So, a brand-new Iowa-based web startup has launched today called “Townpoints” (@townpoints). The concept behind the new startup appears similar to popular daily deal sites like LivingSocial and Groupon. Basically, the site promotes a local merchant with some great deals. There are, however, a few basic differences behind Townpoint’s effort that are worth pointing out. […]
Web development as a creative art
So, creative projects, MIRITE?! Still going strong, despite the fact that I still have to finish that week 3 poem, and I’m still missing a couple from February when I was on a business trip to Brazil, but for the most part, I’m still there, still creating things on a weekly basis. But lately, these […]
Facebook landgrab sucessful!
I was able to successfully acquire my desired name in the great Facebook vanity URL landgrab of 2009. No longer am I Facebook Random User ID# 501415487. I can now be found at facebook.com/nathanielpayne. It’s a minor thing, truly, but one that I’m happy to have secured. And yes, I was up late at night […]
Facebook completely fails at advertising properly
Facebook has essentially guaranteed that I will never, ever engage with any of their advertising partners. How did they do this? Easily. They did it by completely ignoring me. For the past week, there has been a recurring ad being displayed on my profile sidebar advertising Sexy Singles in My Area™. It features a half-naked […]
Playing around with Paint.NET post-processing
I’ve been using GIMP off and on for a couple of years now, but I just haven’t been completely happy with it. I hate the multiple separated windows “feature”. And it always took way too long to load, even after I completely reformatted my computer recently. I’ve been looking for an alternative. Something with more […]
One last TrustyPig post
Last one, I PROMISE! I just realized that in my last post, I was far too kind to TrustyPig. I gave the TrustyPig admin too much credit, thinking that he was simply the victim of some freelance web developer from China that stole the site design from SmartyPig. Why did I allow myself to swallow […]
More on TrustyPig
I know, I know – I’m already sick of talking about TrustyPig myself. But today, we received word that the TrustyPig admin (“Costy”?) has responded to our claims that the SmartyPig website design was stolen. Rather than post the response on their own blog (which any transparent company would do), TrustyPig opts instead to work […]
TrustyPig changed their site (but I still don’t trust them)
You would have thought that after yesterday’s efforts by the Des Moines online community to destroy TrustyPig’s reputation that something would have changed by now. And will you look at that. Someone has a new site design today! Beautiful. A search on Google for trustypig reveals why that site design has been posted so quickly. […]
TrustyPig steals SmartyPig website
We don’t have many web 2.0 products coming out of Des Moines these days (you can read my commentary about that here). So when something hideous and wrong happens to one of our few entrepreneurial successes, we take notice, and we do something about it. Des Moines-based SmartyPig is a site where you can start […]
Could Des Moines be a web 2.0 hotbed?
A while back, Jesse Stay (FriendFeed | blog) asked a question on Twitter (which I, of course, responded to on FriendFeed, as did many others). It was a simple question: Just curious, if you had one city in the U.S to live, based on affordability and web 2.0 networking potential, where would you live? I […]