Mark Fletcher the CEO of BlogLines writes Stealth Start-Ups Suck :

Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length of time before launching their product or service. In many industries, creating a new product or service takes significant time and effort. During this time, being in stealth mode may make a lot of sense. But creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that’s being generous. I’m speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONElist over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in 3 months. By myself. It can be done. And I suck at it! Just ask all the engineers who have had to deal with my code.

I agree with all his points. Read it all.

I started going down the stealth route, but quickly dumped the idea for much the same reasons he says. With Ruby on Rails it is even quicker to do stuff, so there is no excuse to not get your app out in front of people.

Paul who I met at Reboot is starting up a new web service SiteVista for checking out what web pages look like from a whole range of web browsers. It’s pretty cool and extremely useful.

In this blog post he is debating openly about pricestructure for his service. This is one of those subject areas that are very scary to open up, so congratulations to Paul for having the guts to do so.

I want to do so for StakeItOut as well, but will wait until such a time that I have a few more features in it for me to tell the StakeItOut story better.

YubNub has to be one of the most original sites out there. It bills itself as “A social command line for the web”. It basically has a bunch of pre formatted search url’s that you can type into one place.

YubNub was written in Ruby on Rails as StakeItOut is. It was actually written in less than 24 hours for the Rails Day competition and is an excellent example of what can be written by a good solo coder in short time.

I’ve added a stake command to it myself. See the man stake page for how to use it.

Internet Explorer

I’ve done a few changes to the layout which now means that IE should work better. As I haven’t got a good windows box available, I can’t fully test it yet. Please let me know what further problems there might be at [email protected].

As always I recommend Firefox.

Convert your tags to Screens

The other big news are screens. Screens are essentially special purpose tags that you can use to organize your most important stuff into screens. They work just like tags except that there is now a button for each Screen, so you can find them quickly.

Ideas for screens:

• Dashboard – For your most important links or web services
• Admin – Put links to all your blog/webapp admin pages on one screen
• Stats – Put links to all your web server and feed statistics on one page

To create a screen just add a tag (eg. “admin”) to your assets. From your main portfolio screen click on the “admin” tag to bring up the admin tag page.

In the top right corner click the little link that says Make “Admin” a screen. Now your admin tag page is a screen.

Nick asked on ruby-talk how to do simple encryption using ruby and it’s built in OpenSSL module.

I’ve just registred an ezcrypto module at rubyforge, which should make it a lot easier to use. There currently is no code there, but I will be uploading something shortly.

However to get started here is a little starter:

require 'openssl'
require 'digest/sha2'
cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new('aes-192-cbc')  
cipher.encrypt
cipher.key=Digest::SHA256.digest("super secret password")
encrypted= cipher<<"data to be encrypted..." # Note this needs to be padded to be the block size of the cipher.

To do decrypt just use cipher.decrypt instead.