links for 2009-02-26

9. Get ramen profitable.

"Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.

The company has created an entire 37 page guide to the development process (below), decisions they made and what they learned during the creation of their PhotoKast app. Their hope is that the document might provide insights for other developers when they start out on iPhone App development projects.

You can practice and test and work out your presentations, you know. Author and speaker David Meerman Scott works from the perspective of perfecting his presentations, mapping them out to great detail, and then tweaking only small pieces while leaving the most of his work intact.

At Wiki-Teacher, we believe that there is an untapped resource within our nation's teachers. Wiki-Teacher is a forum for teachers to share their collective intelligence through their resources, insights, and practices. As a community of educators, we will control the direction of Wiki-Teacher as well as determine the relevance and value of the resources. Wiki-Teacher is made possible through the support of the Clark County School District's Curriculum and Professional Development Division.

This article is intended for developers interested in accessing the Google Data APIs using Ruby, specifically Ruby on Rails. It assumes the reader has some familiarity with the Ruby programming language and the Rails web-development framework. I focus on the Documents List API for most of the samples, but the same concepts can be applied to any of the Data APIs.

This site is an attempt to document, in one place and in a uniform manner, the web services and XML data sources that are provided by the US government.

Everyone caches. This guide will teach you what you need to know about avoiding that expensive round-trip to your database and returning what you need to return to those hungry web clients in the shortest time possible.

A new follower? Should you follow back? Find out if you have common followings with them, and which people you follow that follow them…

What if we could provision and deploy instantly? This is where the difference between “a little” and “none” comes into play. If it’s instant, the portion of time spent on it goes to zero. The development process can then improve at any speed, and deployment/provisioning will never become a barrier. Problem solved.

Typically, with a RESTful API, you’ll have a well-defined URL scheme. Let’s say you want to provide an API for users on your site (I know, I always use the “users” concept for my examples). Well, your URL structure would probably be something like, “api/users” and “api/users/[id]” depending on the type of operation being requested against your API. You also need to consider how you want to accept data. These days a lot of people are using JSON or XML, and I personally prefer JSON because it works well with JavaScript, and PHP has easy functionality for encoding and decoding it. If you wanted your API to be really robust, you could accept both by sniffing out the content-type of the request (i.e. application/json or application/xml), but it’s perfectly acceptable to restrict things to one content type. Heck, you could even use simple key/value pairs if you wanted.