Everyday Ideas, QD Ideas

The Medical Abbreviations Application for the iPhone is receiving a nice bit of press from being on the front page of the iTunes store.

We have several more applications in development. You can see our iphone applications at qdideas.com.

Today, QD Ideas, LLC released the Medical Abbreviations application for the iPhone. This application provides simple, fast, and convenient access to more than 1600 medical abbreviations. The application’s powerful search feature finds abbreviations and definitions as you type. Browsing of the abbreviations is available through the familiar index on the right-side of the screen.

Official and slang abbreviations are included. New abbreviations will be added with future updates.

Feel free to supply feature requests and comments. Nice customer reviews on iTunes are always appreciated.

The Medical Abbreviations application for the iPhone is available for $0.99 from the iTunes store.

The QDI crew has been hacking away at our first iPhone application. Code monkey extraordinaire, qmchenry, has been doing the majority of the heavy lifting. Shamanstears has been tweaking the data and designing our logo.

We will update here with addtional details as we get through the submission process.

The Tech-Recipes redesign is finally in place. Tech-Recipes 2.0 is live!

I will post about our design considerations and our theme designer in a later blog post. For now, here are some before and after screenshots for comparison.

Old Version versus New Version:

Platform Transition

Early on in the process, we decided to transition from our php hybrid hacked-to-death platform to WordPress. The exuberant wordpress community, the ease of writing unique plugins (without hacking wordpress itself), and the large existing plugin library were reasons that we decided to go with WordPress. Most of our other blog projects were WordPress driven, so it has become comfortable territory to us.

My concerns around wordpress deal with speed and security. Q had generated an amazingly efficient static caching system for our old system. I am still unsure that we will be able to get the performance under WordPress as fine tuned. By its nature, our old hybrid platform had some security weaknesses, but Q effectively isolated it from overwhelming attacks. The huge popularity of WordPress makes it a big target for hackers. Hopefully, the large community of developers can stay ahead of them.

Comments

The forums are dead. Most of the popular forums threads have been roughly imported into the appropriate comment threads under the related tech-recipe. As successful as my buddy arn’s macrumors is with a forum based site, forums never really worked well for us. The noise to signal ratio was pretty high, and forum sign-ups are painful. By having comments directly related to a specific tutorial, hopefully we can keep the quality and focus of the discussion at a good level.

Disqus is an amazing comment system plugin. It makes commenting and thread-following much easier for the Tech-Recipes users. Moderation and spam-reduction are great benefits on the administration side as well. Plus, we keep control of the comment database so we can always move to another comment platform if we wish. Our biggest hiccup during the transition was importing our previous forum comments into disqus. As impressive is the disqus software, their customer support surpasses it. They immediately responded to our cries of help. Between the tweaks on both ends, comments were enabled within 24 hours.

New Features for TR2.0

We have always highlighted the current most popular tech-recipes. However, now on every page you will get a context-sensitive most popular list in the right-hand column. For example, while browsing a category, the top tutorials for that category will be listed. Or while browsing through an author’s articles, his/her top tutorials will be listed.

Q has developed a new advertising delivery system for us. I do not want to de-thunder his eventual release of the system. However, I will say this: It beautifully manages multiple ad campaigns through multiple categories. Since we pay our authors by percentage of ad revenue, it must also keep up with the author of the content as well. Q’s plugin does this as smooth as silk.

Q is also perfecting our media offloading system. Since our tutorials are including more and more images and video, it made sense to get our media off our main server.

The Future

Certainly, the rollout to 2.0 is not complete. We still need to wrap up more redirections for some 404s. I will be tweaking the theme for a long time to come. Speed, security, and our plugin systems above will continue to be tweaked and debugged. Still with all of this work on TR 2.0 to finish, it is fun to start brainstorming new features for TR 2.1.

Concurrently, we are also developing a couple of web applications for the medical industry, a medical iPhone application, and a fun flickr integration.

It is a great time to be part of QD Ideas.

From the beginning of our blogging network we have refused to sell or exchange links.

Other than our subscription to yahoo’s directory (which has subsequently expired) we have never purchased a place in a web directory.

Any recommended links in our sidebars or in our blogs are honest and sincere. We do not attempt to gain compensation for outgoing links. We do not receive payment when we review hardware or software.

Today, I have even placed this information on our advertising information page.

Recently, Google has been increasingly punishing web sites that participate in link selling or exchanging. Many large websites have been effected and punished. We hope as these sites correct their mistakes that google lifts any penalties on their content.

However, we are proud that we are succeeding without the purchase, manipulation, or selling of pagerank.

A link here will always be an honest, genuine recommendation.

Tech-Recipes has a long history of revenue sharing with our community. For example, most of our recipe authors get the majority of the advertising profits from their submitted content. Everybody who has submits a tutorial that is validated by our editors gets either an amazon gift certificate or tech swag. We also have given away hardware and software to our authors in the past.

Recently one of our past tech-recipes authors, Risherz, requested our help. He needed a MacBook for his school work. Although it has been a while since he posted here, his tutorials have helped a lot of people. We felt that he deserved a little love.

We purchased and shipped him Apple’s latest and greatest MacBook Pro.

So Risherz now has a MBP and ShamansTears has a Zune and a Nokia Internet Tablet.

If you are a tutorial blogger and need some new gear, please drop us an email or buzz me on AIM: drdavak.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation is a powerful force against breast cancer. As part of a previous web project, we had the opportunity to raise money for this wonderful organization.

Personally, I have dealt with the Komen foundation in academia previously. They are a strong sponsor of UNC’s Get Real and Heel program. This project is using prescriptive exercise therapy to combat the side effects of breast cancer and its treatments. Although I am still listed in the project directory, unfortunately my new job has limited my personal involvement with the project. However, one of the project head, Claudio Battaglini, is a good friend of mine. He runs several exercise-related cancer projects for UNC and is always looking for new patients to help through the process. Please contact him if you are in the triangle area and are interested in cancer-related exercise therapies or research studies.

QD Ideas, the parent company behind tech-recipes, has raised over $600 to help in the fight against breast cancer. We also have purchased getrealandheel.com and redirected it to the UNC project page to protect it from spammers. Considering we are in the shoe-strings, bootstrapping phase of our company, we are proud that we are able to contribute in this battle against breast cancer.

Today, we have released a test version of our little FeedMake tool for public testing.

FeedMake simply attempts to solve the problem of keyword searching through multiple blog search engines. Instead of creating custom searches on the multiple blog search sites, this site will create the search feeds for you.

1. Input Your Search Term.
2. Subscribe to the Feeds in Your Feed Aggregator.
3. Enjoy.

Please leave comments here regarding questions, bugs, or feature requests.

QD Ideas, LLC is the two-man company behind the tech-recipes network of sites.  Information regarding the company and her other future projects will be posted here.