Here’s the history of Coca-Cola:

1. Pemberton’s French Wine Coca (cocaine wine) is invented
2. Inventor removes the wine (prohibition) and calls it Coca-Cola
3. Inventor removes the cocaine (prohibition) and people still buy it.

There’s a business lesson here but I’m not sure what it is.

Pictured: Me in Atlanta with John Pemberton, inventor.

I get a lot of requests to bring back Mobog, the camera phone site I conceived and launched over a weekend in early 2004.

Mobog let you send in pictures from your camera phone and instantly post them to the community.  The site was popular but I took it down after a few years due to issues with hosting and porno (more on that here).

But I just thought of a way to solve those problems.  I’m thinking about working on a new version of Mobog this weekend, but I couldn’t remember everything it used to do: profiles, comments, private messages, etc.

So here I am searching the Web for screenshots and such, when I come across a mock business plan for a pretend photo sharing service called “PhotoCat.”  Apparently it was written as a Berkeley business school assignment (author unknown) and includes a complete description of Mobog, including screenshots, in the “comparative analysis” section here.

The question remains whether “Mobog 2008″ would be as popular as Mobog 2004.  The truth is I do this stuff for fun and my own personal use, so if other people decide to use it, that’s just an added bonus.  Is it pretentious if I say I consider it “my art?”  I think so, so I won’t say it!

I admit it, I wrote my first PHP program tonight.

I’ve been programming since I was around 12 (i’m 32 now). In high school I used Pascal. In college I used C. My first job out of college was programming in Live Wire (server-side Javascript - wow, it doesn’t even have a wikipedia page… but it is mentioned in the disambiguation) and Visual Basic. Then in 1996 I started using ColdFusion.

I continued programming in ColdFusion to this day, even though it’s kind of considered an outdated and amateur programming language (even though MySpace was originally developed with it). I still rock Visual Basic from time to time for Windows (non-Web) programming. And of course lots of Javascript.

Anyway, I just installed this new blog software, which is PHP-only. So I figured I’d get with the 21st century and learn PHP so I can customize it. Here’s my first PHP program: Ask me anything.

Maybe in 10 years I’ll learn Ruby on Rails… (2008’s hot programming language)

Oh yeah - in keeping with my tradition of weird programming environments (like ColdFusion), Pud.com now runs on a “WAMP” server: Windows, Apache, MySql, PHP. Most programmers will find this strange, as they are used to “LAMP” (Linux…and so on).

Fun.

I also know Flash, sort of.

Check out Ask Pud’s new cleaned up design. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time… new features include prettier commenting, “next page” link on the bottom of each page, and more.

Also I decided to start writing my titles with the proper capitalization — “New Design” instead of “New design”.

Let me know what you think. Also let me know if you notice any bugs or weirdness.

Rock on.

(Paint brushes by Chris Campell)

Okay I realize I’ve been totally slacking on answering your questions. The questions are piling up and my lack of responses is unacceptable.

Here’s an experiment: I’ll post a question here for you to answer. Pud.com has hundreds of readers every day — at least one of you should be able to come up with a decent answer, maybe…?

I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, but let’s find out. Here’s your first question:

Hi Pud, 

There is this girl I’ve been chasing for 6 months now. I have a lot of feelings for her and she knows it.

But she doesn’t know what to do — she has this long distance relationship with a guy overseas and he’s allegedly coming back toward the end of the year, maybe sooner.

What should I do?

Thanks,
Mot
Queensland, Australia
25 years old

Well? Post your answers in the comments.

(Photo by TwOsE)

Is anyone else clicking “restart later” every 10 minutes, after the most recent Windows update? Going on 3 days or so, still haven’t rebooted. This popup is driving me crazy.

I made this site a while ago, MyVideoComments.com, so I could see what people were saying about my YouTube videos. For example, use it to search the username “pud”.

I think it’s one of the more useful little sites I’ve made over the years, especially for people who upload videos to YouTube.

Anyway, I just added a new slide-show interface thing on the homepage. I think it’s pretty cool. Check it out.