Cool micro sites and businesses

As if Geoffrey Grosenbachs excellent Nuby on Rails blog and soothing voice on the Rails Podcast he has launched a great new business idea with PeepCode.

PeepCode is a monthly series of very high quality screen casts aimed probably mainly at rails developers. Each one costs $9 and is sold via Lulu. It really is a fabulous idea and with Geoffrey’s usual top funky style is brilliantly executed.

I bought the TextMate Basics for Rails screen cast as I know I have only scratched the surface of it. To be honest I also wanted to give something back to Geoffrey as his blog, podcast and funky plugins are always incredibly useful.

So in the first part of it he covered all the basic stuff in TextMate, that I’m ashamed to say I never was aware of. I’m going to have to go through it again to make it stick.

There is also great in-depth coverage in how to customize TextMate to follow your own usage patterns and environment using custom snippets and commands. I knew most of these already, but I really like Geoffrey’s approach to covering it. He’s persuaded me to immediately create my own bundle and add to it as I go along. It really is very easy todo and also very powerful.

I wish him lots of luck with this project. It really is a great twist on selling content.

I like to follow the situation in Colombia and Latin America closely for my libertarian blog Econotrix. For that the Colombian news paper El Tiempo is one of the sources that I read frequently.

Recently thy have featured a complete redesign into something that looks more like Wired than a Latin American newspaper site. It looks very nice and offers RSS, readers blogs (complete with beta badge), forums and much more.

My favorite paper here in Panama is La Prensa which is not bad from a technical stand point. They have recently introduced a news blog. Unfortunately La Prensa hide the URLs for their articles within an annoying single frame frameset.

I am now officially launching TimeCert which is a trusted third party service for proving the existence of a file, object or document at a certain time.

Applications

Lets say your application managed confidential documents or emails. You could use TimeCert for maintaining a proof that a document or email existed at a certain time. As this timestamp is generated outside your own server, it is evidence that you did not manipulate say a contract after the timestamp.

You could also use it to timestamp a sourcefile to help out with Intellectual Property issues.

Technical details

It was written in about an hour the other morning using the new Camping micro web framework and the Mongrel.

There are full open API’s. You can read all the nitty gritty about how it works over on
Neubia my tech blog

While I am using Wide Word for almost all my writing needs these days, there are times when I need to generate fancy print or pdf documents. I have been using NeoOffice which while powerful is heavy and still has a non mac like user interface.

So when ole Steve announced iWork ’06 I thought cool. The price tag fits with my cheap ass bootstrapping goals and it looks like it would provide slick documents, thus saving either my design time or paying someone.

The few reviews I saw of iWork ’06 all focused on Keynote, but I was more interested in Pages. Therefore I decided it best to write a quick little first impressions of Pages 2. So read on for more…

Just stumbled over this great directory I want to of Web 2.0 apps.

It takes the approach of asking you what you want to do, such as Communicate with other people and Do things with web pages.