BrainFuel

As anyone working on a startup knows, it’s no easy task and there are many ups and downs along the way. We all need a little boost every now and then to keep us going. Sometimes, we just need someone to tell us to quit crying about how hard it is and get back to work.

When it seems like your startup effort is resulting in futility, I would advise watching the videos listed below. Take a minute to wipe away the tears and see what some successful founders have to say. They’ll help you get the wind back in your sail. Just a warning, these guys all like to use “adult” language for some reason, so be warned.

Gary Vaynerchuck At Web 2.0 Expo

*NSFW language warning (my personal favorite)

David Heinemeier Hansson

*NSFW language warning

Ominisio Video Link

Jason Fried At Web 2.0 Expo

*NSFW language warning

Evan Williams

As many of you know, I built a web-based CMS. While my product is aimed mostly at people with an existing site, I recently did some research on web-based site builders, aimed at new sites, and wanted to share my findings with the Brainfuel faithful. I found 4 products and they all look great, especially for those occasions when you need to whip a site up quickly.

1) Squarespace
Squarespace
This is my favorite of the bunch. It’s not free. Pricing starts at $8 per month. That’s what a lot of us pay for shared hosting, so it’s pretty reasonable. This system is very user friendly and the menus and dialogs are very Applesque. One of their claims to fame is that Kevin Rose uses it. They also feature some really nice designs.

2) Brightegg

Brightegg is also a paid service (they do offer a free package) with pricing starting at $19 per month. If you happen to be a designer, they have a program where you can make money by submitting your designs. Another great thing about Brightegg is that they have a private label service.

3) Weebly

This site builder is totally free and features some nice designs. They offer a developer API that allows some extended functionality.

4) Synthasite

Finally we have Synthasite, a completely free site builder that offers (like the others) a design, hosting, and custom domains (custom domains cost money).

These are all great products and for canned websites, they have some very impressive designs and features. For free or for the cost of hosting, you can slap nice site together in minutes.

Good article over at Smashing Magazine about design trends for ’09.

From the article:

Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. In this post, we present Web design trends for 2009: recent developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches. We also discuss situations in which these trends can be used and present some beautiful examples. Did you miss any recent development in this overview? Let us know in the comments!

This article covers only 10 of the over 25 trends we’ve identified over the last months. The second part will be published next week. We’ll cover new layouts, new visual approaches and new design elements. Please stay tuned.

I have been following @gapingvoid (Hugh MacLeod) on Twitter for a few months now. He’s a really interesting guy and I enjoy his Tweets. So, today I decided to read up on him and I found that he has posted some very influencial content over the years on his long-standing blog (maybe it’s only new to me).

According to his bio, he’s most known for this post (called “How to be Creative” – long and very good). You should really take the time to read this post. It inspires without the superficial, patronising motivation-speak (he’s frank and direct). Oh, he’s also known for some pretty interesting cartoons.

I just discovered Common Craft. It’s a great educational resource for all sorts of things (Chris posted a video by them a while back: here). They produce short videos that explain things to people like Twitter, or how to use LinkedIn, all in ultra-basic paper style. So now, the next time you have to explain what Twitter is, you can point that person to Common Craft. They cover a wide variety of topics too like Zombies (see below…no, really, you gotta see it).

Zombies in Plain English

Social Networking in Plain English

Twitter in Plain English

Wikis in Plain English

I have been trying to figure what technically makes a blog a blog and I hoped the BrainFuel faithful would help me out. So far I have these attributes as the minimum requirements to be considered a blog:

• A list of posts sorted from newest to oldest
• Permalinks for stories
• Syndication (RSS/Atom)
• Comments

So here’s the question: does a blog have to have all of these attributes to be classified as a blog? What am I missing?

Recently I was doing some work with logos (business cards, desktop backgrounds, etc) for my product. As I was working away, I would periodically save the files to my DropBox. For those who aren’t familiar with Dropbox, it’s an online storage/syncing utility that will make your life much easier (you can thank me later).

You see, I’ve been saving files to my DropBox for a few months now. It’s become such and integral part of my daily computing experience that I don’t think about it. The reason I don’t think about it is because it’s a trouble-free product and the experience is totally natural.

I think this is probably the high-point of any product or service; the ultimate benchmark for quality and usefulness. When something is so good you totally take it for granted an forget about it. That’s when something is truly valuable.

Another example of this phenomena is with my hosting company. I really put a lot of time into researching what host to use for my product, but no matter how great the deals were at competitors, no matter how good the reviews where, I still had to deal with a nagging truth in the back of my mind. I have never had to think about my current host. I don’t think about them because they are so good that I forget about them. Because of that, I stuck with them and I’m glad I did.

I’m not sure what this means, but it seams like there’s a pattern here. While not every product is best forgotten, there are some things in life you just don’t want to think about (like web hosts and file syncing) and when you don’t have to think about them, you probably found a good one. What do you think?

Last week I posted some programmer resources (in the form of a list of 91). Today I stumbled across a list of 40+ cheat sheets for designers. Enjoy.