1. I have a Nexus S.

2. Fully paid for.

3. No service plan now.

So the question...

I want a month-to-month plan.

What's the best deal?

 9/6/2011; 3:50:20 PM.

It's great if your product takes off with the first launch, sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. That doesn't mean the product is doomed to fail, it may just mean that you have to follow-through. And a lot of people don't.

There was a fair amount of hoo-hah about Bootstrap when Twitter announced it. The usual quick pieces on TechCrunch, GigaOm, PaidContent. Maybe a few posts from bloggers like Scoble or Jeff Jarvis (I don't know if these guys specificially wrote about it). The product rolls through in a wave of publicity and that's it.

But just a half-hour after writing the review of Bootstrap here, weeks after its rollout, I'm getting emails from people who hadn't heard of it, people who could really use it.

No one promoted the product to me, and believe me, I'm not asking them to. But here's what can't possibly hurt. If you're the developer of the product, think of the people you read and whose opinions you care about. Not just who the PR people say are influential. Who influences you? In general those are good people for you to tell about your product. You don't have to write a fancy marketing piece, just an email that says hey, I read your blog and I thought you might find this intereresting. Include a link. Say thanks, and sign off.

For me, products that were made by my readers are inherently interesting. Here's a product developer I know I can influence, who I am influencing. If I see something in their product they're likely to listen. That matters a lot.

I don't think of this as a conversational medium like some people do, because I think that leads to people saying empty things just to "engage" with you, and I prefer to be treated like a human being, not a business model.

BTW, when I have a product that I think someone influential would find interesting, I don't wait for them to discover it. I send a link. No pressure. Here's something you might like. Bing.

 9/6/2011; 12:31:55 PM.

This morning I released a new UI for Blork on my server and to other people who are running Blork servers.

I'm already getting congratulations on such a nice-looking UI, but I don't deserve it. The credit should go to Twitter for releasing the Bootstrap toolkit, which I have been learning and building on.

I needed a framework of solved problems that I could hook into. Trying to put all the pieces together when I'm already managing a billion pieces in my own world was going to take forever. They just put out a set of easy UI techniques that I could hook into. From there, it was mostly just programming. The complexities melted away.

This has been the problem with CSS. It was designed for laying out documents, for apps we need something akin to the Mac Toolkit (they call it Cocoa these days, I think). I'm not sure Twitter realized they were developing that, but they gave a guy like me what I needed to put it together.

They aren't the first, but I've spent a fair amount of time staring at other UI toolkits and never got to Hello World. With this one, once I realized the answers were available by doing a View Source, it was off to the races.

Now we have some glitches to clean up, no problemmo, because we have plenty of CSS gurus in our midst who can tell me what I did wrong. What I needed was a place to start.

So -- thank you to the people at Twitter who had the talent to put this together, and the generosity to give it to the world.

Update: Here's a set of Bootstrap demos. They make it easier to get started.

 9/6/2011; 12:02:31 PM.