I like JavaScript, and I like jQuery, and I am always interested in improving my skills with those tools. So when I found out that jQuery’s latest conference was going to be held in Boston, less than an hour’s drive from where I live, and that a good friend of mine was going to be [...]

Wow, it’s been two weeks since the last BlogShouts update, but that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working on the site. Not by a long shot! We’ve pushed out a bunch of new fixes and features, including at least one thing that wasn’t even on the list of pending features. To quote Captain Willard, from Apocalypse [...]

For a while now, Gabe and I have been working on BlogShouts. Not all of that time has been spent in development — first we had to come up with the idea and flesh it out, then we had to write a complete business plan and PowerPoint deck (not as easy as it sounds!). After [...]

It’s been another busy period over here at Dart. We’ve been working hard to take BlogShouts from ULTRA BETA to plain ol’ beta, and I think we’ve just about hit that point. This is exciting, because it means we get to really ramp up our efforts to attract bloggers to the site. We’ve got 220+ [...]

It’s been a busy few weeks for us over here at Dart! First, we went on a bit of a crazy streak with BlogShouts, fixing bugs and finishing features like madmen, and then running a bit of a private beta with friends. Then I moved to Providence, RI so that my wife can go back [...]

As we wrap up the final few bugs fixes and feature additions that we want to have ready before BlogShouts goes live this month, I ran into a minor bit of CSS/JavaScript wackiness that was annoying me. I wanted alternating “Shout Cards” to have different margin widths, but I didn’t want Gabe to have to [...]

One of the things we believe in very strongly here at Dart is keeping the company lean. We’ve seen start-ups hire too many people, too quickly, and it can get ugly. You end up disorganized, over-managed, and filled with employees who aren’t quite sure what their roles are (often fighting over who gets to do [...]

I have to admit, even though the MVC concept has been around for a long time, I had never really heard of it before Microsoft chose to adopt it for ASP.Net. This is mainly because I’m not a programmer, and also because I haven’t worked extensively with Ruby on Rails, which from what I understand [...]

Here’s something you probably don’t know: BlogShouts actually began life as GameShouts, an idea I had for a website where independent gaming bloggers could get their posts seen by more people. I’ve worked in the video game industry in one way or another for a huge chunk of my professional career, and Gabe and I [...]

Do you remember that scene in the movie Creepshow where the old, rich jackass’s apartment is filling up with cockroaches, and he’s freaking out and screaming, and spraying bug spray everywhere, and it’s crazy? That’s kind of where we’re at right now! We are officially in bug-stomping mode on BlogShouts, which is a pretty awesome [...]