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What I’d Change About 99 Designs

Dustin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:30:07 +0000

I recently ran a logo design contest on 99 Designs. It was my second contest overall. The first one I did about 2 1/2 years ago was such a success, that it seemed a no-brainer. This recent contest turned out to be a flop, despite paying twice as much this go around.

I love the idea of 99 Designs, but I think the execution could be improved. I was thinking about it this morning as I drove in to work and had some thoughts that I think would improve the service overall.

While 99 Designs is great for the person looking for a design, if I were a designer, I really doubt I would submit anything on 99 Designs. It would be far too much work with very little chance of receiving any compensation. I would perhaps use it as a stepping stone to build a portfolio, but beyond that, I’m sure I could find far easier & betters ways to get paid.

So the first thing I would do is find a way to reward more designers. Here are my initial thoughts just for a logo competition:

Charge $499 for every logo competition.
Allow designers to submit up to 3 designs. It seems on my last competition I had about 60 designs submitted. It seemed half of them came from one designer, and the majority came from 3 designers. Limiting a designer to 3 designs would force them to choose their best work. They could always remove a design and replace it with another.
To play off the name of the site, I would limit the contest to only 99 designs. So in theory if each designer submitted 3 drafts you could only have 33 designers. But not every designer will submit 3 drafts so there could certainly be more.
For every submission the designer will get paid $1 at the end of the competition. There would be checks in place so that the contest owner could mark a design as garbage and X number of other designers could concur to boot the awfully bad design. That designer simply wouldn’t get paid. So out of the gate, $99 of the $400 would be allocated to paying out submissions.
Each designer that submits work would be allowed to rate other designs, but not their own. As a project owner I would be curious to get such immediate feedback. At the end of the competition, the design with the highest average peer rating would get $25 (consider this the Miss Congeniality award). That leaves $375 in the pool
At the end of the submission deadline, the project owner could have some choices: 1) refund of $370. They are out $129 for running the competition ($5 service fee would go to 99 Designs to cover any credit card transaction fees and just a small charge for using the service. 2) Create a poll. They would select their top 6 designs to create a poll. Anyone selected for the poll would get a $10 bonus. That would leave s the pool with a minimum of $315. 3) Choose an outright winner. At this point 99 Designs takes their usual cut and the winner gets the rest.
If the project owner chose to do a poll and submit to friends & colleagues on twitter, the highest rated logo would receive an additional $25 leaving the pool at $290. At this point the project owner would select a winner. 99 Designs would take their cut and the winner would get the remainder.

I don’t know if this would fix much, but I have a feeling it would attract more designers and more designs per competition. The numbers are just straight off the top of my head. Some testing could be done to find the sweet spots.

What do you think? What would you change if anything?

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Audio Books!

Dustin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:07:07 +0000

Commuting is a drag. There was a point in time that I had a 5 minute commute to work, then I decided to move and my company said I could just work from home. When it came time to switch jobs my walk down the stairs turned into a 45 minute (one-way) commute – and that was on a good day. So for the past two years I’ve found myself in the car for a minimum if an hour and a half each day. It seems insane at first thought, but I am a bit surprised how I have gotten used to it.

How do I pass the time? There are two main things I do that keep me sane: 1) Eat Sunflower seeds – this is mainly to keep me awake. I find I don’t get drowsy if I am constantly eating something and Spitz BBQ sunflower seeds are my addiction. 2) Listen to audio books.

Why audio books? A few reasons. First, I’m not much of a music person. I never have been. I will listen to music on occasion, but it gets old fast to me. I know, I’m strange in this regard. Second, I like learning new things. I don’t really get that from music. Third, there are lots of books I would like to read, but I just don’t have the time. My average weekday looks something like this:

4:00 AM – 6:30 AM: Freelance or independent work
6:30 AM – 7:15 AM: Shower & get dressed
7:15 AM – 8:00 AM: Commute to work
8:00 AM – 5:00 PM: Work my butt off!
5:00 PM – 5:45 PM: Commute home
5:45 PM – 8:00 PM: Family time (dinner, play with kids, etc)
8:00 PM – 10:00 PM: Time with my wife (watch TV, talk, eat ice-cream)
10:00 PM – 10:30 PM: Ready for bed, read, pray

So that is an average day, I wouldn’t say I stick to this schedule religiously, but it is somewhat predictable if nothing is on the schedule. So you can see I don’t really take the time to read. Dave Ramsey often says that the average millionaire reads one non-fiction book per month. So the best way for me to get in all the books I would like to read, is by listening to audio books.

