So a while back I found a cool little site called Glyde, and their About Us page really sums up what they are all about:

Glyde.com is a new marketplace that combines the great deals of a person-to-person online marketplace with the ease, simplicity, and safety of a retail store.

So I think the best thing about Glyde is they already know 95% of the details for anything you want to sell on their site, and they make doing business super easy.

Start a Sale

Getting started is easy, simply sign up (free), and start listing products. You can sell DVDs, CDs, Games (console) and Books. Listing is as easy as typing in the title of the product, or ISBN (or other unique identifier). They will load your store with all the images and descriptions you need.

Price to High?

One thing I find particularly handy about Glyde (beside their very easy to use interface) is the notifications that my products are not within market price. Let’s say I list a book for $25 (market value) and two weeks go by and no one buys. As time goes by books lose value and so prices in the market adjust. Glyde doesn’t auto adjust your price, but they do tell you what the system considers fair market value and you can decide to accept that and change your price, or ignore it and try to sell your book for more.

Shipping Sucks

Now let’s admit that we all hate having to deal with shipping details and figuring out pricing for books etc. Well Glyde makes this easy too! When you sell an item on Glyde they handle the shipping. What they do is mail you an envelope ( or other mail package ) which you put your item into and drop in the mail. That’s it! Your item you sold is then sent to the purchaser and all is grand.

Glyde Fees

So how much is this awesome service? Well cheaper than some, and more than others. Glyde takes 10% of the sale (not bad), plus the cost of the shipping materials. The listings are always free.

Go Glyde!

Glyde is really a great way to look at purchasing new media, and I hope to see good things from them in the future.

Head on over to Glyde now for the Utahcon.com Book Sale!

Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (Book Cover)

Today I am reviewing Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time which is best summed up by the books official website on The Pragmatic Bookshelf site:

Do you ever look at the clock and wonder where the day went? You spent all this time at work and didn’t come close to getting everything done. Tomorrow, try something new. Use the Pomodoro Technique, originally developed by Francesco Cirillo, to work in focused sprints throughout the day. In Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, Staffan Nöteberg shows you how to organize your work to accomplish more in less time. There’s no need for expensive software or fancy planners. You can get started with nothing more than a piece of paper, a pencil, and a kitchen timer.

The best part of the above statement is that it is 100% true. I haven’t had enough time to really evaluate the use of the Pomodoro Technique, but the book really lays it out in a clean an easy to understand way.

Author Staffan Nöteberg has really written a quick read about the Pomodoro Technique, that will allow you to breeze through the book, learning the technique as you go.

The book is short, approx 200 pages total, with each page being an indepenent thought or section. You literally could read a single page each time you sat down and feel good about stopping in the middle of a chapter. The thoughts are clear and expressed in a clean format that really makes the things stick.

The technique itself is really simple. And Staffan’s style of writing only makes it even easier to pick up and use.

I would strongly suggest getting Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time if you plan to learn or at least try the Pomodoro Technique, even more so if you plan for the year is to be more productive!

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to write a review on this book today either.

Things have been mighty quiet here. I have been working on getting setup with more publishers so I can read and  review more books on Open Source and Programming with you. I have also been working with friends to establish some partnerships to hopefully get a chance to write reviews for video games as well. All in all things are moving quite nicely on all fronts.

This weekend looks to be packed with a lot of fun. Tonight I am attending a party to get some free software, probably nothing OS, but hey free is free. The company hosting the party is also giving us free tickets to the Jazz game, I don’t much care for basketball, but again free is free.

Gears of War 2 released today, so I will of course be getting knee deep in some Locust blood, can’t wait to chainsaw in an upward fashion. You can find me on Xbox Live as “ut dragon”, I hope to be changing that soon.

Finally I have a slew of books that should be hitting the PO Box this weekend. I know for sure I am getting RESTful PHP (Packt Publishing), I should also be getting Ubuntu Kung Fu (O’reilly), as well as Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship(InformIT), and PHP 6:  A Beginner’s Guide (McGraw-Hill). This will make for some great reading and growth in the peronsal category.