteration.

Go to a different host. Here are my two recommendations:

http://linode.com http://slicehost.com

Both start at $20 a month. I am a customer of both.

If your site's going down, it's probably already time. VPS's are pretty cheap. Alternatively, there may be some optimisations you can make to your code to reduce your concurrent MySQL connections.

You can use tools like siege or Apache ab to probe the limits of your capacity, although I wouldn't run them against your shared host out of respect for the others on the machine. You know what your capcacity is there anyway - you've already reached it.

Is less choice a good thing?

I second the UI needing some user feedback. I was expecting a Google Suggest style dropdown and it took me a few seconds to realise I was filtering the results already in the page.

It didn't take me long to figure out the purpose of the site but - then again, I shouldn't have to work it out / think. Check out Steve Krug's book on UI design, Don't Make Me Think. The title says it all.

Correct me if my assumptions are wrong but I sense some scaling issues just around the corner. The live search doesn't make any AJAX requests - will the app always start with every listing on the homepage? How will it behave when you have hundreds or thousands of listings?

The Technologies taxonomy is not what I would expect (no programming languages). Is MySpace really a technology you'd list on your resume? Perhaps I've not quite got who the site is aimed at. If that's the case then (as others have said) you should make that explicit, in bullet-list style on the homepage.

Link the logo to the homepage. Lose the icons. Bump up the font size. Add some visual hierarchy to the listings to make them easier to scan (the dev's name isn't the most important piece of information in the listing).

crickets Not sure what that is/means.

What's your strategy for filling out content?