hikari17

You could try the RailsInstaller (http://www.railsinstaller.org/en) project from Luis Lavena. I went from essentially zero webdev experience to completing Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial to building modest production applications in Rails on my Windows 7 PC at work with RailsInstaller as my starting point. It hasn't been problem-free, but I've been able to get great support through the RailsInstaller Google group.

Full disclosure, though, I also have a Mac for personal use and I've definitely found Rails development and deployment to be much easier on a linux-like platform than a Windows one.

No mention of Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time"?

I'm gone the 28th-30th, unfortunately, so I'd vote for anything before or after that (January 3rd would be ideal.)

Either way, though, welcome to Chicago, Patrick!

We're looking for short-term remote Rails help implementing faceted search using solr/lucene or websolr.

Though several startups are addressing this area, I like the timeline approach taken by Eternos (http://beta.eternos.com)

[Disclaimer: I've blogged enthusiastically about them in the past and we've discussed a possible advisory role.]

At Molex, we've been pitched recently by Invention Machine to adopt their SAAS service "Goldfire". They claim that Goldfire makes it easier for companies to incorporate TRIZ principles in their new product development processes. So far, most of my colleagues who've heard the pitch are quite skeptical. This article covered most of their objections: it's a gimmick, it hasn't been objectively proven to yield innovative ideas, we don't need expensive software to use these techniques, etc.

Genlighten is looking for a Front-end UI/UX Designer / Rails Developer. Details are at http://bit.ly/dshmNY. Preferred location would be Chicago or Logan, Utah, but remote may also work. Thanks!

My wife and I have been co-founders of our nights/weekends startup from day one. She runs customer support (phone and e-mail) and is the prototype "seller" in our online marketplace. I handle product development, marketing, finances and some front-end design.

We spend most evenings laptop-to-laptop in "Genlighten World Headquarters" (our daughter's old bedroom.) Last night we worked the booth together at a startup demo event. It was tremendous fun and particularly exhilirating to be doing it as a couple.

Our CTO lives in another part of the US, and so far (~2 years) we haven't experienced any obvious problems with the couple + third founder arrangement.

Bottom line: it works for us.

Yeah, I've checked the posterous video for new views (alas, none so far). But mostly I'm working on improving the existing app, dealing with a recent influx of users, and filling out applications to other programs with later deadlines.

I'm looking for a part-time front-end UI/design person with RoR skills to help out our bootstrapped nights/weekends genealogy startup. I could meet your income needs (paying by the task) and still leave you time for the other suggestions you've gotten here. My e-mail's dean (at) genlighten.com.

Trying to get the video done for our YC app. We're seriously bad at saying anything cool or interesting on camera... all we can do so far is laugh at each other. :)

I've signed up for postling, which offers some similar features, but it hasn't really "wowed" me yet. Your service sounds a little more ambitious in some ways... and it hits a particular pain point of mine (managing Facebook pages). I filled out your form, but forgot to explicitly express interest in being a beta tester... please count me in.

We currently use Constant Contact for newsletters and email campaigns. It's served us well so far, but I could be easily convinced to ditch it -- the email templates, editing features, and analytics are decent, but hardly inspired or delightful. I'm looking seriously at both Aweber and Emma... and this thread has motivated me to consider MailChimp too.

Just thought I'd add +1 for Intense Debate. We've used it on our site's blog for a little over a year and we're quite satisfied.

+1 for sendgrid. We've been using them for several months now with highly satisfactory results.

I'd advocate taking a longer-range view-- both of the design of your site and your relationship with a designer. If you're at all successful, there'll be lots more design work to do. So why not use this small initial project as way to get to know a high-quality designer whose work you'll be proud to see on your site?

Also, though it may seem like the "tweak" you want should represent only 30 minutes of effort, in reality, to produce quality work, the designer will need to spend at least 30 minutes (and probably more like an hour) just exploring what you're looking for with you before they can even get started with the actual design. And a good designer will want to develop several different options for you to choose from. Pretty soon you're looking at 2-3 hours minimum even for what you've described.

Bottom line... I started out the development of our webapp vastly underestimating both the value of and the time it takes to produce quality design. I encourage you to avoid doing the same.

I first came across Justin when he blogged from the FamilySearch development conference back in March of 2008. My wife and I had been looking for months for a technical co-founder with a strong interest in family history. Justin's blog posts were noticed/quoted by a genealogy blogger I followed and that quickly led us to him.

Emails and phone conversations soon followed, and within a month he had started making our fledgling app his own, taking it in all sorts of new and better directions. Through it all, we've only actually "met" face-to-face for a total of about five days during the 20+ months we've worked part-time on Genlighten.

A somewhat inverted approach (snail mail => web): www.zumbox.com

From a ways back, but still a pleasant memory:

Richardson, Dean; Gibbs, H. M.; Koch, S. W., "Computer simulations of fully cascadable picosecond all-optical logic using nonlinear semiconductor etalons"

IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics (ISSN 0018-9197), vol. 27, March 1991, p. 804-808.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991IJQE...27..804R

Nice... makes we want to spring for a smartphone just so I can see it in action!

Isn't Aardvark (http://vark.com) tackling this idea, without limiting the sources of the answers/tasks to twitter?

We've been using Pivotal Tracker for about a year on our nights-and-weekends genealogy research webapp. It's intuitive -- even fun -- to use, costs nothing, and takes almost no time to administer. For user-sourced feature requests, bugs, and support responses we're currently quite pleased with GetSatisfaction. So far, we find we can migrate issues between the two without much difficulty.

We use Onebox as well. Simple to manage, forwards to our cell phones when we're not home. But it's not like we're getting lots of calls yet, so I can't speak to how it scales.

We're using Solo on EngineYard (i.e., their AWS-based offering.) Quite happy with it so far. Thinking about moving to Flex eventually.

We're the platform provider in a two-sided genealogy market (genealogy document clients on one side, genealogy lookup providers on the other.) We take a commission from providers (15% of their selling price) and a processing charge from clients (10% of the provider's selling price.)

So our income breaks down as:

client processing charge: 40%

provider commission: 60%

Good for Twitter, not so good for the Chicago tech/startup scene. Dick was an inspiration to many local entrepreneurs, and the Feedburner exit is often cited as evidence that "it can be done here."