YAPC::NA (the North American "Yet Another Perl Conference") is my favorite tech conference to attend, probably because it seems to be rather "by perl developers, for perl developers".
The YAPC conferences seem to have come about after the original perl conferences became OSCON. The perl community developed something specific to perl again, and something that was more intimate, casual, and affordable. There are YAPC conferences all over the world, like YAPC::EU and YAPC::Asia and others.
My experience is only with the North American one, and it's typically 3 days of technical sessions with one or more optional days of more formal classes before or after it.
A conference ticket is cheap, say $100, and you can get a dorm room for cheaper than a hotel room if you like. That's part of the effort to make the conference affordable and open to anyone.
Another, more recent part of that effort seems to be adopting a more formal code of conduct. I think that's popular with a lot of technical conferences these days. Recently, Schwern, one of the prominent members of the perl community withdrew from the conference and described why here: http://blog.schwern.net/2013/05/15/yapcna-2013-withdrawal/ The article linked from this HN post seems to be a reaction to that.
Anyway, YAPC::NA is in Austin this year, and should be a great conference. Check out http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/ if you want to read more about it.
You may be on to something there. Sometimes I see sites for sale on Flippa, but from the comments I can tell that some potential buyers have discovered something negative in their research that I would have overlooked. I'd pay for an extended, honest, third-party analysis of some current flippa offerings. Help me value sites I'd consider buying, and I'd see value in that.
Great article. I love to see what sites do well on flippa, but some of them boggle my mind. Perhaps it's because not all buyers or sellers are rational, but I have to also think that there are schemes and scams that I'm not aware of at work there. I'd love to hear explanations for some of the sales I see there.
Flippa is a marvelous wasteland of make-money-fast sites being marketed as make-money-fast schemes themselves. Although there are diamonds in that rough, surely there is another place where people go to buy or sell more established, traditional web-based businesses. Where is that place?
brilliant! I may "embrace and extend" this idea for my workplace. I'd build a browser extension that notices when I load a new trouble ticket and makes an entry in my timecard for it. If I used paydirt, I'd love the thing you just built.
Don't forget that you may have to spring for some things yourself. If you worked with physical tools, like hammers, hard-hats, or calculators, you may have to provide some or all of them yourself. So, don't be afraid to bite the bullet and buy a license for a piece of software that will help you do your job better.
I wish I had a better recommendation than flippa since it's completely full of worthless things for sale. I am constantly looking for projects to buy and would love to have a better place to look than what I've found so far.
Anyway, drop me an email with any information you can provide and I may make an offer. If you're hesitant to reveal the actual site, that makes it really tough, but with some traffic and income numbers and information about the niche, I can tell you if I'm interested enough to learn more or not.
You may find Bob Gourley's book Make Money for Bob to be a bit helpful here. It has a few good chapters on how he has bought and sold businesses, and he handles each one with honesty and integrity.
I tend to not subscribe to these things unless I can read a sample newsletter to confirm it's reasonably useful to me. Consider providing a sample, and it doesn't have to be the most recent.
I'm waiting for sendwrite 2.0 in which I can email you a photo and a message and you print a postcard with my message on the back and drop it in the mail for me.
Also, I dig the workflow of sending and email to signup. It seems to work well for tripit.com. If you commonly interact with your users through email, I don't see any reason against it.