So driving this morning, I finally realized why I LOVE driving race cars so much. It’s the challenge and exhilaration of being on the edge but not over it. When I was a kid, I was the little turn who would poke someone just 1 time less than what it’d take to completely send them over the edge and, all the while, keeping me (somewhat) endearing. Yesterday, on the way home, I got my little car to solidly rotate into a turn (whoops happened to be on a public street) and it kinda just hit me. I had a smaller revelation the first time I got a racing car to rotate at Mid-Ohio, but this time it was different. The time it happened at Mid-O (and every time after), came from a tense ‘oh shit please keep me hooked up so I don’t die’ approach to a corner. This time, it was much more under control…and surprisingly…much smoother and quicker feeling. Guess it’s a tactile thing.

As I’ve read books like the Speed Secrets series and Skip Barber’s Going Faster, instructors and coaches always talk about being on the edge. But it wasn’t until this morning’s childhood regression that I finally connected the dots.

As we all (racing drivers that is) are trying to find ‘that thing’ that makes us faster. This is one barrier, I’m REALLY excited to have identified and broken through the was it feels like it should be.

I was on eBay and came across several listings made using WipBox. How cool is that?!?!? Read the post and check out the listings!

http://wipbox.wordpress.com/…-wipbox-users/

Yesterday and today have been INSANE on WipBox!!!  45,000+ page views and 3,000 new users in the last 2 days.

There will be a moderate update happening tomorrow night with some solid bugs/usability fixes.  Also there will be a tutorial on what  the graphs do and how to use them best. I’ve also wrangled  some resources to help get BIGGER releases done to and make it way more usable and friendly.

Please keep sending in bugs, though. I’ve been putting them into the bug tracker and have all of them slated to be addressed as soon as possible.

Also, please be patient.  I originally created this for myself to use in less than a month.  For me it works great.  But, it’s becoming VERY clear that, as more people have been signing up, I’m finding  things need to be made more usable.

J.

What a great way to start things off!!! Had awesome feedback from people right out of the gates, was written up by Mashable and Emily Chang’s eHub, received excellent suggestions and had WAY more than expected signups.

Launching Wed, the last 4 days brought 5,987 page views, 1,968 visits and 375 registered users. Thanks to everyone for trying WipBox out!!! I’m planning some cool new additions, but definitely, let me know how I can make it better.

I decided at the beginning of December to play around with mashing something up. The result is WipBox (pronounced whip-box).

I was selling a couple things on eBay and got REALLY annoyed with how long it took me to get everything together, take the pics, find the right categories, find the right price and THEN research good product information for people to bid on my listings. If I simply put up the item with a decent pic and a half-assed description, I’d normally get the lower-end of my expectation range. But if I took 25-30 minutes extra and cut and pasted some detailed specs and reviews on it, I was at the high end of what I was hoping to get for it, and even in some cases I got WAY more than I expected.

That got me thinking. Well, Amazon has this great resource API that I could call to get better descriptions which I could then skin and include in my listings…and eBay has category and price info available from their API, and if I use that with a basic checklist, I could sell things more quickly and more profitably. Then I tried using it on a handful of listings and was stoked about the results. I was able to list thing 4-5x faster on either site. My auctions on eBay bumped up to an 86% success rate from the low 70s% and the closing price was about 10-20% higher that I’d expect. And my response rates on Craigslist more than doubled. A case in point was when I helped T sell her car. We couldn’t believe how many people called simply because they’d never seen such a nice listing on Craigslist. One guy even said he wouldn’t have considered it (being above 100k miles) if the listing didn’t look so good and have all of the info he needed in one spot. Kinda cool.

Well after 4 weeks of casual on-again off-again coding and stuff, I’d like to introduce the world to my little mashup, WipBox (http://www.wipbox.com). It’s in its second iteration, but I’d definitely appreciate any feedback you or your friends may have.

It was developed all on MAMP (Mac/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and deployed on WAMP (Windows-flavored). I’m using SOAP calls to the Amazon and eBay APIs; Mootools for the AJAX (which there is a ton of — but not in the hokey ways most people are using it right now) and user experience stuff; Maani charts for charting and TinyMCE for WYSIWYG editing the listings before you export.

Take a look, play with it (IT’S F.R.E.E…FREE), and let me know what you think.