Last december Maciej Ceglowski, founder of pinboard has written a post about the fact that all great services which don’t charge are very likely going to disappear in the long run.

Maciej Ceglowski:

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software.

The reason I’m writing this is that while premium services are making money they’re not necessarily attracting enough users to actually accomplish something while at the same time, free, VC-backed startups are doing exactly that. The middle way is to design a so called freemium service where premium users have to pay for free ones, but they’re obviously not going to tell them that.

Now after having migrated this blog over to a static version I needed a replacement to enable visitors to send me e-mail while at the same time not opening the doors for spammers. PHP scripts can easily fulfill that job but I want something else.

While having used the free version of Wufoo in the past I thought it’s a no brainer to go back and leverage it again. Obviously paying for it this time. Then it hit me while checking the pricing page. The cheapest subscription is 15 dollars per month, while free plans are displaying ads to your visitor. What are they thinking! Paying 15 dollars, which is more than I pay for hosting, while only receiving about two messages during that time period.

That said, please startups and SaaS companies, remove the free model and make premium reasonably priced.

As for Wufoo, i’d guess replacing the free plan with one where you’d pay 2 dollars a month would make them more profit than showing ads on those confirmation pages.

When talking about showing ads to free users checkout the tweet by @romeroabelleira and give it some thought (translated):

Dear Advertisers on Spotify, I don’t even pay for Spotify, I’m therefore worth nothing to you too. Sorry, Juan

And don’t waste your time looking for the contact form, I’d just put the e-mail address into the footer for now.

Ten days back Nikon announced their new flagship model, the Nikon D4. It’s clearly got a higher Megapixel value - as needed for marketing purposes. On the side it has gotten some long awaited features such as proper HD video recording with all the bells and whistles you’d expect. For more details listen to James Banfield below.

Dslrnewsshooter video: Nikon D4 - video feature run through from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

The most innovative feature in my perspective however is the Ethernet connection and what comes with it, a camera management console completely built in HTML and JS so one’s finally able to leave all the proprietary, heavily bloated, vendor specific crap software behind and focus on realizing ideas.

Checkout the video WHY by Corey Rich below if you want to see what’s possible with a D4 presumed you know what you’re doing.

WHY - Nikon D4 Release Video from Corey Rich on Vimeo.

A great read if you’re working on the next big thing yourself, because you’ll might need a team to work on it later.

Once you are no longer alone working on your project, the code you have written sets an example. - Philip Hofstetter

Also, I think it’s totally fine to hack together an initial version, hackathon style, you can improve later on however the structure, needs to be reasonably stable.

Right now I’ve already broken most of my New Years resolutions, I admit it. Why? - Well, I thought of me as a machine, meaning that I could easily deliver one hundred percent without an issue. In fact, that’s extremely unlikely to happen and I obviously knew that but I still made that promise with myself, you need to aim high right?. However, the impact it has by breaking resolutions or not reaching your goals makes you feel terrible or worse even makes you feel sorry for yourself. That’s why I recommend you watch this excellent talk by Tony Schwartz and start correcting your self expectations by stop wanting to prove yourself to others or yourself. It’s good to have goals but a weekly to do list has nothing to do with dreams just doable tasks.

via swiss-miss

During the last week well known bloggers have started turning off comments in a move to not having to care about sorting out SPAM and having more time for the actual writing. Matt Gemmell has written an excellent summary about this, for those of you interested.

While I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever do the same, I started wondering on how to realize something like a Link-Blog with Octopress. Turns out it’s pretty easy.

First modify the article.html inside source/_includes and exchange the lower <h1> part which is responsible for the page view title with an if-else clause.

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<h1 class="entry-title">
  {% if page.ref_url %}
    <a class="reference" href="{{ page.ref_url }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
  {% else %}
    {% if site.titlecase %}{{ page.title | titlecase }}{% else %}{{ page.title }}{% endif %}
  {% endif %}
</h1>

Then continue with adding an if-else clause to the atom.xml file too. Extend the <link> element inside the parent <entry> with the code below. Done.

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{% if post.ref_url %}
  <link href="{{ post.ref_url }}"/>
{% else %}
  <link href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
{% endif %}

If you want to create a Link-Blog post now, add ref_url to the markdown file header and Octopress takes care of the rest.

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---
layout: post
title: "This Awesome Article"
date: 2012-01-13 21:20
comments: true
ref_url: http://somesite.com/thisawesomearticle.html
---
This one is really great, check it out.

Alternatives

If Jekyll is too nerdy for you, then please checkout tumblr whose philosophy has been based on link-blogging for ages.

On the otherside if Octopress and therefore Ruby is still to cool for you to use then give the newly released Second Crack by Marco Arment a try. It’s also baking your markdown files to flat html ones, but it’s written in PHP.

(Sidenote: PHP and I were never really friends)