Our BlueFur mascot has been a representation of our business since we opened. The lovable character has been one dimensional with our logo and has served us well. I feel it is time for our mascot to come alive in the form of a puppet. I have been working to find a good puppet maker to design it and have a few possible solutions.

The idea I have is that we can use the puppet to make weekly video’s for our blog. Something like BlueFur TV where our mascot would comment on the state of the hosting industry in a humours manner. I think the idea would be both entertaining, viral and educational for our current and future customers. The owner disagrees and feels that it is not a good idea.

As a leader in community evolved hosting we have decided we will throw this question out to you to help us decide…

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Over the weekend I had an idea for an easy to create and fun Twitter application. Like various other social mediums I like to build something so I can better understand how that medium works. I also like to ensure that our hosting will work with that medium if someone asks. Reading through the Twitter API it became very apparent that a Magic 8 Ball application would be very easy to build. I sent a tweet to Matt and asked him if he wanted to build it together. Matt agreed and we development began.

How does it work?
The Magic 8 Ball Application allows you to send a yes or no question to @magic_8ball and it will reply back with an answer to your question. Matt and I agreed to make the code open and available for you to see and use it if you wish. You can reuse the Magic 8 Ball Twitter Application script to create your own script. I think it would be easy to modify this script to make a coin toss game and rock-paper-scissors.

Problems with developing on twitter
From the development I would make a few suggestions to Twitter. The 70 replies per hour limit slows down development and will mean that the application will only be able to do 70 replies an hour. Also they limit the API to pull 20 replies. If you had 22 questions the script would only reply to the first 20. Twitter should look at the Facebook development model which they approve scripts which can then increase these limits if approved. I did email twitter to request these levels be increased and as of this post I have not heard back.

Monetizing your twitter application
If your developing an application for twitter there is a limited amount of revenue models. You could sell the link monthly in your applications profile. You could of course sell the application but usually people only buy applications that generate money. You could spam your users but usually that will cause people to stop using it. I think it would be hard to generate some good revenue from a twitter application at this time.

Do you have a twitter application you would like to develop?

Based on last weeks response to the question if we should have a job board for our community we have decided to add one. Not only are we adding one were creating one from scratch using WordPress. Once the code is done we will make it available to the community so you can add your own job board. It will be very easy to post a job and to keep track of the job posting using your RSS reader. Below is a preview of what it will look like…

For categories I was thinking Web Programming, Graphic Design, SEO and Content Writing.

What categories do you think we should have?

As a website owner you have work to be done and need to find the right person to do it. As a developer or designer you want to find new customers. Our community has these 2 types of people visit it daily. Does it make sense then that we provide a job board?

It would not take that much to add a job board and I think it would bring value to our community. As a job poster you would sign-up and be able to post a job for free. Developer and designers would be able to apply to your job at no cost to them.

What do you think?

Last year we were working on a solution for remote shared file management. We tried working with WebDAV but that had some major issues that we could just not over come. We have now found a new solution which we have been Alpha testing internally.

After our Alpha testing is complete we will open up for a small group of Beta testers. If your are interested in being a Beta tester just post a comment with your Operating System and that you would like to be a Beat tester. We will contact you once we open the product for Beta testing.

We will officially launch Inferno Drive in the coming weeks once Beta Testing is complete. We are working on the site design for Inferno Drive and if you have feedback on the design, prices or target market lets us know in the comments.

I have been visiting a few niche Digg style sites and found one I think is appropriate for this blogs target audience. The site is called Small Business Brief and topics are all related to business. The problem was that they did not have WordPress plugin.

That presented an opportunity for me to make one (like we did for DealDotCom). I did a bit of research on Small Business Brief and found it was based on software called Pligg. Pligg is also used by Sphinn and there are a few plugins out there already for Sphinn. I adapted the following plugin to work with Small Business Brief.

The install is super easy…

Download the Small Business Brief Plugin.
Unzip the file in your wp-content/plugins folder.
Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin.
Customize the Plugin on the Options page where you can choose the plugin position.

You can choose to not have the Fetched plugin on each page and instead add the following code to a specific posts…

<!–fetchit–>

This script is still in Beta so use at your own risk. If you find anything wrong or any suggestion feel free to post them in a comment.

I have also posted the full script here.