Thanks for your suggestions, all. Our traffic roughly doubled, which didn't cause any strain on our infrastructure.

For the curious, the site is http://betterific.com, which was linked from http://facebook.com/arbys, marking our first big partnership. After endless market surveys about what your customers want, Betterific tells you why.

Start one. Ordinary people do it all the time.

I recommend less text shadow.

Thanks for the feedback on text shadow. And what do you think of the Twitter tool itself?

I have a similar laptop: 32-bit, 1Gb RAM, 1.6Ghz atom, purchased years ago on the cheap. I run the latest Ubuntu desktop edition and am able to run everything that I need (mostly Rails + remote services over SSH tunnels). I can even stream Hulu, though the video does sometimes lag.

I don't have personal experience with any other distros, but a friend of mine has an equally antiquated laptop running the latest Fedora which he claims is better than an abacus. YMMV.

I see. One reason I didn't want to go that route was that the Unity bar on the left of the screen takes up too much space on a 13in screen, and I'm not confident I can get the resolution to run right, cuz I can never quite get my graphics card drivers sorted out right in Ubuntu.

From the user login screen, select the classic desktop from the bar at the bottom. This works well on my machine with roughly the same spec.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I think I heard they'd removed this in Ubuntu 11.10. It's there on 11.04, at least.

It's in 11.10 too, it's the gear right in the login box, as opposed to the bottom of the screen.

edit: I've become a fan of KDE recently, and I've been able to get it looking and working the best, so that's what it is for now.

Ping me - I've got some ideas. [email protected]

Okay, will come from [email protected]

For those (like me) who didn't already know, the FetLife homepage appears NSFW.

FWIW, I worked at an online advertising company that ran a whole division on EC2 machines - at the peak, nearly 100 instances. This was never a problem for us because we were judicious in our use of the machines (minify your content!) and we were disciplined in our deployments and management. If you go that route, just be sure the learn and follow best practices - you'll save yourself quite a lot of time.

I'd recommend "The Mythical Man-Month" by Fred Brooks.

Taking ideas from the beginning of "Keep Your Identity Small," I'd like to read something about art and / or artists. I choose that topic because, on one hand, I can say without justification that I prefer one artist's work over another's work, yet there must be some justification to say that one artist is obviously better than another artist. I'd like to see pg's treatment of a topic that is based in both opinion and fact (and one in which he has some expert knowledge).

You're completely right. Thanks for the find!

Ditto on the recommendation. It's one of the few free pieces of software that does something that's important to me really well.