thinkzig

I think Pavlina is an odd guy, but I've found some of his advice to be quite helpful over the years.

I don't agree with everything he says, but I don't think he's a "crank" either.

My suggestion: once I've defined an API, let me apply it to multiple targets that I supply to you programatically.

The use case driving my suggestion: I'm an affiliate for a given eCommerce site. As an affiliate, I get a data feed of items available for sale on the site, but the feed only contains a limited amount of information. I'd like to make the data on my affiliate page richer with extra data that I scrape from a given product page that I get from the feed.

In this case, the page layout for all the various products for sale is exactly the same, but there are thousands of products.

So I'd like to be able to define my Kimono API once - lets call it CompanyX.com Product Page API - then use the feed from my affiliate partner to generate a list of target URLs that I feed to Kimono.

Bonus points: the list of products changes all the time. New products are added, some go away, etc. I'd need to be able to add/remove target URLs from my Kimono API individually as well as adding them in bulk.

Thanks for listening. Great work, again. I can't wait to see where you go with this.

Cheers!

Oh wait... there is!

Viewing the source from the "6 of the Most Enjoyable Theme Parks in the Nation" [1] article referenced in the parent article shows that the phrase "guaranteed best price on airfare" indeed is a straight link to Expedia.

[1] - http://www.cheaptravelblog.net/6-of-the-most-enjoyable-theme...

[2] - http://i.imgur.com/gGoo9jL.png

I've read over it a few times and I still have no idea what your service does or why I would want to use it.

Please consider revising your copy to focus on the benefits you're providing to me. What problems are you solving for me? Why is using GoodFilms going to make my life easier or better?

Good luck to you. Congrats on launching and I hope you do well with this.

Cheers.

I would find the image conversion particularly useful. Is it possible to upload a file and have it saved at multiple sizes? I couldn't see a way to do this in your API docs.... or else I'm just reading it wrong.

Congrats and keep up the great work.

Could you give us some insight into how you come up with the ideas for your apps? What's your thought process for determining whether an idea is worth pursuing or not?

Congrats again. Your success has always been an inspiration to me and is very well deserved.

That sounds like someone was arrested and charged to me.

I'm using the latest version of Chrome on Windows 7 if that helps.

I think most places use the "Forgot Password" link now so I think most people come to expect it. I know I would.

Thanks for releasing this. I'll let you know how it goes. HN delivers again!

Visual Studio Magazine [1].

I've enjoyed reading all your comments on this thread. You clearly know your stuff. Based upon what you've seen so far and what you know about the ASP.NET framework, do you see any way around this short of some patch from Microsoft?

[1] - http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2010/09/14/aspnet-s...

Section 5.1 of this whitepaper[1] by Rizzo and Duong, that lists Ruby on Rails as one of the web frameworks vulnerable to this attack.

Granted, this paper was published in May, and I'm not a Rails guy, so it's quite possible this has been patched as well.

[1]http://usenix.org/events/woot10/tech/full_papers/Rizzo.pdf

It looks interesting but I found the documentation page to be pretty lacking. The simple example they show just allows you to pass a height and width parameter, but the home page says you can do cropping, watermarking, etc.

These are indeed incendiary words, and they were used to make a point, but certainly not to make a personal attack, so I apologize if it came off that way.

My point in using language like this was to illustrate how others may perceive you and your business if word of the "Virtual Tony" gambit got out. It's not fun to see things like this written about you, and it can kill your business.

In my experience there are two kinds of clients that don't pay on time: clients that genuinely want to pay but can't for a legit reason, and clients that have no intention of paying you and will do anything to weasel out of it.

It's the latter that could really use the "Virtual Tony" against you if it ever came to light. These are bad people anyway, and by doing something dishonest in return you are just giving them more ammunition to get away with it.

Did you happen to catch the case of Carl Herold on Reddit a month or so ago? He had a deal go south with a client and the guy smeared him all over the internet and almost ruined his business. [1]

In that case, Carl was in the right and still had all kinds of harm done to him because of a disgruntled client. Imagine if Carl had pulled the "Virtual Tony" on this guy. I'm guessing Reddit wouldn't have jumped to his aid to help him out because they would've seen him as dishonest.

To your point, you are certainly justified in following up with a client if you're not getting paid. And I certainly think there's validity to the idea that a third party, good cop/bad cop relationship could help things turn out better for everyone in the end.

What I totally disagree with is making that person up and impersonating him or her to your client. It's a bad road to go down and not worth the potentially devastating hit your reputation would take if it got out.

1- http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ckcjc/reddit_can_...

If a client isn't holding up their end of a contract with you it doesn't suddenly make it okay to start lying to them to get what you want.

What happens when the client finds out that you invented a fake person to pressure them into paying you? What happens when word gets out in your industry that you are a liar who will stoop to deceiving your customers if you're not getting what you want?

There are few, if any, things more important in business than your name and your reputation. I would much rather take the loss on the contract and move on than risk being seen as untrustworthy.