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Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil

alexkrupp.typepad.com

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Re: Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil

#21
Right now, I'm the reading 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell and the message seems to be very similar to what Alex is saying.

The smallest details can sometime have a surprisingly large impact.

It's not always clear why certain startups are successful and others fall by the wayside, maybe the success or failure of a website just depends on getting the hundreds of little details just right ?

As site developers, we need to think more about the psychological and sociological side of things, we should think of ourselves as community builders not just tool makers.

Re: Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil

#22
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. First of all, I would not take dietary advice from Penn and Teller, just by using common sense and looking at Penn. But, on top of that, you went out of your way to call what I said "bullshit", basing your belief on what a magician said in a TV show by the same name, without ever quoting what the magician actually said. Also, you claim that people very, very rarely feel hungry when they want wat…

I'm not citing Penn, per se. He interviewed several doctors and nutritionists, they were the ones who stated that additional water in the diet is largely unneeded, and that rumors of chronic dehydration in the general populace are wrong. Also, Snopes has addressed the topic: http://snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp Believe what you'd like, but don't try to mislead other people with it. (Have I ever eaten a solid…

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Re: Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil

#24
post #15

"if I were launching a new website, here's what I'd do. Instead of hiding the Feedback link in the upper right hand corner, I'd place a form right on the main page. A big form. And I'd bend over backwards to get people to use it." What are the two lines of code to produce this?

I'd like to know too. You could do something like the following, but that would mean an ugly email message and ugly thank-you page. [(define-input feedback) (mail '("foo@bar") feedback)]Thank you for your input.

The thank-you page isn't really code, so even though it might be hundreds of lines of HTML and CSS, it's the web designer's responsibility, not the coder's. :)

The code for the thank-you page could be as simple as:

import smtplib

smtplib.SMTP('127.0.0.1').sendmail('website@example.com', ['you@example.com'], "From: website@example.com\r\nTo: you@example.com\r\n\r\nMessage follows: %s" % (web.input.get('feedback', 'NOTHING'),))

Not sure it that will work without a .quit(), but then you'd have at least 4 lines. Well, that's what local libraries are for. :)

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