Here are some of my favorite sources for audio books:

Audible.com: this like the Amazon of audio books. (In fact, they are now owned by Amazon). I have a monthly subscription that I pay $14.95 per month for. This gives me 1 credit per month. Each audio book is 1 credit. Also, as a subscription member, you get discounted pricing on all books. If a discounted price of a book is less than $14.95 I will likely purchase it without using a credit and save my credits for more expensive books. I’ve learned that credits will expire if you don’t use them, so this encourages me to continue to find new interesting books to read. I do find that my favorite are self-help type books like Zig Ziglar stuff. It energizes me. I look at the membership price as an investment in me.
BooksShouldBeFree.com: This is a very easy to navigate site with all kinds of audio books created from public domain sources. Check out the top 100 to see some of the great classics available. Sometime is is nice to step away from non-fiction books and just be entertained.
LibriVox.org: This may be a duplicate listing because it seems to me that all the listings in BooksShouldBeFree.com are essentially taken from LibriVox. It appears LibriVox is build on top of WordPress, so I mention them mainly because they are the source we can all thank for these free audio books, but their user interface will not be as nice as the custom interface of BooksShouldBeFree.com.
iTunes: While this integrates well with my iPhone, there are a few reasons I don’t use iTunes much. I have purchased AudioBooks on iTunes in the past and after switching computers and iPhones, I don’t have those books available and I can’t find them in my account history. I’m sure this has improved since the invention of iCloud. Second, they tend to be more expensive. Generally a book selling for $29.95 on iTunes I’ll just find on Audible.com and use 1 ($14.95) credit.
Podcasts: So I know they are not audio books per say, but if you run out of books you want to listen to, check out some podcasts that are in your interest area. The best place to find these are on iTunes, and most of them are free.

So how do I play these audiobooks? I have an iPhone. I found it works great with Audio books. If I have audiobooks in MP3, I can tell iTunes to treat it as an audiobook. This gives me the ability to have all the audiobook features such as 30 second rewind, remembering position, skip when shuffling, playing at half the speed or playing at two times the speed.

I currently use an FM transmitter because I still have the factory stereo in my 2000 Maxima. But I have found that I can’t seem to find a station that is totally clear and I’ve tried a few FM transmitters. Soon I will be installing a new stereo that integrates better with iPhone. I went in to Best Buy last week and found a good stereo can be purchased for $100 and their geek squad will install it for $50 plus parts needed for integration. I believe they said parts for my car will run around $100. It is a bit more expensive because I have the Bose stereo system. So I’m looking at around $250 to get a new stereo installed. I’d say it is a good investment since I’ll be using it 7.5+ hours per week.

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Why The Cash Envelope System Didn’t Work for Us

Dustin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:01:29 +0000

Now let me preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Dave Ramsey and I see the wisdom in all of his teachings. Now that said, I readily admit I don’t follow everything he says. One area in which I don’t follow along is with the cash envelope budget system.

I think the system is excellent. I do believe it “hurts” more to spend cash. It is hard for me to break a $20. I like that fact that when I spend cash I usually end up with change that becomes savings because I never spend change (I don’t know that Dave ever mentions that one, but it is a nice bonus).

My wife and I tried the cash envelope system. We gave up after only two months. Here are the reasons why:

Inconvenience. Let’s face it, debit cards make life so much more convenient. It is not convenient to got to the bank or ATM once or twice a month to allocate cash in your envelopes. I hate waiting in line at the bank so I avoid it at all costs. My credit union now allows me to scan checks from home and deposit them online – even less reason to ever go there.
Inconvenience. Yeah, same reason, but different. It is inconvenient to pay with cash. Grocery stores are not so bad really – unless you use the self-checkout, which I often do – again, because there is usually no lines there. Putting cash in those machines is downright painful. And really, who pays for gasoline with cash anymore?
Location of the envelope. It’s happened on more than one occasion that my wife is making dinner and finds she is missing an ingredient. So what does she do? She calls me and asks that I pick it up on the way home from work. If I don’t have enough blow money in my wallet I reach for the debit card.
Have you ever reached the checkout and when it is time to pay you realize you don’t have your wallet. That is really mortifying to me. I’m frantic in that case. I start looking through my car for a hidden $100 bill (it’s never there) or a blank check (never there either). Even if I only live 3 blocks away it is inconvenient and super embarrassing. If you forget your envelope and you don’t realize it before you get in line to checkout, are you really going to go home and get it? Not me, I’ll pull out the debit card again. Of course my intention is to go back to the bank and deposit the amount of cash I spent, but I don’t because that is so… inconvenient!
While it “hurts” me to spend cash, it seems to have the opposite effect on my wife. If money talks, all it ever says to my wife is “goodbye”. I’m not being rude here. She readily admits this. It’s not more difficult for my dear wife to spend cash than it is to spend money in any other way. In fact, I think it is sometimes easier for her. It seems to call out to her to be spent! OK, now I’m being rude .

