j. paul arterburn

This is the story of why I built theBCycle.Me Mobile Web-App The...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:49:00 -0600

B-Cycle Station

Main/Help Screen - Choose a city

Default map view showing all stations

Selected B-Cycle Station

DIRECTIONS: shake to clear the route

Easily see nearby restaurants/bars

This is the story of why I built the
BCycle.Me Mobile Web-App

The Background

On St Patty’s Day my girlfriend and I bought 24-hour passes to B-Cycle, which has 52 bike sharing stations all throughout downtown Denver. The very next day we both bought annual memberships. It’s completely changed our transportation method & places we now frequent. B-Cycle is like Redbox for bikes. You check out a shared bike at one station and check it in at another station. As long as you get from one to another in less than 30 minutes, no additional charges apply. They really push for short rides so that bikes are readily available and thus prevent the problem of somebody hogging the bikes so no other members could use them ($4 every 30 minutes after 1 hr of continuous use). Memberships are very affordable, too: $80/yr (on sale for $59 until 4/30), $20/wk, or $8/day.

The App

Now it’s time to scratch my own itch. Each station has about a dozen or more “docks” (which lock the bikes into the station). On average there are 5.8 bikes available per station for you to check out (I’ve been running my own stats), but at any given time there can 12: which would make the station full and thus not available to check-in any more bikes - or there could be 0: which means you’re not going to check-out a bike at this station, obviously. Therefore it’s important to know which stations you 1) want to check-out from and 2) want to check-in to. There are a few mobile-friendly options for doing this currently (including an official B-Cycle iPhone app), but they’re all terrible to use - none of them allow you to quickly understand the availability of each station. So I created my own B-Cycle Web-App. You won’t find it in the iPhone App Store or Android Marketplace - it’s simply a website you visit on any smartphone: BCycle.Me. It utilizes the latest mobile technology so it feels & acts like a real app.

Some features of the app:

Availability is shown by green (4+ bikes available), yellow (4 or less), or red (0). This is all real-time, you can even test it: check-in a bike, hit refresh, and watch the counter go up.
Bike-friendly routes can be shown from one station to another by setting your “A” starting station and “B” destination station (shake to clear directions)
What’s Around: after selecting a station, scroll down to see nearby businesses/restaurants

Scan this with your mobile phone’s QR reader (iPhone / Android) or simply visit BCycle.Me to see the app in action:

Over the past few months I’ve been building out sites...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:57:00 -0600

All the daily deals on one page

Alerts: emails for only deals you want

Over the past few months I’ve been building out sites around the daily deal space (ie. Groupon/Livingsocial). There’s been a ton of activity around these sites - new ones popping up, mergers, sites going stale, and big players posting huge losses.

I started out with a product called preVU that is a daily deal aggregator - much like Yipit - but I didn’t like how the competitors were displaying the deals nor were they showing all the deals available (specifically for Denver). So naturally I threw some PHP together and built my own which is now up at the new address since I recently sold the pre.vu domain name: Dealert.Me (http://dealert.me). The other piece to the puzzle was an alerting system. Rather than sending an email everyday with the current deal that you may or may not be interested in, I wanted to be able to get an email only if there was a deal I wanted to know about. So I built a keyword tracking tool that does just that called Dealert.Me Alerts (http://dealert.me/alerts/). It’s fairly straight-forward to use - put in your email, your location relevant to the deals, and the keywords. It will go out and check 2x per day on a nation-wide level of every deal currently available - if any of your keywords match up against the current deals you’ll receive 1 email with a list of all the deals you might be interested in.

There is a 3rd piece that is actually the most important. In terms of business, when someone says “most important” it usually means “most profitable” and this is no exception here. I license the preVU/Dealert.Me product to bloggers whose content is focused on providing deals either at a national level or for a specific city. Examples of this in action are at Mile High on the Cheap and Atlanta on the Cheap (two of my best clients). This licensing feature is a win-win for myself & my clients. The deals shown on their sites have their affiliate codes built-in to every link so anytime somebody makes a purchase through their customized preVU page they make a % of the sale (payable by each daily deal site). The deals are automatically updated for them every 3 hours, and the install code is less than 1/2 a tweet using a Wordpress plugin. If you’re a blogger or know any blogger that might be interested in this please have them reach out to me via paul@sixteenseven.com.

