Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Once again, we've made lots of changes at ToolBarn. But now, I'm looking for some feedback. We've got a cache on our local servers of what most of the competing sites are priced at on every product we offer. If we show that, similar to Progressive Auto Insurance, are we asking for trouble? Two thoughts on why we should : 1) Establish ourselves as a destination. 2) Give our customers less reason to leave our site and look around. Two thoughts on why we should not : 1) We may not always have the lowest price. 2) We've got more traffic than most of these sites, so we'd be building their brand for them. Such a tough choice. We'll probably run an experiment at some point and see what it does. What do you think?

Anyone remember when VRML was being touted as the "2D Web Killer"? I do. I laughed back then... of course, it was more because I thought nobody would take the time to learn it and that it'd be tough to get WYSIWYG web designers to ever consider. Well, here we are years later. People are still programming flat (although 2.0 sites try lots of 3D shadows and the like) websites without that whole 3D interactive world. Granted, in 1998 I did play around with some 3D interactive stuff like this , but nothing like some of the VRML sites that came out that you could walk around to different buildings and the like. While I still think there's a place for that (Second Life seems like a possibility, but it's much more flexible in an app you run), I don't see it happening any time soon. Oh, and this post can be credited to my bookcase, where I noticed one of the titles "Java, CGI, VRML and SGML". I think my wife got that one for a web development class once and ...

Today, I was realizing I haven't done a post in a while, and I also got a new camera from the recent Woot-off. Combine those, and I got pictures of some geeky things. First off, above is my podcasting setup. I don't have everything mounted in my new rack from Rack Solutions yet, but you can see the stuff I regularly use right now. That cost a few pennies over the years. :) Secondly, those are the servers we use for ToolBarn. We have 1 more Google Mini that we'll be adding shortly to this mess, making 12U of our 13U being used and 1U for storing the external drives we swap out weekly for off-site backups as well as pass-through to one of the switches (we ran out of room on the back for those.) Finally, that mess is my desk at work. I regularly get working on too many things at once and can't really keep up on things. However, the dual screens are almost a necessity now, and I have a matching 22" at home along with a really nice 20" Samsung. I remember in the o...