steve-benjamins

In any bullying, there are three players: the bully, the bullied and the witnesses.

People who are bullied will often internalize that they are worthless (and that's why they are bullied). That can be one of the hardest parts of being bullied.

This happens especially if people who witness the bullying stay silent. Than the bullied will feel even more alone (and will feel awful about how bad they feel).

But if witnesses stand up and say- "hey, bully: you're being an asshole", then that is a service to the bullied. The bullied will at least not feel so alone.

Hope that makes sense.

Totally. I have a 4S but I did upgrade to iOS 8. I wish I had stuck with iOS7. Everything got pretty sluggish.

-- Read --

Don Delillo: End Zone

Luc Ferry: A Brief History of Thought

Brett Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero

-- Working on --

Don Delillo: Libra

Hubert Dreyfuss: Being in the World (it's taking me a long time...)

I really, really love David Foster Wallace and I've also never gotten through Infinite Jest.

If anyone is interested in reading DWF I'd recommend checking out his shorter fiction (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) or non-fiction (A Supposedly Fun Thing) if Infinite Jest (rightfully) seems intimidating :)

Haha :) ... Luckily our mayor elections are a month away, so hopefully you won't be hearing too much more.

Thanks!

Err. I thought it had been closed- but you're right, it still exists. Earlier this year AOL sold it to Hale Global (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230414940...), maybe that's where I got confused.

Thank you! I hadn't really thought about it because I don't see the code as being anything great (maybe that's just me being hard on myself though). From a code standpoint, it's really standing on the backs of some great gems (three in particular: acts_as_votable, acts_as_tree, cancancan).

And the algorithm is Reddit's open sourced algorithm. A ruby version can be found here: https://gist.github.com/jrochkind/2636355

Thank you!

Yes, I remember Patch. I was always rooting for it. Village is similar: for example, in addition to posting links, users can create photos, maps and essays (sort of similar to the self-publishing of Patch). In some ways, Village is sort of a mix between Patch and Hacker News.

Hey everyone,

I started Village because I couldn't find a place online with reasonable, civil discussion about my city, Toronto.

On Reddit, r/toronto could be a bit harsh and was pretty heavy with downvoting. Local blogs had comments sections that were mean and insulting.

Village is an experiment. It's a place that- while honest about the challenges my city faces- tries to celebrate and share what's awesome about Toronto too. It's a place for reasonable and civil discussion. It's a place to discover awesome and interesting things in Toronto.

I custom wrote the software for Village but I feel like the software for creating a social news website is pretty trivial at this point. If you want, it only takes 5 minutes to set one up using Telescope. The hard part is cultivating a community.

But in the same way that you can’t design a users experience (because it implies a sense of control over what a user will experience), you also can’t design a community. Instead, you can only hope to cultivate a community.

That's what I'm hoping to do with Village :)

PS - If you're interested, you can read more about my thoughts on how to cultivate community here: http://www.itsonvillage.com/design-tips

Hey everyone,

I started Village because I couldn't find a place online with reasonable, civil discussion about my city Toronto.

On Reddit, r/toronto could be a bit harsh and was pretty heavy with downvoting. Local blogs had comments sections that were mean and insulting.

Village is an experiment. It's a place that- while honest about the challenges Toronto faces- tries to celebrate and share what's awesome about Toronto too. It's a place for reasonable and civil discussion. It's a place to discover awesome and interesting things in Toronto.

I custom wrote the software for Village but I feel like the software for creating a social news website is pretty trivial at this point. If you want, it only takes 5 minutes to set one up using Telescope. The hard part is cultivating a community.

But in the same way that you can’t design a users experience (because it implies a sense of control over what a user will experience), you also can’t design a community. Instead, you can only hope to cultivate a community.

That's what I'm hoping to do with Village :)

PS - If you're interested, uou can read more about my thoughts here: http://www.itsonvillage.com/design-tips

Thanks, I appreciate the comment :)

Interesting point- ease of sharing is not something I had investigated too closely before. Thanks for sharing.

Unfortunately I haven't spent enough time in Webflow yet to say. But it seems thoughtfully designed. I'll have to do a review of it soon!

I don't understand your comment?

To be clear: not all website builders suck. Weebly and Squarespace are two examples of very good website builders.

Not sure I understand?

The article is an in-depth look at Weebly. The bad examples are meant to show how easily a website builder's interface can get ugly. Squarespace wasn't included as a bad example because it has an excellent interface. In fact Squarespace and Weebly are the only website builders I've given a perfect score to in my website builders guide.

Yup, Weebly allows you edit HTML. Some (outdated) documentation showing the HTML editor is available here: http://themedocs.weebly.com/index.html.

Weebly's markup is good- especially compared to most website builders markup with poor markup (as you pointed out). Wix probably has some of the worst markup among website builders.

For reference, here's an example Wix website: http://s99433.wix.com/stevebenjamins and here's an example Weebly website: http://weeblyreviewed.weebly.com/. You can check out the markup using your console.

"Turn Your Idea Into a Business in Less Than 2 Minutes"

GoDaddy also has an ecommerce website builder (and like Yahoo it isn't easy enough to compete with Weebly or robust enough to touch Shopify).

But what's interesting is that GoDaddy advertises itself the same way as Yahoo does here. GoDaddy always has slogans like: "Get Up And Running In 5 Minutes!"

I've asked people internal at GoDaddy about this and they've said this is what their users always say they want. So I bet Yahoo has run similar surveys and had similiar conclusions: people want to build websites in 5 minutes.

The problem is obvious. Any website worth building will take much longer than 2 minutes to make. It strikes me as a bit of a tone-deaf marketing slogan.