kotrotsos.com

This has got to be the best episode yet!
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I am getting into the whole Ning stuff. I didn’t realise the potential until now. The whole walled garden approach of most SN’s like Myspace and Hyves put me off quite alot. There is only one social network and thats’ the internet right? But Ning is different, it has opened up the entire platform. Not only can you change the look of the site, add widgets and stuff but request the code that runs on the Core (The Core is the Engine that runs Ning) called the Playground. So there is not much of a limit (as far as I can see) in what you can do.

Now why am I saying this? It’s because we’ve build 2 iterations of a social network from the ground up, and it’s been quite a long and windy road. With Ning you got most of the tools at your disposal. Using the Playground as well as adding some premium services can create an as compelling a network as one can get by building it yourself. I think it will set you back a 35 dollars a month to disable ad’s (or ad your own), add more space and bandwidth and your own domain name. And that’s about it.

Note: I didn’t get to check out the Facebook platform yet- I imagine it beeing about the same, maybe less then what Ning is doing. I know of Kickapps and will look at that also.

The network I created is called battlous.ning.com (what else right?)

The theoretical maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum is expressed in sheepsecs (Ssx), calculated as follows:

Speed of light (c) divided by wooldrag (Wd) + Welshmen (Wm), where wooldrag is a species-defined drag coefficient determined by the length and pliability of the fleece and Welshmen is the number of locals who have turned up in their wellies, and are hanging on for dear life.

Wooldrags have recently been calculated by researchers at CERN, and the latest experiments shed some light on the phenomenon, but it is still mysterious. The effect is similar to friction here on Earth, but is due to the interaction of the wool and fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. Researchers have applied to the EU for further funding, but it has been put on hold as a result of the recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

For example, an unshorn Welsh Mountain Badger Face, with a wooldrag of 67, chased by three Welshmen will ultimately attain a Ssx of c/(67+3), or 4,282.74 km/sec.

Alternatively, a newly-clipped Finnish Landrace, with a wooldrag of 23, worried by just one Welshman has a theoretical Ssx of c/(23+1), or 12,491 km/sec.

Clearly, the difference in these two results means that a compromise standard is required. The El Reg Ssx uses the classic Cheviot as its sheep of choice, with a wooldrag of 50. Wm is in this case 0, since everyone knows that Welshmen do not in fact have intimate relations with sheep and any reference to the same is just a cheap attempt to drum up laughs.

The Vulture Central standard velocity for a sheep in a vacuum is, therefore, c/(50+0), or 5,995 km/sec. [from: the Register]

I love japan, the japanese and japanese facemarks.  Here are my favorites, you have to read them the natural way- horizontally (unlike smiley’s).

(._.) and (O.O)

(^_^) and (>_<)

(><) and ((+_+))

and m(._.)m (bow)

It is finally done! Rails app is working fine now thanks to the support staff of Site5. I believe they tracked it down to a permission issue. I don’t know if my foot needs to be stuck firmly in my mouth, they didn’t point out who’s fault it was (good support. )

so….go see. http://battlo.us

Kuler, the colour-theme manager /slash/ creator has an API. Now this might not seem interesting at first, I mean- it’s just (don’t kill me) colours and stuff. But thinking of it abit more it would be cool to have an ever changing colourtheme on my site. Like everyday it would change the colour combinations on kotrotsos.com to reflect the most populair colorcombo’s on Kuler. No?

I love their statement btw. ‘Kuler your live’ That’s awesome.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Kuler

Gawd it’s so frustrating. Site5 is a top-notch hosting provider, gives me perfect service- but it is already taking alot of time to get battlo.us up and running as an application (not the site) It’s not completely their fault, I can’t give it my upmost attention at the moment, so there is alot of time in between calls. But it’s frustrating none the less.

I am trying to set up a bare rails app called battlous. I then check it in my browser, it gives me the welcome screen of rails but it also gives me the application error (application failed to start etc). When I do the exact same thing on a new site (15pixelsoffame.com) then it works the first time around. THAT makes it so frustrating…

Well, i’m sure that this get’s fixed. In the mean time. This is the text that I wanted to put up, i decided to put it here.

Ever wondered what would happen next?

The setup is as follows: Both Wolverine and Predator fight in the woods somewhere in Canada by night. Predator has an obvious advantage of his armor, night vision and is a keen hunter, but Wolverine has hyper sensitive smell, Adamantium bones and claws.. Who will win?

Now you and your friends can decide who will win, create battle’s between your favorite character, fictional or non-fictional like: Obama VS Bill O’Reilly, Hiro Nakamuri VS Rogue or Lara Croft VS Duke Nukem.

So there you go, battlo’us is all about Comic Battles! On the net, on your mobile, you and your friends decide the setup, the contestants and the outcome!

Although product development didn’t really start in earnest yet, some milestones have been reached

• The domain is up and running.

Or that’s only one milestone, mind you I do this in my ’spare’ time (which is shared with many other spare time activities with my family) And since I have a high stress full-time job at the moment it’s unlikely I get alot done during the week. But I will journal my progress here. I do plan on moving this journal over to it’s on space, be it Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku or my Tumble blog. We’ll see.

I am toying around with the idea of opening up de development of battlo.us. And I mean everything including (but not limited to):

• product development
• business plan
• Design + XHTML Wireframing.
• Development
• Marketing and monotization.

I am not sure because I can’t really see in the future and what it would mean for the product itself. It will mean more work for my part and I guess more accountability, which would maybe be nothing less then a good thing.

I know Carsonified did this with their Amigo product, that is where I got the idea from in the first place. I am usually the type that just crams out a product and put’s it out there to see how it goes. But somehow I feel this is different.

I am going to formulate my pitch and put that on my blog(s) today or tomorrow. We’ll see how deep this rabbit hole really goes.