Let’s face it. I love debit cards. What I like about them is that if you use your debit card as a debit card (as opposed to credit card) it withdraws the cash out of your account immediately. Your bank account balance is updated immediately (at least where I bank it is).

Here are some more things I love about my debit card:

It is free to use. I have a free checking account. I don’t have to pay for new checks as long as I use my debit card.
My bank let’s me customize it. I generally put pictures of my kids on it so people can tell me how cute they are. I sometimes wonder though if my bank would be opposed to me scanning in my drivers license so people don’t have to ask for it when I use my debit card in place of a credit card.
It’s thin. With all that cash, your wallet can become a pain in the butt – literally.
It doubles as a credit card. For those places that don’t accept debit cards but can take credit cards, my debit card works fine. I generally have to wait a day or two for the transaction to appear on my bank statement though.
Did I mention it is convenient?

So, how do we make use of the timeless & effective envelope budget system with debit cards? We use Inzolo.

Whenever I get income, be it a paycheck or any other form of income, I decide where we are going to spend that money and allocate it to various virtual envelopes.

Whenever we spend money using our debit card, the transaction imported lightning fast into Inzolo and I specify what envelope that money came out of. I can visually see all my envelope balances. If I go over in an envelope I can easily move the exact amount I need to cover the difference from another envelope.

It’s basically like haveing dozens of savings accounts set up in your bank and deciding where each transaction will come out of. I can even split transactions so that different portions come out of different envelopes.

Inzolo also has a mobile web interface. My wife and I both have iPhones. So we can pull up our Inzolo account anytime and see our envelope balances.

So if you love the idea of the cash envelope system, but don’t feel you have the will power to stick to it, I urge you to give Inzolo a try.

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Webfaction Review

Dustin — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:29:24 +0000

I was looking at my web stats and noticed I was getting a lot of traffic to my limited review of Webfaction. To recap, I tried out there account then decided to cancel, and they were prompt and friendly at delivering a refund.

Since that time, I have set up two Webfaction accounts. When I started developing Inzolo.com, I wanted to set it up faster and keep it separated from my VPS accounts mainly so I could keep cost separate with this business as I was going to be working on it with friends. Setting up Django was ridiculously simple compared to the steps I had to go through with cPanel. I was able to set up the latest version of Django and the latest version of Python with a few clicks of a button. As far as access goes, I still had SSH to go in and work directly on the server, just as I can with my VPS account.

Webfaction has a method of breaking things down by domains, applications, and websites. Once you understand how it works, you will fall in love with the simplicity of the system! You can set up multiple domains. Then you can create various applications, such as:

Django on WSGI
Django on mod_python
Static/CGI/PHP
Subversion (What?! I just saw this, I’ll have to check it out!)
Ruby on Rails
Symbolic links (perfect for Django’s admin media)
WordPress
AWStats
Drupal
Joomla
… and a number of others

Once you have a domain and an application, you specify how you want to access that application on your domain.

Let me give you an example with my latest project – Mini Site Tracker. I originally set this up on my inzolo account, but again, I wanted to keep expenses separate so I ordered another Webfaction account. I set up a domain – minisitetracker.com. I then added two subdomains:

www – points to minisitetracker.com
* – wildcard subdomain so I can use any subdomain for accounts in my web application

I then set up the following applications:

admin_media – points to Django’s admin media for the built in admin control panel
minisitetracker – Django 1.0.2 running on mod_wsgi 2.0 and Python 2.5
mst_media – Static/CGI/PHP for storing all my media files associated with my Django application (images, javascript, css)
osticket – Static/CGI/PHP for installing osTicket on
wordpress – WordPress 2.7.1

I then map my application to my website like so:

It’s really that simple. Databases are equally easy to set up – you can set up MySQL or PostgreSQL. I haven’t found that anything missing with Webfaction that I used in cPanel or DirectAdmin VPS accounts.

That about sums it up really. I love Webfaction. Webfaction rocks! Really, for what they do, I don’t think they have any real competitors that I know of.

If you find this review helpful, please sign up using my referral link.

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Webfaction Limited Review

Dustin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:48:18 +0000

UPDATE: Since writing this review, I have set up two accounts with Webfaction. Check out my latest review.

