process

  • January 13, 2025

    Analytics is better than A.I.

    Imagine this: you’re in a new town, and you’re looking for a place to eat — not a franchise, but something local.

    It just so happens that a bunch of people you know live, or have lived in this town — people who understand what you like and don’t like (what’s important to you, and your general financial and dietary situation).

    In looking for a place to eat, which of these would sway your opinion more:

    1. Opinions from random people in town
    2. Top results in a Google search
    3. Recommendations from your friends

    For most people, it’s going to be recommendations from their friends, right? For all the reasons I listed above.

    Strangers don’t know you, so they’ll basically just tell you their favorite restaurant.

    Google and other search engines don’t know you personally. They rely on averages and a different set of signals.

    I’m speaking at Podfest later this week and I noticed something interesting about the schedule: there are at least a dozen talks on how A.I. can help you with your podcast.

    But as far as I can tell, there’s only one talk on using analytics to measure the success of your podcast.

    Read at Source

  • January 24, 2006

    The coding process

    During my winter break, which is very quickly coming to a close, I have done a lot of coding- stuff I have never done before. Each time I have pretty much followed the same process and have found the same thing.

    It starts off with me thinking about or writing down what I want to accomplish with the program at hand. Recently, I wrote a mailing list. So with the mailing list I wanted to accomplish these things:

    • Allow people to sign up via a form
    • Generate a confirmation number once they join, add them to a database and send them an e-mail to confirm their subscription.
    • Once they confirm, edit the database to reflect that. If they were added by mistake, delete them from the database.
    • Once they confirm, send them one more e-mail stating they have been confirmed.

    Once I get to the coding, I write functions, connection codes, queries, etc. to accomplish said goals. Then there is the debugging phase. I usually call it the What? why the hell isn’t this working??? phase. Usually after staring at it and doing a few things I know won’t work, the solution comes to me in a flash of brilliance.

    And once you are all debugged, you’re done, right? Well, not quite. Now is the time to look over ever thing, since you code is working, and see if there is anything you over looked. With this particular project, there were 2 major things I over looked:

    • A major security risk when unsubscribing
    • A check to make sure the person signing up did not already sign up

    After writing that code, it’s debug time again, and then another check. It’s usually good also, to get a couple of friends who know what they are doing to check it for you too, so they can throw some ideas at you, and maybe check something you may have over looked. Just like writing a paper, your friends might see something you didn’t because they didn’t write it. Later.