Kyle Ritter

We have been getting bad about adding new products to TheBuilderStore.com…bad in the way that we don’t add enough. Luckily, Frank has been better about sending me photos, most recently he sent me a photo of a diamond shaped gable vent. So now I have added diamond vents to our website. I assume we will get more sales as a result, since we sold these to people when they called and asked for them as a custom shape, so we should pick up people querying the search engines now. Which will be nice, as business has slowed up a bit.

Sometimes, I think I waste too much time trying writing custom scripts to perform functions similar to existing open source ones. Part of my problem in that regards is that I’m a control freak: there is always some special set of features that aren’t included in available packages, and I always convince myself that it would be easier to write it from scratch then hack apart an existing number.

Case in point: I was helping my friends at Flying Rhinoceros figure out what to do about integrating a live help into their flash heavy sites. Not having the time for that sort of undertaking, we began looking for available solutions. While none where specifically meeting our needs, we did find one that we could modify quite easily at Darren’s Script Archive. For easily modded flash/php type things, that place is the best. And even better, incredibly cheap!

WebProNews published an article today entitled “The Future of Web Video“. YouTube might be the media darling (and I’m the old man who yearns from the halcyon days of the internet, when having a dot com name meant you could afford Network Solutions’ high fees and crappy email template registration thingy.

The article barely glosses over any of the “On Demand” offerings from current cable companies, while suggesting that no one is going to get off the couch to watch web content. Little is mentioned about the invetible merger of the two. My girlfriend and I pay for comcast broadband + television package, but we never watch regular cable anymore. Why bother, when onDemand is so much better? Nicole and I can watch movies, series, and even watch some crappy cable access style cotnent created by Portland’s local freaks. I think you can even watch PDXposed onDemand.
Essentially, onDemand IS web video in high resolution, only you can’t access it via a pc or standard browser interface…yet. The right product at the right time will fill that void. WebTV was about 8 years too early, but had the right idea about blending two mediums: web and television. As PCs became cheaper, WebTV seems to have been mostly abandoned in favor of real internet connections. My logs across my entire network of websites show close to 0% WebTV users accessing my content. Maybe I’m not targeting the WebTV audience all that much, but still, 0% is still something.