PROTIP: Some people might be worried about only having their email as the login for Dealert.Me Alerts as anyone could then find the keywords associated with your account - if you’re using gmail you can create your own “password” by putting in your email with a ‘+’ sign at the end of your username. Ie. username@gmail.com -> username+eiou@gmail.com (‘eiou’ is my password in this case). Using the plus sign is a built-in feature that all gmail accounts have and it will still get sent to your original email address.

An opening class act

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:44:22 -0700

I ended up at a Baywood show on Friday at Larimer Lounge - Baywood was amazing, as expected (check out ‘I Can Breathe Again’ for some sing-along-clap-along). The surprise, however, came from one of the opening bands out of Boulder who call themselves The Yawpers. The lead singer/guitarist rocking cowboy boots was an all-out entertainer with great talent. I picked up a copy of their new EP and thought I’d stream it here for ya’ll to hop on board the Yawp-train.

FLOW

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:19:46 -0700

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it)
Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

A growing TED

Sun, 22 May 2011 10:40:10 -0600

A growing TED:

I’m a huge fan of TED, so I’m delighted to hear that their facebook page just reached 999,999 other fans. TED is one of those things that I wish more people knew about. Ideally, all 230 million adults in the US would be fans. They cover topics that will be sure to reach every single one of us in some way. It’s about pushing the World to a better place through individual motivation. While some speakers do cover some political topics, they manage to bring people together to find solutions that actually work. If you stay out of politics because you think your voice doesn’t count, I would invite you to pick a few TED talks to listen to and see how you feel after. They are free to watch so next time you catch yourself watching a reality show just turn it off and watch a 10 minute TED talk instead. You might just get hooked like I did.

preVU gadgets for iGoogle & Gmail

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:23:00 -0700

Right now most of the daily deal sites require you to put in your email before you can even view the deals for any particular city. This is so they can send you daily reminders of what the deal of the day is; this isn’t exactly the best user experience in my eyes. It’s certainly best for the daily deal companies, I understand, as it’s putting their content in front of you without you having to do anything different from your normal daily online behavior. You’re going to check email, twitter, facebook, and a few news sites likely every time you connect. If a company can put their content in one of these mediums (or all of them) they have a higher chance of clicking with you, pun intended.

What I didn’t want to do with preVU was what I hated with the other sites and force-require an email address for this sole purpose (I would, however, like to at least provide that option in the future if a user desires the daily emails). I set out to come up with a creative solution that is both effortless but not aggressive and landed on this: gadgets - or widgets, whatever you want to call them. Starting with iGoogle & Gmail as well as the iframe solution that website owners can install on their own sites if serving a local crowd.

It’s a simple 1-click install to add the gadget to your iGoogle home page: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=dealert.me/ig/prevu.xml

It takes a few more steps to get it working in Gmail, but it’s well worth it: How to add gadgets to Gmail

This is what shows when you click on the title of the gadget (“preVU »”)

I’m still working on converting cities over to the widgets, so right now it’s only Denver, Omaha, & Topeka. As soon as I’ve got the current city list widgetized, I’ll start adding more cities to the line-up. Any requesters will get their city done first: yo@dealert.me

preVU - daily deal aggregator for the smaller markets

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 08:44:00 -0700

I launched a new project this week that acts as an aggregator for the plethora of daily deal sites on the Internet. If you were one of the 111 million viewers of the Super Bowl last Sunday you were exposed to two of the major players in the arena: Groupon & LivingSocial.

Visit the new site here: Dealert.ME

Part of the idea for the site is to make it easier for people to get this information without having to subscribe to a dozen different emails. But making them visit another website not normally in their daily routine (ie. email, facebook, twitter, news, rss reader, etc…) is not exactly conscious as well. So I’ve developed a widget that will allow sites such as local ISP’s/newspapers/tv stations and the like to drop on their sites and give their readership an added bonus they’re likely interested in - everything likes 50% off, right? If you find the widget useful, please request your local news site to get in touch with me and I can custom-make one to fit their requirements.

