RORY HANSEN

Now that I’m living on my own, I’m tasked with doing my own grocery shopping each week. While my weekly purchase is fairly small (a few pieces of fruit, some meat, and lots of prepared foods), I find that I rarely get to take advantage of the deals that are available at the supermarkets. So, instead of buying the bulk peanut butter, I buy the mini jar. Or, I buy one or two buns, rather than a dozen. Or I get the pack of 12 rolls of toilet paper rather than the 36-roll pack. In doing so, I don’t get the same cost-per-item deals that most families would take advantage of.

At the same time, I realize that in my apartment building, there are probably many other young, single professionals like myself that are facing the same dilemma. A possible solution: create a website which allows singles living near each other to find each other and share grocery and supply lists.

Don’t need a full bag of sugar or salt or pepper or any other seasoning or spice? Log into the website, find people in your area that are looking for the same ingredients (with hooks into Google Maps for convenience), and see if they’d like to share.

Understandably, we’re often just talking about fractions of dollars here, but to help with that, make the website credit-based. For example, I buy $10 worth of credits and when I need some salt, I pay $0.25 for a few tablespoons worth and that credit is then dropped into the supplier’s (ie. one of my neighbours) account (with the site taking a small margin).

As the site would be completely localized to the various parts of each city, there’s a great opportunity for local grocers to advertise (coupons, ads, etc.) through the site and target residents that live in the surrounding areas.

Thoughts?

Scenario 1: I’m walking down the street and an idea for a new website pops into my head. I even think of a great domain name, but have no idea if it’s already taken. But I’m forgetful and chances are, will have forgotten the whole business idea and associated domain name before I get to a computer.

Scenario 2: I buy domains and sell them for a profit. While in line at Starbucks, I think of a great one, but don’t know if it’s available. In my industry, domains are disappearing quicker and quicker and my window of opportunity may not exist when I get back to the office.

Solution: Create a service which allows people to check the availability of domain names via text messages from their cell phone. If available, also lets them purchase the domain name.

How would it work:
1) User sends a text message to service containing the domain name their interested in.
2) Service responds with “Available” or “Not Available”. If available, service also sends back numeric reference number and message that says “Please reply if you’d like to purchase this domain name now.”
3) If user replies with intention of purchasing the domain name, an automated phone system calls the user back, takes reference number (to avoid re-typing of domain name) and credit card info and processes the purchase.

Target customers:
1) Those that make purchases based on emotion, gut feeling, or instinct.
2) Domain squatters.
3) Brainstorming entrepreneurs hoping for the next YouTube.

What do you think?

Adsense: $236.07
Firefox Referrals: $793.10

Yahoo! Marketing: $167.39
Google Adwords: $271.80
MSN AdCenter: $5.62
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $68.38

Profit: $515.98

Stumbled across 3 things this week that have me excited:

• Yahoo! Pipes
• Code Igniter
• Facebook API

I’ve been looking for a quality, light-weight PHP framework for a while now, and Code Igniter seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. I’ve known about CakePHP, but never bothered with it… seemed to be bloated with a bunch of crap that I’m not interested in. A bonus is that tests indicate that Code Igniter is faster than CakePHP.

With regards to the other two (the Facebook API and Yahoo! Pipes), it’s just plain exciting to see companies releasing fun, geeky tools and making their APIs publically accessible.

Wanted: Income tax information for Internet-based businesses in Canada

I am looking for books, eBooks, or websites.

If you know of any good ones, please let me know! Revenue from my websites is getting to the point where I’d better cover my bases before the Gov’t comes after me.  : )

Just a quick update on my Firefox + Yahoo! Marketting experiment.

When I first started using Yahoo! Marketting 10 days ago, I was only getting a few Mozilla Firefox conversions per day. Adding the revenue from those referrals up, we were looking at just a couple dollars per day– maybe more if I was having a good day.

Now, Yahoo! Marketting is sending about 100 visitors per day my way, at about a dime a visitor. Plus, some of my pages have started to get listed in the various search engines, leading to another 50 or so visitors per day from natural search placement. Total, about 150 page views per day.

With that traffic, I’m getting nearly 1000% more signups than when I first set up the website. Even with the Yahoo! Marketting costs, my figures show that I reap more from those visitors than it costs to get them to my site in the first place. So, although my $50 credit from Yahoo! Marketting is going to expire soon, I’m going to continue with the service.

Wanna start making some money through Firefox referrals on your own homepage? Click on the Google Adsense referral image on the top-right corner of the page. Not only will it take you to the Adsense sign-up page to get started, but you’ll also be helping me earn a few extra bucks through the referral to their service.

I started work at TELUS over 10 months ago, and since that time, I’ve barely written a stitch of Ruby, let alone learn anything more about Ruby on Rails. My TextDrive account is no longer active and the experimental websites I launched while actively learning Ruby on Rails have been shut down. Essentially, I’ve lost all connection and interest in RoR and the RoR community.

For that reason, I’m renaming my blog from “Rory on Rails” to simply, “Rory Hansen”, as I don’t foresee myself writing about Rails anytime in the near future. Who knows– maybe somewhere down the line, I’ll regain interest in RoR, but right now, my mind and my time are focused elsewhere.

At work, I program almost exclusively in ASP.NET and C#. For the type of development I do, ASP.NET is fine. I appreciate the power of the framework and, given my experience with it now, I can get new webapps up and running quickly and easily. Do I like ASP.NET? Actually, yes I do.

