How to get rid of old programming books… A good idea

Posted by & filed under Programming.

You know, your bookshelf is full of old (or not-so-old) very expensive (at the time you bought them) programming books. Here’s a picture of a small shelf on my bookshelf…

In “Kindle’s times” now maybe you have an electronic copy of those books (an many other) on your favourite ebook reader / tablet.

What can you do with those books? Well, if you don’t have any particular reason to keep them and make them cover in dust, you can sell them on eBay or on a classified site (but you won’t get more than a few bucks for them) or donate them to the local public library.

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Let the iOS journey begin

Posted by & filed under Programming.

In January I set as personal target for 2012 this “simple” task: learn Objective-C and iOS and have 2 apps on the Apple AppStore by the end of the year.

One app will be for free (and I have also a nice idea for it) and one will be available for 0.99$, why this?

I just want to understand how the AppStore works and how much I can earn from a single app.

I’ve just ordered this book on Amazon… Let the journey begin!

How to make some money with a single line of code

Posted by & filed under Programming.

Yes. You can make some money (~3€/day on average) with a single line of code.

Which one? This one.

Plus of course some very basic SEO, a good domain name (some bucks from GoDaddy) and a bunch of adsense banners. You don’t really know how many people are searching everyday for “today’s date” on Google (for my italian site about 400 unique visits per day).

No weather info, no horoscope, just today’s date.

It’s of course a small income, but a simple site could pay you a server for a bigger project or some stuff you don’t really need but you can afford with that 80/90€ / month you can earn (I usually pay xbox games with that).

On the other side nobody is searching for “yesterday date” (believe me, I’ve tried). So don’t try to make a site on that…

Everything you always wanted to know about italian coffee but were afraid to ask

Posted by & filed under Italy and Italians.

Nerds & Coffee… Love & Hate. All over the Internet you can find people and blogs teaching you how to order a coffee the “Italian way”. If you are “lucky” enough you can also find infographics explaining you all the 169 (or more) different kind of coffees an italian bar should offer.

Everyone of these guys claim that they’re sharing with you the definitive “italian coffee guide”. They’re wrong. Well, they are ok if you want to look like a tourist (and pay 5€ for something that usually is sold at 1€ more or less).

Have you ever wondered why these posts are written by people with an english name? (more…)

Why you don’t really need WordPress (if you are a web developer)

Posted by & filed under Programming.

Don’t get me wrong. This blog is powered by WordPress (and Bones). I’m a WordPress user and I make part of my money building websites based on WordPress.

Using WordPress is the fastest way (for me) to build a website where I can share my stuff.

WordPress is a good software (despite some criticism about how the code is organized/written) and the community around it is one of the strongest in the Open Source world. But the cons are a lot too…

  • WordPress is full of features you don’t really need. Who needs tags in 2012?
  • WordPress needs a lot of resources
  • WordPress needs external plugins even for basic functionalities (multilanguage, pagination, etc…)

WordPress does what it promises: it gives people a blogging system easy to install and mantain, but do you really need WordPress if you want to blog and you are a web developer?

NO.

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