MyBlogLog Founders at TechStars from David Cohen on Vimeo.

RegEx Powertoy - Uses AJAX to instantly render the results of your regular expression.  Very useful for debugging.  Just remember, it does not render special escapes for quotes that may be required for specific programming languages.

Matchmaking with Regular Expressions - An excellent Java World article on Regular Expression basics that I use as a reference every time I need a refresher!

Common Web Development Tasks - For common web site tasks such as commenting and callbacks, take a look at this Smashing Magazine post.

What do you use to refresh your regular expression knowledge?

If you didn’t get to attend and you get some free time, I would highly recommend watching the videos from this years conference.

According to Smashing Magazine, Zend Studio was evaluated as the best PHP IDE.  However, only one of my business partners use Zend, the other swears by Panic’s Coda, and I prefer the simplistic Smultron over other bloated IDEs.

Take a look at this list of PHP IDEs and let us know what you use!

If you would like to learn more about agile programming and software development, I would highly recommend watching his presentation below.

Watch the full video

amcharts image

From SmashMagazine:

Thanks to the Web’s widespread adoption of JavaScript, JavaScript libraries have sprung up to help make design and development easier. Here are a few of the major JavaScript libraries that developers use: jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, mootools, Dojo. These frameworks have thriving communities whose members have developed countless plug-ins that can greatly add to the JavaScript framework.

Personal favorites include:

Facebook Autocompletion

Galleria

Coda sliding tabs

amCharts

See all of the useful javascript techniques

He makes many good points as to why entrepreneurs shouldn’t be worried about others copying their ideas including:

• You Can’t Copy Execution
• Good Ideas will always be Copied
• Bad Competition is a Favor

From the article:

About once a month I get a Google alert notifying me that someone is looking for a Web developer who can copy the functionality of my Web site.

The thinking goes that if they simply copy the Web site verbatim, they’ll essentially enjoy the same success.  This sounds good in theory except for one truth - in five years across three different companies (Swapalease.com, Go BIG Network, and GotCast.com) no one has ever done it successfully.

That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried.  Heck, people have gone as far as to literally copy our Web sites and just change a few of the colors and buttons.  Yet time and time again, they fail.

The reason these companies fail isn’t because they didn’t make a good enough copy.   It’s because they mistook copying the product for copying the business.  As a business owner it’s important to understand the difference between what your competition can replicate and what they cannot.

Read the rest on his blog

A short and easy read. Highly recommended.

From the article:

Much of that support system, not surprisingly, is university-based. Millennials start companies in dorm rooms while studying the subject of starting companies in classrooms. Approximately 2,100 colleges and universities offer at least one class in entrepreneurship, according to a 2006 study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the discipline has sprouted more than 400 endowed chairs. Many schools also sponsor business plan competitions. Nate Alder, a student at Brigham Young University, has won first or second place in 11 competitions over the past year for his company, Klymit, which has developed a way to insulate outerwear and outdoor gear using argon. Alder racked up $200,000 in prize money, potential strategic partnerships, and recognition in the national business press before he even had a product to sell. (See: Gen Y, impatience of.)

Business incubators, too, are contemporaries of the Millennials. Though incubators have been around since the 1950s, there were only 12 in the United States in 1980 — but more than 1,400 by 2006, according to the National Business Incubation Association. Some newer incubators are particularly conducive to the kind of support and collaboration on which Gen-Y entrepreneurs thrive. For example, Y Combinator, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, funds start-ups in batches. Each class starts and finishes at roughly the same time, encouraging group learning and support. The founders of Xobni are among the promising Y Combinator grads.

“One thing that differentiates the young founders is who they can connect with early on,” says David Cohen, executive director of TechStars, a Boulder, Colorado, incubator that works with Millennial company founders. “People are starting companies at young ages. They fail fast, learn a lot, and keep going.”

That’s another trait of Gen-Y entrepreneurs: They are comfortable with a business world in constant flux. For Millennials, change isn’t something to manage; it’s something to relish.

Read the Full Article