New Blog Design

Design, Meta

It is now official get out of your RSS reader day. Take a few minutes to check out the new photomatt.net and browse around a bit. This is, I believe, the fifth major iteration of the design here but it’s the first one since 2003. When I last freshened the paint around here it got a link from Zeldman saying “lucky in redesign” and I figured I would never be able to top that, so I left the design the same for years. The only major change was the introduction of Asides in 2004.

Well I couldn’t top the last design, but Nicolò Volpato had no trouble creating something beautiful I started coding up earlier this weekend. Nicolò is still working on mocking up a few of the pages, and in the meantime I’ve been working on a little additional functionality around the site, particularly with photos.

Here are a few things you might notice so far: related posts on entry pages, recent entries shown in the sidebar on entries older than 2 weeks, when a blog is from the same day as a photo album random photos from that day are shown at the bottom, and likewise a photo will show when there’s a post that day.

The main goals of the photo integration were to enable a little more serendipity. There are a lot of other little Easter eggs, but those will remain an exercise for the reader.

MySQL Camp Google Notes

Events, Google

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

Continue reading MySQL Camp Google Notes →

Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances

Asides, Events

The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.

Boxely Gone

Asides

I blogged about Boxely a few days ago, it seemed like a neat framework. I’ve been thinking more about the desktop the past month or so, hence my blogging around it. Joe has updated saying “Well, that was fun while it lasted. AOL has taken down the site already. Apparently not all executives in the company were aware of the release, and ordered it removed when they caught wind.” On the other side of the web Jason Calacanis is waving the AOL banner, yet a company that stifles innovation like this and flip-flops releases isn’t one I would invest in. Is this a continuation of Nullsoft-style rebels inside of AOL fighting to make a difference? Update: It’s back!

Firefox Followup: Parakey

Firefox

Details have finally emerged about Blake Ross’ secret new project, Parakey. It gets to the meat on the third page.

“Although it looks like a Web site–down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section–it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera.”

It uses a new language called JUL. I haven’t found anything about Parakey online, besides Parakey.com registered about a month ago. Most disappointing quote from the article?

“If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”

I’m guessing this might be a misquote. Investors are for money, advice, and connections, not product leadership. There are good examples now of scalable businesses being built on top of open source — don’t let anyone take you down a path you can’t believe in 100%. Think long term. I don’t know who Parakey’s investors are, but I’m sure Blake hooked up with (or could demand) folks smart enough to understand this.

Update: Blake says in the comments, “That is, indeed, a misquote. Parakey will be open source, as I repeatedly told the magazine while the article was being edited.”

On PayPerPost

Uncategorized

So I signed up for PayPerPost is Toni’s foray into the seedy side of paid blogging. Includes some interesting comments, including an ultra-defensive thread from one of their investors. I also came across a ton of creepy videos on Youtube, a lovefest for PayPerPost and apparently those are $10 a pop. There is a firm that does something similar in real life, Buzz agents or something, but they’re actually fairly respectable simply because they require one thing: the agents to say that they’re being paid. End of story. I have no problem with bloggers making money, but that info out there and let people make up their own mind.

Another way to think about it: If PayPerPost was PayPerComment instead, and they paid people to leave comments shilling various products or services, what would you call it? What if they paid people to email their friends about something without disclosure? Would someone start an anti-PayPerPost Akismet, or a Firefox extension to detect and highlight people using them?