Jake Scruggs

When we built SQuiD (easy project management for link building), we had a problem in that the client was on a limited budget and yet the site had to charge people subscriptions for usage. Which, if we wrote that part ourselves, would take all sorts of time to research, implement, and (most importantly) not screw up. When you take people's credit card numbers there is no such thing as a small security breach. Luckily my teammate, Joseph Leddy , remembered hearing about Spreedly -- all they do is "Make Selling Subscriptions Easy." We decided to use Spreedly and it saved us a ton of time (and consequently money). Here's 9 reasons why I loved working with Spreedly: 1. Free to start and test with! Spreedly doesn't charge any money to sign up and run tests against their API. You start paying only as soon as you're ready to start collecting real money. 2. Ridiculously test friendly You can create a pretend (test) area that you can charge accounts to. It looks...

Just a quick note to let you all know that Rails Conf accepted my talk. It's called "Using metric_fu to Make Your Rails Code Better" and you can find more details here . If you'd like to join me in Vegas for 15% off you can use this nifty code: RC09FOS Hope to see you there.

Today, for some reason, I was thinking about a start-up I worked on few years ago and how we could go really fast because (almost) no one used the darn thing. When you're working on a small budget you need to get that code out into the wild as soon as possible so you can figure out if this idea of yours has any legs. So maybe you test a bit less then you would with a big application and you don't pair program that often and workflow is managed through IM and email and you take shortcuts because if you didn't the code would never see the light of day. That's the way it has to be and everyone accepts that. However, there will come a reckoning -- and it's not fun from the owner's point of view. The site's popular -- it's making some money but your development team is slowing down and asking for expensive things. They've brought on a new guy, but in addition to costing more money the team (which has now ballooned to two people!) is going slower for so...

For the last few months I've been working on SQuiD : A website that helps you get a better Google ranking through totally honest means. There's a lot of not so honest and even downright nefarious ways to try and increase page rank, but this site takes the high road and focuses on link building. Link building is way of taking a look at your competition and getting the places that promote them to promote you -- by asking nicely. This may seem naive but it works, builds your reputation, and doesn't leave inky black stains on your soul. There's a lot to cover about how the site works so I've created my first ever screen casts and you can find them here: SQuiD Tour Part 1 SQuiD Tour Part 2 I should warn you that we charge for using SQuiD so if paying money for goods and services isn't your thing then keep on walking, mister. In the coming days and weeks I'll be blogging more about the technologies and processes we used to develop SQuiD (Teaser - we used Spree...