Simon Willison’s Weblog

How can I print out USA postage stamps online using a credit card with a non-US address?

After much research, the answer appears to be that you can’t. To quote http://stamps.com, “The USPS requires you to register your name, telephone number and physical address from which your postage will be printed”. It appears you can only print stamps for mail that is to be sent from your specific registered address, so you can’t use it to prepare stamped-self-addressed-envelopes anyway.

Is Quora an effective tool for participating in realtime conversations at SXSW?

Not really. Quora tends to deliberately under-emphasize the time aspect if when something was posted—I’m still seeing unanswered questions from SXSW 2011 popping up in my feed!

Why are so many YCombinator startups focussed solving logistics, marketplaces or business problems rather than true hardcore engineering problems?

Because building a successful startup isn’t about solving difficult engineering problems, it’s about Making Something People Want. Customers pay for services that solve problems they have. They don’t care how hard it was to build.

What are some creative ways to pitch a new initiative to my team without slides?

Use a whiteboard.

What are the best ways to get traffic to my SAAS project management app?

At your stage you won’t be able to get meaningful paying customers from regular web traffic. You need to be building up your customer base manually, one at a time, through a high touch sales process.

What information do you feel is most valuable when integrating a Web API (REST or SOAP)?

• A really good API explorer
• Comprehensive documentation of the response format, including what happens if certain fields are missing (empty string, null value, missing key?)
• Comprehensive documentation of the available request parameters, including allowed values
• What are the rate limits?
• What is returned if there is an error?

What are some good examples of tweets used to attract visitors to a new website?

Without knowing what the site does, I’d go for the personal approach: "I just launched my new project, example.com—check it out and let me know what you think!"

Does Twitter still care about Tweetdeck?

Anecdotal: I personally know two people who have joined the TweetDeck team at Twitter in the past year. They frequently ship improvements, and seem to be enjoying themselves.

Where can I sell the tickets of a conference I won’t be attending?

Most conferences are too niche to support a full scale online marketplace for unwanted tickets -it’s not like concert tickets where millions of people might want to buy your unused Kylie tickets.

How can I get access to the PHP script of websites like Dropbox?

If a website doesn’t deliberately publish its server-side code (some sites like reddit do this, but it’s pretty rare) then you won’t be able to see it. You can search for an open source clone but these will often be pretty low quality—the smartest open source developers tend to work on libraries that solve common problems rather than putting their efforts in to building complete clones of existing sites.

What is the most succinct definition of a JavaScript callback, being more elaborative than simply “A function that calls another function.”?

A way of saying “once you’ve finished doing this, do that”.

If one were to bring the concept of Twitter to a VC today, would it be invested in, or turned away?

If someone brought just the concept without any form of actual implementation (of something that is pretty easy to prototype) I don’t think they would get very far.

How can Google’s Zopfli compression algorithm be implemented in Django’s cache system?

It’s pretty easy to write custom backends for Django’s caching layer—check out https://github.com/sebleier/djan... for example.

Will there still be opportunities for web agencies in North America in 10 years?

Is there still demand for poster design agencies?

I have an offer from an angel, but just landed a 5 minute meeting with a big time VC. Do I try use the offer from the angel to my advantage, if so, how?

An offer is worth a lot more than a five minute meeting—and VCs are much more likely to take you seriously if you’ve already convinced someone else to invest.

How can I produce an animated prototype out of designs for an iOS app?

Keynote is a surprisingly good tool for this kind of things, especially since they added path based animations to it a few years ago.

Is it worth it for an aspiring web developer in NYC to attend the San Francisco Startup Jobs Fair in November? What I mean is what are my chances that a company would be interested in me, allowing that my code skills are up to snuff, if I don’t live ...

Not being in SF already is no problem at all—demand for talented developers is crazy high, so provided you are a great developer the fact you would need to relocate won’t be a barrier.

What are some creative way-finding methods for events? Besides the usual signs.

Add a venue map to the inside of the conference badge.

What is the best framework to use, Yii or Ruby on Rails?

This is a big decision, and it’s worth taking the time to pick what’s the best fit for you. I recommend going through the tutorials for each one, building the basic application they describe and seeing which made the most sense to you. As a Django developer, I suggest trying that framework too :)

What are some strategies for scaling sites & infrastructure so global response times are relatively close to US response times?

You need to run your application in multiple data centers around the world, partitioned such that an incoming HTTP request can be completely serviced by a single data center. Then you use global DNS load balancing to direct users to the data center that is closest to them.

Is it normal for conferences to charge a registration fee from selected authors?

It depends very much on the type of conference. I believe charging speakers is quite common in academic conferences—presumably because there are plenty of niche academic conferences where almost all of the attendees are speaking or presenting a paper.

What are the best ways to find online serious partners ready to outsource mobile app development company?

If you want to do long-term outsourcing deals with “serious big companies”, you need to get on a plane and meet them in person.

Why do programmers tend to fall in love with non-mainstream languages?

Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right for every person, every problem or every situation. If no one ever explored non-mainstream options, better solutions would never be discovered.

Using userstream to listen to events for each user doesn’t seem practicable for an application with thousands of users.

Sounds like you need Site streams: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/str...

Which free encyclopedias offer free APIs?

Wikipedia runs using Mediawiki, and Mediawiki has an API: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

How did the big players on the web promote themselves in the early days?

Good old fashioned PR. I first learnt about Yahoo! and Google in newspaper articles about the internet.

What should be my minimum requirements for a cutting edge SaaS business product?

That depends on your customers. If you’re building software for banks or hospitals you probably need to support older versions of IE. If it’s for software companies or web freelancers, requiring a modern browser version is fine.

What prevents founders from taking blown up salaries?

When the money runs out, the startup dies. If a founder takes a high salary they are reducing the runway of the company, and dramatically increasing its chance of failure. Good founders will take the lowest salary they can make work for them.

Is it possible to build an application that can consolidate tweets from multiple Twitter accounts into a single stream?

Yes, the Twitter API can be used to build this. You’ll need a competent programmer though.

Which is the most complete and up to date API for restaurants/nightlife?

The foursquare API is pretty great for restaurants and nightlife these days. No chance if revenue share though—how would you envisage revenue share working?