saravk

Anyone else having trouble with using the new 4.0 fonts from the Bootstrap CDN?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19549881/cdn-for-font-awe...

Very nice article useful for Nginx newbies. While we are on that subject, can anyone please let me know if we can use Nginx for page cache busting purposes.

It is easy to configure Nginx to check if the cached version of the requested URL exists and serve it. But i would like to know if the configuration can be extended bit further to serve the cached file only if is less than a few days old?

Great job with the phone number. I'll try to make it.

Thanks for the links.

+1

I'd be interested in reading about some of the horror stories that developers selling digital goods (paid subscriptions, digital downloads etc) have had with Paypal. Any pointers?

As a developer outside US, Paypal is pretty much the only option available to my startup (selling paid subscriptions to a blogging platform). But it would be good to hear about some issues developers have had with Paypal so that i could try to avoid them.

Kettik, http://www.kettik.com/ (not mobile friendly), was rejected as well. Not very surprised or dejected by it as I was pretty much in the exact opposite founder demographic they were looking for. Single founder, close to 35, middle of the road play by the rules kind of guy loved by all (2) the big corporations that hired me over a span of 11years.

Oh well.. targeting for the YC application gave me the required focus in the last 5 months to turn my hobby/personal-use site into a full fledged travel blogging & recommendations platform ready to launch in a couple of months.

I don't think i will re-apply any time soon. My goal, starting Kettik, was to achieve creative, financial and geographic freedom. To create something of my own, travel, live and work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Not sure how free i would've been if i had funding, a team to manage and investors to give returns to. So i guess the best thing to do is to continue on my own and focus on making Kettik profitable enough to sustain itself, me and my co-founders (if i manage to find any).

And maybe one day if it grows too big for me to manage, i'll go knocking on YC's doors again.

I love the responsive design of your navigation menus. But it feels redundant when i see your page on my laptop. Both the left navigation pane and the TOC button display the same list of articles.

Instead you could perhaps make the TOC button display the chapters within the current article on a wider display and revert to the current behaviour on phone/tablet.

5KB is amazing. I thought that this would be a great replacement for bootstrap-wysihtml5 until i saw IE missing from your browsers list.

Btw, for the drag and drop inserting of images. You should probably check the url of the image and if it is from local file storage then upload it to the server and insert the resulting link back. That would be a cool feature to have in a editor.

This is where macros (C) come in to play. Using macros (do all the bit shifting and masking inside) you can write very human readable code that is easy to maintain and while at the same time offers all the advantages of using bit-masks.

The major advantage of bitwise operators for me is the memory savings that come with them. I used to write the route calculation algorithms for routers and every bit/byte save had an tremendous impact on the total capacity of the router. We use bitfields to set and store various things from simple flags to multi-bit values, all inside a single integer variable.

Thats pretty cool. I'm currently doing the same at Ko Phangan in Thailand spending almost the same (well, maybe a couple of dollars more per day). And i've been more productive working like this than i was at home.

Btw, just curious. Does your place have a fast Wifi connection or are you using 3G internet for your work ?

Any plans of releasing an affiliate API ?. I'am current creating a travel media site (think Tumblr + Tripadvisor mashed together) and i would love to integrate a intelligent, accurate & unobtrusive little flight search widget to the site.

For instance when a user visits a page under any destination (say Bangkok) I would like to present him with something like 'Flights from {Your Location} to Bangkok starting at {xyz}$" to get him to start his flight search.

Here the 'xyz$' pre-search number should be a real price that the user would see in the search results and not some unrealistic number that sites like Tripadvisor and Expedia use as link bait. The start location should be the user's current location and the destination should be from a list of options (e.g {dest: "Ko Phangan, Surat Thani, Thailand, Asia"}) specified while calling your API.

A few months back i explored various options available at that time and gave up on the idea as being impossible. But now, since you are making the impossible possible.. maybe you could do something about it? I'am sure that many other publishers would be interested as well.

