Jordy Blog

Wanted: Firefox Plugin Dump and Reload

OS reinstallation would be much easier with a plugin that could dump your entire list of Firefox plugins and reload them later.

Does anybody know of a plugin like that?  I’ve used screenshots to remember which plugins I’d installed, then reinstalled them one at a time, but that’s a remarkably sucky way to go.

What do you use to avoid having to find and reinstall your favorite plugins one at a time? Anything?

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Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Released

The new Ubuntu is out. Download it here if you haven’t already.

For my non-technical readers:

Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux, an operating system that can replace Windows. Linux is open sourced, meaning you can look at the code and see how it works. It’s also free to download and includes a ton of world-class open-source software: Firefox for web browsing, OpenOffice for office software, Gimp for photo editing, and much more.

Ubuntu is easy to use, and it’s a great way to familiarize yourself with Linux. Plus it can save you a lot of money if you’re buying a PC that doesn’t come with Windows. (Or, if you’re currently pirating Windows –you know who you are– switching to Linux can help you get legal.)

There is a ton of help online. There are also lots of local user groups like Ubuntu Utah that can help you get it installed and answer any questions you have along the way.

Anyway, give Linux a try; you’ll probably like it. I for one, am never going back to Windows.

Software for Starving Students 2007.01 — RELEASED

Here’s the press release we sent out:

The 2007.01 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

More info:

• Project homepage
• A complete list of included titles
• Screenshots

Please help us out by seeding the torrent, spreading the word, and burning copies for your friends and family. (Nothing spreads holiday cheer like good, free software.)

Happy Downloading!

Last year this got hundreds of thousands of downloads after getting posted on the front page of Digg. Here’s this year’s entry.

Wordpress MU 1.0 Released

In case you didn’t already notice in your blog dashboard, WordPress has released version 1.0 of its powerfull “Multi-User” platform. Go team!

Online Word Processing with Writely

If you haven’t seen Writely (the beta online word processor) yet, you really should check it out. I think the “online platform” thing is going to be huge, and (although I love Excel) I hope Writely rocks proprietary Microsoft to its core. Writely looks sharp and is sure to grow with the funding and reputation of Google behind it.

Some things I like:

• Writely imports and exports to Open Office’s newly ISO approved OpenDocument files
• Writely automatically backs up your files every 8 seconds
• Writely supports multiple editors at once (a purpose for which I used wiki all through college).
• Writely versions your editions so you can easily revert to previous state.

One thing I don’t like:

• “WWW2″ right in the URL… It’s just too much.

I’m sure I’ll find other things I dislike as I try it out. Writely is free, but it won’t accept new users until June or July. I signed up for the mailing list to get an early crack at it.

Introducing Google SketchUp

It looks like Google SketchUp is now live. But besides enabling users to put mock ups on Google Earth, I’m having a hard time seeing how this acquisition fits into its Google’s overall search strategy. Still, it looks pretty cool and will probably be great for branding. Plus, I believe that if it’s cool enough, a revenue model will follow.

A free trial version is available for download, but it’s currently only available on Windows. Alternatively, if you’d like to see a great, fully-featured, open-source 3D graphics and animation suite, check out Blender. It’s definitely not as sleek as Google SketchUp, but it’s much more functional.

FC5 Released

Fedora Core 5 is out. Here are the release announcement, release summary, release notes, mirrors, and torrents.

For those who don’t know, “Fedora Core is [a Red Hat sponsored] operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever. It is developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards.” It’s also the distro I dual boot to. Very clean.

Happy downloading!

SSS PageRank

The PageRank for Software for Starving Students (via Google’s toolbar) went clear from 0 to 5 with the latest data update. That’s pretty indicative of the almost immediate success the project has enjoyed. The site has only been up since the very end of December but has had some really incredible growth. Just check out the Alexa traffic:

As the project’s volunteer marketing director, I’ve had a valuable lesson cemented in my mind. SoftwareFor had practically no link recruitment; we just focused on making a really cool (free) product. We included top-of-the-line open source programs and gave it a sleek GUI. About the only “marketing” involved me staying up all night and polishing up some very good quotable text for the webpages. In other words, we focused almost exclusively on making a cool product –which (after all) is what the market wants.

The project got almost 1000 Diggs (thus the traffic spike) because it was cool. People from all over the world linked to it because it was useful to them, not because a bunch of suits spent a lot of money trying to jam it down their throats. Our traffic spiked and our PageRank jumped because we provided a service that people legitimately wanted.

Conclusion: The market doesn’t care how much you spend on it. Instead it wants to know what you can do for it. If what you offer is cool, then your “customers” will market your product for you. A cool product (or service) almost sells itself.

Although link recruitment (for SEO purposes) and reaching your market are important, many people and companies take the wrong approach. It’s not about beating the system via comment spam, round-the-clock commercials, or anything else. It’s the classic standoff of “Push vs Pull”, and with today’s technological sounding boards, “pull” always wins.

The best way to market your products is to give the market what it wants. In other words, just be cool. Be remarkable, and people will remark.

SSS is Apple’s Featured Download

Jake Spurlock IMed me pointing out that the Mac version of the Software for Starving Students CD is listed as Apple’s featured download for Mac OS X. This is great exposure for the project. Good work team. :)

January Geek Dinner

We finally posted details about the upcoming Geek Dinner. I wanted to give the DevUtah site an overhaul first, but alas, no time. Here they are:

DevUtah’s next Geek Dinner will be held at 6:00 this Tuesday night at the Miller Business Innovation Center on the Salt Lake Community College campus (9690 South 300 West, Sandy).

We’ll have two short educational presentations by accomplished attorneys who will discuss legal topics for geeks. Nathan Nelson will talk about legal aspects of selling your software concepts, starting your own software development company (code shop), or becoming an independent developer. David McKenzie will discuss popular myths about software patents and copyright ownership relating to contractors.

We will also have a brief mini-presentation by Dave Turnbull from SoftwareFor.org, who will talk about some of the successes and failures of the last release of “Software for Starving Students”, which had over 25,000 downloads in just a few days.

The event will be catered by Panache Catering. Each attendee is required to contribute $7 to help cover the costs. Attendees are strongly encouraged to prepay burnsadria@hotmail.com via PayPal, although cash and checks will also be accepted at the door.

Hope to see you there.