I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for Webfaction for new Django developers who want an easy to use hosting solution. As you can see from previous posts that I have a VPS that I’ve set up Django on. I was having problems getting one of my applications to work, and I wondered if it was because of my setup. So I decided to try out Webfaction. After all, they offered a 60 day money back guarantee. So I signed up and set up my account. I must admit it was much easier to set up than my VPS, plus I could choose to use Python 2.5 (which was never really able to get working on my server setup) and you can use mod_python or WSGI. I was quite impressed with their setup options and the ease of setup. It turns out there there was a problem in my code because I ended up getting the same error on their servers as I did mine. I was just confused because it was working on my windows development machine, by not my Linux servers.

So having lost the need for Webfaction, I decided to exercise their money back guarantee. I think this was the best part of the process. I sent them an email. The responded quickly telling me how to cancel the account from the control panel. I think within a half hour I had the money back in my PayPal account and an email confirmation letting me know and saying thanks for trying their service.

Surely, If I ever need another Django host or if it comes to the point where I need to use the latest version of Python, I will look to Webfaction. If I have a client looking for hosting, I will recommend Webfaction.

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Clicky Is So Much Easier!

Dustin — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 16:24:53 +0000

I wrote a post about how to hack Google Analytics to show the full path on referrer URL. Honestly, its a pain in the butt at best. I went digging around the net and came across a new stat tool that shows the full URL. It’s called Clicky and I have to say, it is so much easier to use that Google Analytics.

A long time ago I used to use pphlogger, which was nice, but I had to install it on my own server and it seem to create a lot of overhead. What I like about it is that I could see what a particular visitor did while on the site.

Clicky gives you the same functionality, but it is in a much nicer format and easier to read.

Plus, they are adding new cool tools continually, like the spy, with allows you to see traffic occurring in real time! This may only be useful to you if you get a lot of traffic

One more feature I have to mention is the ability to make a sites stats public. I set up clicky for a customer and sent her the link the my stats. She LOVES it and she doesn’t have to remember another login to see them. Kudos to me!

So, let’s see what people searched for yesterday to find my blog…

So, what are you waiting for, go get Clicky. They have free basic accounts and cheap plans if you have enormous traffic or want a few special features such as the spy and RSS feeds – you do get a free trial on these when you initially sign up.

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What do Mormons, PDAs, & DVDs Have in Common?

Dustin — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:54:13 +0000

I was looking at some web statistics this morning and I noticed that I had quite a few hits on my DVD site coming from a forum at LDS Mingle. I was intrigued (mostly because I’m LDS) so I signed up temporarily to see what the talk was about. A member there suggested visiting DVD Anthology to track your DVD collection, keep track of movies you loan out and print lists of your movies – exactly what I created the site for

Another man piped up and suggested, why bother when you can keep track of all your movies on your PDA and not have to be tied down to the internet. They argued for a bit about the pros & cons of each. I thought it was funny, because little do they know that the creator of DVD Anthology is also the owner of Shilbon Software and LDS PDA!

I wanted to join the conversation, but it required that I pay for membership. Since I’m already married I couldn’t see the value in it.

[tags]LDS, DVDs, PDA, PDAS, Palm, Clie, DVD Collection, Mormons[/tags]

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Gmail Delete Shortcut Key

Dustin — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 20:57:03 +0000

I love Gmail, but I find it rather annoying that they feel you never need to delete an email. It took them about 2 years to add the delete button. I don’t know why they didn’t add a shortcut key with it. Certainly, they must have had thousands of requests for it already.Well, I’m happy to report that you can get a shortcut key to move your messages to the trash. But you will need the following:

What to do:

Install Firefox (if you are not using it already), then install the Greasemonkey extension. Then download the Gmail Macros script for Greasemonkey and read this post carefully to learn how it works. Now you can press ‘t’ (for trash) to move that non-spam, unimportant message to the trash!

[tags]Gmail, Greasemonkey, Firefox, Delete, Trash[/tags]

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Local Business on the Net

Dustin — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:25:40 +0000

There are lots of local business on the Internet. I think every business should have a home page. It’s basically like have a really cheap glorified yellow page listing – but so much more. You can share everything about your business and even automate some of your business processes.

There was one occasion where we wanted to get our carpets cleaned. I started with Google, but couldn’t fine any local results. Then I turned to the yellow pages and looked at each of the ones that had websites. When I found one I liked I made the appointment. The person on the phone asked why I selected them. I told her because they had the best website (and believe me, that was not saying much!).

So if you own a local business, make sure you have a website. If you have a website, maybe you could benefit from search engine submission by servicewrap.net.

(This was a sponsored post)

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Web 2.0, or Star Wars Character?

Dustin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 20:34:03 +0000

I guess I just don’t keep up enough. I only scored a 28 here: http://www.cerado.com/web20quiz.htm

Now I supposed after the popularity of this quiz sets in, all Star Wars characters will eventually become web 2.0 sites

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