Hmm.. couldn't resist inserting a plug here. But the site you mentioned is very close to what i'am building now http://www.kettik.com.

Like you i spend a lot of time before a trip researching on the kind of experiences i could have once i get there. And being an independent traveler i'am more interested in the kind of activities i could do by myself rather than having someone arrange it for me. So i designed the site along similar lines.

User experiences(blogs)/photos/attractions/activity/sleep/eat/

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Especially on the way how the content is presented, there's a lot of scope for improvement there.

I intended to do photography so that i could make a living doing something i loved. It seemed a great idea at that time.

But while i loved the process of taking the photos (i do mostly landscapes, which basically involves patiently waiting for something magical to happen http://saravk.kettik.com/go/photos), i didn't quite enjoy the process of turning that hobby into an income generating endeavour. So i guess i finally came to the same realization as you did. To keep my passion and profession separate.

I also realised that i didn't lose my love for coding, especially when working on my own projects. So i'am now working on a solution for my original problem. To find a way to help travellers create, share and monetize their content.

Nice. Congrats on your move. I wrote a similar post exactly 2 years earlier when i decided to downshift from my job of about 10 years and go live in the mountains doing photography http://www.kettik.com/go/articles/16. Reading your post made me go down the memory lane and examine my own journey.

Fast forward 2 years and i have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Monetarily its been a complete flop, failing to earn even a single paise in the past 2 years. But spiritually, the memories and experiences gathered along the way have been priceless. Sounds like a classic Mastercard ad, doesn't it :D

All this experience did motivate me to create my startup. I have to say that i totally resonate with your "the only code I write will be for my personal projects" line. It feels more fulfilling this way. But ofcourse there is no guarantee that this would arrest the rapid depletion of my bank balance (as opposed to taking up parttime consulting gigs). Only time will tell.

I'am using Font Awesome (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/). Thanks for the heads up i'll look into the issue, luckily its occurring for me as well on Firefox, so should be easy to fix (hopefully :)

I'am working on Kettik, a blogging + content/services monetization platform for travellers. The landing page is pretty bare (on purpose) so i'll link to a user profile page (mine) which should give you a better overview of the site.

http://www.kettik.com/meet/saravk

It started as hobby when i quit my job couple of years back and wanted to travel the world & blog about it. I set out wanting to become a travel photographer but instead i found myself spending more time on the site, learning on the go and hacking it together bit by bit (this the first & only website i've ever built).

Now it has come to a point where i believe i could turn it into a viable startup. But the transition from a 1-man hobby/startup to a proper business seems to be quite a daunting prospect, especially since i hail from an environment with little or no startup culture.

Digital Ocean looks interesting. But if you want a dedicated box check out Hetzner.de. 49Euros/month gets you a i7 Quad core beast with 16GB RAM and 2x3TB HDDs.

Moving from Linode (20$/month plan for 512MB ram) gave me something like 30x capacity increase for only about 2.5x price increase. Mind blowing.

Dunno if that would work. Adobe (unlike Amazon) would require your credit card billing address to be in the US. Not sure if it has changed now, but a few years back i tried buying Adobe Lightroom from the US site and was unable to do so.

My workaround was to buy the retail box from Amazon, ship it to a friend in the US and have them email the license key to me.

You can always prepend the form input with an appropriate icon (or even text).

http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/#examples

I'd guess that smacontech created the site for smiproperllers.

Initially i was of the "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" mindset. But after going through a few of the sites i couldn't stomach the blatant rip offs.

Especially by companies like http://smacontech.com/ which claim to be design firms. Worse still, they seem to regurgitate the design into some of their client's sites as well (http://www.smipropellers.com/)

Not sure how you can proceed here. But if you are intent on naming and shaming them publicly, try posting a message on their facebook fan page's wall. That should make them situp and take notice of your complaints.

Good point about the screen reader. I've never considered it before. Thanks.

Personally i dont like using labels and instead use placeholders with tooltips in my forms. But now i might have to reconsider that approach.