I made a post recently that showed a way of downloading songs from popular mixtape sharing website, muxtape.

After reading the article and looking at the number of tricky hoops people needed to jump though, programmer James Rose took it upon himself to make the process much quicker and easier. Simplicater was born.

It’s a very simple application. All you need to do is enter the url of the muxtape you would like to download and hit “fetch”. You’re then presented with a list of download links for all the .mp3s for that mixtape.

Simple, effective and very useful.

Twitter has a wonderfully loyal and dedicated userbase so when twitter inevitability goes down people get rather annoyed. It’s also no secret that twitter has been having some recent scaling issues so twitter has been going down noticeably often. So often in fact that it prompted someone to make a handy “is twitter down?” website.

When twitter goes down, twitabit steps up. It lets you que up tweets that will then be submitted the second twitter comes back online.

I’m haven’t tested this out yet (twitter is currently up!) but it looks like it’s a handy little app for twitter addicts. Stick it in your bookmarks then next time twitter goes down you’re covered.

If you haven’t heard about muxtape yet you’re in for a treat. It’s a wonderfully simple website that lets you create “mix tapes” and share them with your friends. Launched in April they’ve already got some great traction and currently boast over 100,000 users.

The way the site is setup means it’s a great way of discovering new music you might not have otherwise listened to. Unfortunately up until now there has been no way of searching for songs within mix tapes that people have made so while it’s a great way of discovering new music it’s quite hard to find songs that you actually want to listen to.

Cue muxfind. A project by Jan Oberst that lets you search for songs on muxtape. You enter a song name and it’ll search the content of muxtape and bring back a list of mix tapes that include the song you specified. What’s great about this is that 9 times out of 10 the other songs that are in the same mix will be similar in style to the song you searched for and generally, you’ll like them.

That’s all wonderful, but the songs are still streaming from the internet. Although there is a way of downloading the songs to your computer so you can transfer them to your iPod and listen to them whenever you like. See the video tutorial below.

Okay, a few days prior to today I was reading the wonderful hacknews and came upon this article. It covers some elements and ideas that helped us find interest in bootstrapping and independent-ness at IndieStartups. I’m quoting a bit here, or if interested the article can be read at OnStartups.

1) Most folks don’t need venture funding in the early stages

2) the odds of first-time entrepreneurs actually raising VC is pretty low.

Oh, and 3) it’s one of the least fun activities an entrepreneur can take. Raising funding is often harder than building a product/business — and much less fun!

…

The simple answer is no, I have not changed my mind on VC. I still don’t think most early-stage entrepreneurs should go out on the venture fund-raising circuit. They should maintain the option of a modest exit. Focus on solving the customer’s problem (not the VC’s problem). My situation with HubSpot was special. I had already done the bootstrap thing (multiple times) and made money. I had above average odds of raising money for HubSpot.

So, why did I raise funding? Because, this time around I wanted to take a shot at the big leagues. Sure, any success (even a modest one) is nice. But a modest success is not going to change my life much at this point. I want to swing hard. It’s not about the money. It’s about the fun and excitement of pursuing a really big idea, working with really smart people and doing what I love. [And, of course, the money won’t hurt either]

And that, my friends, is why I raised $17 million in venture funding.

Once again, full article at OnStartups.

So we’ve outlined our main goals and ideas we’d like to cover here on IndieStartups, but to be clear on what everything means, I’d like to take this post and be a little more specific. Let’s start with bootstrapping – we’ve used this word everywhere, but what does it really mean?

According to Wikipedia, “Financial bootstrapping is a term used to cover different methods for avoiding using the financial resources of external investors. Bootstrapping can be defined as “a collection of methods used to minimize the amount of outside debt and equity financing needed from banks and investors” (Ebben and Johnsen, 2006:853).”

We’ve mish-mashed this word with others like ‘independent’, and ‘self-funded’… And this is what we will be covering. Ambitious new start-ups that don’t have millions of dollars worth of venture capital and investments to blow off. We’re also here to enlighten the start-up society that raising this kind of capital is not always necessary, and more importantly we’ll do our best to share methods; stories, ideas, opportunities and much more to help our readers get their start-up off the ground successfully.

To be more effective, and credible, the team here will also be performing a few ‘Case Studies’ alongside IndieStartups. In layman’s terms, we’ll be launching some of our own start-ups with heavy documentation just to show our readers what can be done (hopefully). We have a few ideas to explore, but we’re very open to suggestions. If you’d like to suggest something you would like to see us do, a comment using the form below would be lovely. Money made from these case-studies will be invested back into IndieStartups and further case-studies.

If you have any ideas on what you’d like to see done, covered, or tested on IndieStartups, please do let us know. We do read each comment and, so far, each e-mail we receive. If you do not wish to leave a public comment, or would like to get in-touch with us for a different purpose, feel free to do so using our contact form (or if you prefer, shoot something to [email protected]).

I’ll finish this post saying we’re also on the lookout for new (and existing) start-ups to cover, so if you’ve got one or know someone who does feel free to e-mail us.

Enjoy! (P.S. – Don’t let an update go unread, subscribe to our feed)