Some of the important pieces of Dealert.ME came from the following sites:

PHP Geo-Targeting Script: this makes it so when you simply visit http://dealert.me it will auto-direct you to the nearest city you live by. I put a little added touch to the script that Eric describes as I have an array with the latitude & longitude of each city that has it’s own preVU page; it then grabs the lat/long of the city you live in and does a distance calculation between the preVU cities & your city to determine which one to send you on to.
Quick & Dirty PHP Caching: preVU’s code is designed to go out to each of these sites, grab the content and bring it back to you. The bottleneck in this process is the connections between my server & the daily deal servers. It’s only slightly faster than if you were to go out and load a dozen websites. It’s roughly only about 30 seconds to do this, but in today’s environment would you really stick around if it took a website 30 seconds to load? Heck no! That’s where caching comes in handy…I’ve setup a cron job to do this ‘capture process’ every 3 hours and basically save a copy of what it found in a static file. So rather than you having to take the 30 seconds to load the site every time and pull fresh content yourself, what you see is a copy of the data that’s at most 3 hours old. Because the majority of these sites don’t change content for the entire day (hence the name, *daily* deals) this process works wonders for site speed.
I spent quite a bit of time deciding how I wanted the hovers to look when you moused-over a link. I eventually settled on qTip2 - a jquery plugin that is extremely customizable.
Mobile Browser Detector: if you visit http://dealert.me on a mobile phone, you’ll be presented with a much more simplified version of the site. This two-line script made it a breeze for me to determine a mobile-user and give them the mobile-friendly version of the site.

Goodbye Vlookup: Index/Match can play nice with sorting

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 09:24:48 -0600

I’ve been using a lot more of Index & Match functions together instead of Vlookup because it’s a faster calculation for Excel, faster for me to put in and copy across (especially multiple columns of lookups), and can go pull back values both right & left of the lookup column (as well as a matrix lookup).

I ran into a sang recently, though. By default, Index/Match doesn’t play nicely with sorts. It almost hard-codes the formula into the cell so your values get completely mixed up after a sort and is now looking up the original value that is likely on a different row.

Google found me the solution. Simply remove the sheet reference (bolded) of the lookup value right after the match: =index(sheet2!B:B,match(sheet1!A2, sheet2!A:A, 0). It will put all sheet references in by default, so type the formula, hit enter, and then correct it…and then copy it down.

So you can tether with your phone, do you go USB or Bluetooth?

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:47:06 -0600

Go USB; the results speak for themselves…

iPhone 4 (AT&T) over bluetooth:

iPhone 4 (AT&T) using USB:

I also have a Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) that I use for work, so I tested the same theory…

Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) over bluetooth:
(dial-up modem, no user/pass, dialing #777)

Blackberry 8330 (Sprint) using USB/Sprint Smartview:

charity:water soda-pop challenge

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:55:00 -0600

charity: water caught my eye earlier this year as an organization that I felt was running their 501(c)(3) nonprofit the right way. There are a lot of different types of charities - many who also do amazing things, but what I really like about this particular one is how they provide long-term solutions as well as how the finances are handled.

charity: water makes it clear that they are not a relief organization (like, for example, Red Cross). When the earthquake hit Haiti and many people were in need of clean water, the organization directed them to their sister nonprofits who were more focused on providing immediate relief, however, charity: water now has wells in Haiti - which you can see because they tag each one with a GPS location on Google Maps.

Their finances work differently than any nonprofit I’ve seen as well. One of the goals of the then 30-year-old founder, Scott Harrison, was to not only to focus on providing a basic need to those who struggle to get it, but he wanted to add accountability to the process so every donor was able to understand every dollar was truly helping. So he setup the organization as two separate accounts: one to cover the costs of running it and another that goes towards building the wells. All public donations are sent to the latter and they take on private donations to cover the costs of administration salaries and even the transaction costs paid to the credit card companies. If you watch the video below you’ll hear Scott talk about how they went broke, but had millions of dollars in the donor account (the organization was saved by the founder of Bebo).

I work in a corporate office that has a very nice cafeteria which provides locally bottled water. What’s startling, however, is that in order to get to this bottled water people walk past a drinking fountain (filtered), a bathroom faucet, a sink faucet, a water/ice machine (also filtered), and a fountain drink machine that serves water. People say they like the taste of the bottled water. We apparently have 6 “flavors” of water to choose from just 30 steps from each other and 1 in 8 people worldwide don’t even have access to potable water.

My challenge to all of you is this:

order water

…instead of ordering a soda or alcoholic drink with your meal when eating out for a month simply say “I’ll have a water, please.” Keep a tab on yourself what you would have spent and donate that to this great cause. If you extend this challenge to the others at the table with you, this act will easily generate the $20 that can give clean water to someone for 20 years. Hopefully it will also give you a new appreciation for one of the easiest things we can take for granted everyday: water.

