Stan Carney

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Inexpensive Explainer Videos

Inexpensive Explainer Videos

Posted by on Jan 23, 2013 in Marketing, World Wide Web | 1 comment

I wanted to A/B test a new home page on Vogogo featuring an explainer video. Having been involved only loosely in the process before, it didn’t seem like there were many options outside of using companies that specialized in the creation of explainer videos. Unfortunately, they all seem to fancy themselves as modern day Donald Draper’s who want thousands of dollars, and months of design and review, to create just one video. A video that you have no idea how it will impact conversions until you release it into the wild, making the whole process seem rather dated compared to the rest of the web.

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Simple Django Asynchronous Processing

Simple Django Asynchronous Processing

Posted by on Jan 17, 2013 in Programming | 0 comments

Django has several asynchronous processing options available like Celery, Chronograph and Django Tasks. They all offer lots of features but if you want something simpler, maybe just the ability to send a webhook on the submission of a form without having the user wait around for the webhook to complete (or the remote site timeout), it seems like overkill.

As a result I came up with the following simple Django asynchronous processing application. It was written to work with Django 1.3 but works with Django 1.4’s, sans the new select_for_update functionality.

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Posterous to WordPress

Posterous to WordPress

Posted by on Dec 8, 2012 in Marketing, World Wide Web | 0 comments

I finally got around to moving from Posterous to a self hosted WordPress instance. The future of Posterous is unclear, since they were aquried by Twitter, but that really didn’t influence my decision to move. My main reason for moving are the limitations of Posterous such as the disallowing of embedded Javascript and not having the ability to do sitemaps. Initially this wasn’t a big deal, I just wanted something quick to set up. At the time I looked at Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress.com and landed on Posterous. Matt Warren had set up the WordPress instance we use at Vogogo and, after playing with it for a while, I was sold. The community support and the amount of plugins available set it ahead of pretty much everything else, assuming you want to host it yourself.

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Node.js Application Dashboard

Node.js Application Dashboard

Posted by on Oct 3, 2012 in Programming | 0 comments

We had a few extra monitors kicking around the office and, rather than just letting them sit there, I decided it would be good to use them as dashboards to communicate important information to the rest of the company. I figured that if live production stats were broadcast throughout the office it would help focus people’s efforts while at the same time building a sense of unity.

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Google I/O 2012

Google I/O 2012

Posted by on Jul 6, 2012 in Programming, World Wide Web | 0 comments

Last week I attended my first Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I meant to post last week but I have been trying to get caught up on things on the Vogogo front, as well as getting over a cold I came down with right before leaving. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the conference so I registered the day before, which was a good thing as when I returned the following morning to have breakfast I was presented with a massive line of people zigzagging throughout the main level of the Moscone Center waiting to go up to the 3rd floor for the keynote. I made the decision to skip breakfast and hop in line in order to get a better seat.

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