Outside of work, I’m constantly trying to better myself through learning new skills and improving existing abilities. As my buddy Jeff would say, I’m just trying to ”raise my NPV.” Whether it be by reading great business books like Blue Ocean Strategy or Good To Great, or by practicing my networking skills at various conferences around town, I’m consciously trying to improve myself, thus raising my “market value,” so that when I’m ready to find a great new job somewhere, I’ve positioned myself as best as I can to actually get that job.

So, with all of that said, future posts on my blog will be about many of my current interests, such as learning how to play the acoustic guitar, improving my communication and networking skills, making change happen in business, and futher developing my leadership abilities.

Stay tuned!

Rory

I’m now two months into my new job and am neck-deep in development on the two web applications that my team maintains. One thing I’ve noticed so far in the code base is that there are many areas throughout the application where try/catch blocks should have been used, but were not. This often leads to users seeing ASP.NET exception error pages when unexpected errors occur.

To quickly address this issue, I’m implementing application-wide exception handling, so that at least users see a nice error page and can continue on with their work. With ASP.NET web applications, there is a super-easy way to get this going: Use the Application_Error() method in the Global.asax file.

Global.asax.cs:

protected void Application_Error(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   if (Server.MachineName.ToUpper() == PRODUCTION_MACHINE)
   {
      Exception ex = Server.GetLastError().GetBaseException();

      Server.Transfer("./error.aspx?e=" + guid);
   }
}


So, what this code does is this:

1. Check to see if we’re on the Production machine. (Of course, initialize the PRODUCTION_MACHINE to be the machine name of your Production web server.)
2. If so, then get the last error and save that at the Application-level, so that we can access it on another page. Use a GUID as the key, so that we can retrieve it later.
3. Then, transfer the user to the generic error page.

Note: You’ll notice that I did not use Session anywhere in this method. Our web applications are using the ASP.NET State Server to store our sessions and this causes the Session to temporarily become null when an unhandled exception occurs and this method executes. Once this method finishes executing and the code-behind in the error.aspx page begins to execute, we can again access Session.

If you are using the InProc session state, you may be able to store the exception in the Session instead.

Anyway, once we transfer the user to the generic error page, we can do any sort of error processing we want. My current implementation displays a friendly error message to the user, then emails our team the details of the exception, including relevant information from the user’s Session.

error.aspx.cs:

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
   // Get the exception
   string guid = Request.QueryString["e"];
   Exception ex = (Exception) Application[guid];
   Application.Remove(guid); // Little bit of cleanup

   // Insert code to email exception to yourself
}


Here’s a business idea: Create a website that makes it easy for people to create and study using flashcards.

How could this website be profitable? Everyone can create flashcards for free for their own use. If they like, they can then “share” these flashcards with the public, so that others can benefit from their hardwork. But, as incentive to create quality flashcards and share those cards, others would have to pay to access them.

For example, Sam creates a deck of flashcards for his Biology 101 course. He chooses to share them with the public. Karen, who is in the same course at the same university as Sam wants to study using flashcards but doesn’t know Sam nor have the time to create her own deck. So she pays $2 to use Sam’s deck. The website keeps 50% of all payments and rewards Sam with the other 50%.

Throughout university, I’ve often found using flashcards useful for studying, but buying the flashcards from the store and creating them takes so much time that it becomes difficult to justify expending the energy to do so. If I had the chance to buy pre-made, university course-specific flashcards online, I actually might have!

The key idea is that these flashcards would be specifically catered to courses at various universities by students in those courses. This makes them so much more valuable then generic, pre-made flashcards that you can buy in stores, as they would test the exact types of information that you’d need for your course.

They could also be used for years to come, as courses usually change very little over even a number of years. This creates a passive income stream for the flashcard creators.

The website would be totally Web 2.0 centric, with the ability to “tag” flashcards with topics, relevant courses, etc. AJAX could be used to shuffle through the deck while studying. Separate stylesheets would need to be created so that the flashcards could be viewed online or printed for offline use.

The only difficult part would be the actual creation of the cards. Version 1.0 would probably only support text and HTML markup, but later releases would also have to support images (uploading and placement), formulas for physics and math, and perhaps even doodling using your mouse as a pen tool.

Lemme know if you are interested in making this happen!

This news is now a week old, but better later than never, right?!

Anyway, the news: Kodomo 3.5 for Windows is now available. I’ve been using the beta version now for a few weeks, but the advanced features that I was hoping to take advantage of have been so buggy that it hasn’t been worth it. I’ve yet to take this non-beta version for a spin yet, but I plan to do so as soon as I can find the time.

I can’t wait to use the Kodomo debugger for my Rails development; I know it’ll help speed up my testing and debugging dramatically. I just hope that the performance issues that I experienced in the beta have now been addressed, as that was a major show stopper.

I did promise that I’d write up a full review on Kodomo in an earlier blog post, and if I can find the time to do so, I still will. But with Christmas just around the corner and a new job starting in the new year, it’s gonna be more difficult to fulfill that promise.

In the meantime, if you plan on using Kodomo as your development IDE for Ruby on Rails, check out Eric Promislow’s blog where he often posts about Ruby on Rails and Kodomo, such as How to work with rhtml files in Kodomo.