I must admit, the thought of this challenge came after hearing about an 8-year-old who gave up her dinner and instead ate rice & beans for a month.

I was inspired to write this post after watching Scott give a presentation during Big Omaha in May of 2010. His “a ha” moment came after a friend bought him a $16 margarita in NYC - the same price that can feed a family in Liberia for a month.

I’m not the only one thinking about this issue - Matt Cuts, a famous Googler, just wrote a wonderful piece describing how he personally cares about charity:water as well as what Google is doing to help save clean water.

This is a video of Bekah Zachritz’s original song -...

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 00:16:14 -0600

This is a video of Bekah Zachritz’s original song - she’s one of my favorites who plays occasionally at the Classic Bean. You missed her tonight, but you can catch her this Thursday, Oct 7 at the grand re-opening of Bosco’s - it’s hosting a tweetup.

The best things in life aren’t things. Micheal Franti -...

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:57:00 -0600

The best things in life aren’t things.

Micheal Franti - I’ll Be Waiting

This song is off his highly recommended album that drops next Tuesday called ‘The Sound of Sunshine’. I went to a concert of his earlier this year where he played a lot of stuff off this album (the rain helped create a lasting memory).

Update: You can stream the entire album during the week of 9/20/2010 over at Spinner: http://www.spinner.com/new-releases#/5

I’ve updated my portfolio site to actually represent the...

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:07:01 -0600

I’ve updated my portfolio site to actually represent the work I’m able to accomplish - simple, elegant & to the point (whether it be informative or productive). Let me know what you think of the new design in the comments.

And, of course, if you know someone in the market for a new website most of my clients work with budgets of $400 - $2k; feel free to get in contact with me.

Check it out @ http://www.sixteenseven.com

Pride (In the name of Love) Dierks Bentley with the Punch...

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:15:00 -0600

Pride (In the name of Love) Dierks Bentley with the Punch Brothers & Del McCoury

I’ve been playing Dierks’ new album playing today, this song definitely stood out - great cover from Bono’s early years.

If you dig covers in general, you’ll be thrilled to land on another tumblr blog called Copy Cats.

A few weekends ago I took a quick trip to Denver and it happened...

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:44:00 -0600

President Farley & myself

Meg along with a few other alumni

A few weekends ago I took a quick trip to Denver and it happened to be the weekend of a Washburn Alumni meetup at a bar in Cherry Creek so Megan and I checked it out. I ended up winning the license plate holder giveaway, which I kind of felt like a fraud for being an outsider just showing up and winning (but it looks so good).

Football season is here...

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:14:07 -0600

Below is the 2010 Nebraska Cornhuskers football schedule in Google Calendar format. If you already use GCal and want to follow Husker football, just click the “+” button at the bottom to add this calendar to your list.

Free app that extends a Mac's multi-touch trackpad (and the new MagicTrackpad)

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:37:36 -0600

I’ve been using an add-on for Snow Leopard called BetterTouchTool that I’ve found to greatly improve the use of the already awesome touchpad on the latest Macbooks, including older Macbook Pros. It made my transition to Google Chrome on the Mac a breeze because it allowed for me to use the multi-touch gestures of the touchpad for things like tab management, paging, and, of course, page navigation such as back/forward. In the picture below you can see a few of the gestures that I’ve added to Chrome. I also use it so Picasa can use similar gestures that iPhoto uses (rotating photos, zooming).

Anyway, this doesn’t need to be some wordy review because there’s honestly nothing to sell - the tool is FREE - much thanks to the German developer, @boastr_net.

Grab the latest version here from the official site. If you want to use the gestures I’ve setup for myself, you can download mine and import them into the app if you’d like.

Punk Rock Roots

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:08:50 -0600

It’s like I passed out for 20 minutes and remembered all these songs…295 songs from Pennywise/NOFX/The Ataris/Sugarcult & more (list in spreadsheet form here). It’s like we’re back in Logan Pribbeno’s 1996 Jeep Cherokee all over again.

Grooveshark playlist:

Enjoy the elements. It’s not quite Necker Island…but...

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:01:00 -0600

Enjoy the elements.

It’s not quite Necker Island…but honestly, it’s plenty for me.

Against Me! - “I Was A Teenage Anarchist” Do you...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:45:45 -0600

Against Me! - “I Was A Teenage Anarchist”

Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire

…not to be played consecutively with Pennywise - Bro Hymn (might be too much anthem sing-along for 8 minutes straight).