Our daughter, Parker Moon, is five months old. She’s the best thing to happen in our life and as new parents, we are learning a lot. One thing we decided early on was that we weren’t going to use disposable diapers. It was a tough decision and the lure of the throw-away mentality almost won out a few times. However, we stay strong to our belief that disposable diapers are not good for the environment and as a result, not only are we outfitting our daughter in stylish cloth diapers, Michelle has created a business on the premise.
For the last few months, Michelle has been researching and planning her online venture. It took a good amount of work to figure out all the pieces of course. One of the pieces of the puzzle was the online store itself. Having experience setting up Shopify store for AnswerLab, I already knew that building a store on this amazing platform was the way to go. Shopify makes it so easy to get up and running with a store. Just sign up, pick a theme (Michelle paid for a great looking theme but many are free), wire up PayPal, add some products and you are in business. Well, there are more steps than that but those basics really will get you up and running.
Her store, sew is your baby! has been open for two days. She already made a sale on the first day and another on the second day. We have high hopes.
For processing payments over the phone, Michelle uses her iPad and a Square. It’s an easy solution at a great rate. Between her online store and her Square, Michelle is able to take payments easily.
Then there are the pictures. One thing we wanted to do was really highlight the awesomeness of the cloth diapers. They come in beautiful colors and prints. Our daughter is the star of the show on the site. She models the diapers and works for milk. It’s a perfect setup.
We’re only getting started. Today’s tools make turning an idea into reality on the web so easy. Not flip-a-switch easy but compared to the hoops I had to jump through in the 90′s to create an online store, it’s silly how far things have come.
Got a baby? Know someone with a baby? Do them and the environment a favor and try cloth diapers from sew is your baby!
Today I saw a Tweet from Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, whereby he mentioned a mobile app he uses, called Decaf, to manage his EC2 instances.
As one who has an EC2 instance running the OPML Editor as a server full-time, I would find this a handy app. So, I picked it up for my iPod Touch. The first time experience is great and quickly helps you enter your AWS credentials. Once that is done, all your EC2 information is now at your fingertips.
The ability to share files quickly and easily is necessary for many of us. I’ve tried various solutions and I’ll bet you have too. Today I realized that CloudApp was the right fit for me. Here’s why.
First of all, CloudApp has a free version. I’ve been using it for a while and it truly is quick and easy. For instance, if I want to share a screenshot, I just press Command-Shift-3 or Command-Shift-4 on my keyboard. Immediately, CloudApp uploads the screenshot and copies a link to the screenshot into my buffer. All I need to do is paste the link and I’m done. It can’t get much more streamlined than that.
As I was poking around the CloudApp site, I realized that I could map my own domain to the links that I share. OK, now they had me. So, I ponied up for 1 year of CloudApp service for $45. They do have a monthly plan but I like to commit and get a better rate.
Once I paid for the plan, I visited my CloudFlare dashboard and created a CNAME record, pointing cl.btm4.us to CloudApp’s server. Easy as pie. Now, when I take a screenshot, or upload anything to CloudApp such as an audio file, bookmark, video or zip file, I get a link to it with my own short domain name. Smart, CloudApp, smart.
Now, I do hope that CloudApp considers the importance of us users and owning our content. Any reader of this blog knows that I am all about avoiding corporate silo’s such as Twitter, Facebook, and other lock-me-in-the-trunk entities but I’m hopeful that CloudApp may allow us paying customers to keep our own data on our own server someday. Right now, CloudApp touts their redundant system of Amazon cloud storage.
Great. But I’ve got Amazon cloud storage too and I’d rather keep my own files in my own bucket, thank you very much. It seems to me that CloudApp has taken the first step of allowing us to map our domain to our account. Let’s hope they go the distance and allow us to host our own content as well someday.
With that quibble aside, I am extremely pleased with CloudApp. They’ve made sharing quick and easy. And this wouldn’t be a proper review of CloudApp if I didn’t link to a file I’d uploaded with the tool, now would it. So, here you go… http://cl.btm4.us/4qcV
Creating lessons on Become the Media is tricky. It’s difficult to explain some of the concepts that I’d like to share. Topics such as configuring DNS settings, configuring link shorteners, setting up virtual instances, explaining the benefits of a river of news, sharing the wonders of the Radio2 minimal blogging tool and its significance need visuals to make the idea stick.
In an effort to better share these concepts, I ponied up for ScreenSteps, an application that makes it easy to create screenshot based lessons. After downloading ScreenSteps, I was off and running. I created two lessons last night and the results are impressive.
I signed up for their free service, ScreenSteps.me and hosted my lessons there. But then I moved them to my own server. ScreenSteps.me may be worthwhile for your needs. Definitely check it out for easy hosting of your documents.
Sure, I could have used my favorite screen capture apps and cobbled together the results but ScreenSteps removes all the footwork. I encourage you to check out my post on Become the Media which shows off the power of ScreenSteps. You might even learn a thing or two about link shrinking with CloudFlare and Adjix.