We just launched the Automattic Support Network which is a place for companies to purchase paid support for WordPress and MU. Originally I didn't think we'd need to do this, simply because the WordPress.org support forums are so amazing and there is such a good community around it. That hasn't changed, but some big companies and enterprise folks are uncomfortable with volunteer support, and want (and insist) on paying someone before deploying a product. Based on that feedback and a lot of input from Podz, we put together this new product, which is basically VIP support with a guaranteed response time. Toni has some more thoughts here. We also rolled out new pricing for commercial Akismet use a few days ago, and the response has been great so far.
Renting is for Suckers
Misconception: Renting is for Suckers. In Houston the market was such that it seemed silly not to buy. Here in San Francisco real estate is definitely another world, and I plan to rent for a while even though it does limit what you can do with the space in some frustrating ways.
Leviathan Servers
Leviathan toys with Zeus. Part I. A mythic allegory describing what Joyent perceives as an evolution from the Google model of cheap generic boxes running Linux (back) to Sun hardware and software with virtulization, new file systems, and new boxes with dozens of CPUs. A great post, even if you don’t agree with the conclusions. (I’m still on the fence.)
Snakes on a Plane
I think in a few years books will be written about Snakes on a Plane and the fantastic (WP-powered) blog which is following it.
Dodgy Mouse and Keyboard
After several days of mysterious mouse jumps, keys getting “stuck” on the keyboard and repeating over and over, and varioun non-responsiveness of my computer, I was extremely frustrated. I tried moving the wireless reciever five different places, re-compiling synergy, scanning for spyware, etc. Of course everything was fixed by putting new batteries in the wireless mouse and keyboard. Noticing a theme? I should get sponsorship from Energizer.
Become a Better Designer
50 ways to become a better designer, broadly applicable to many walks of life. More than half are directly usable for code wranglers.
At Webvisions in Portland
About a month from now I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” The talk will be part tech, part social. It’s a very reasonably priced conference with a lot of great speakers, I think they’re going to sell out soon so if you’re interested in going book soon. It’ll also be my first time in Portland, so I’m looking forward to exploring the area a bit and meeting WP users.
New WordPress Theme Directory
Thomas Silkjær has put together an awesome new WordPress theme directory with uploading, tags, voting, download counters, and more. I hear there is even more on the way.
Skelton Interview
Banned from Google
Something really weird happened when I had the password problem last week — I completely disappeared from Google. It’s not just the search for Matt, but almost every page on my site has disappeared even for super-obvious searches. This happened within a day of the guy getting into my blog account. I have two theories, one is that when all my links started pointing to blogspot (he changed my siteurl) that triggered some sort of anti-spam flag, and my second theory is that [H]e turned on the new Blog Privacy feature in WP that adds noindex,nofollow
to the header of your page, and Google was crawling me that very instant and removed my site. BTW, as an update to the previous entry, I have since found out that I did not have a super-obvious password, but rather he found it embedded in the source code in the SVN repository of a new project I’m working on that hasn’t been released yet. I’ve axed the repo, but at least now I don’t feel so bad about having an awful password on my blog. Regardless, the event was a good excuse to review my password strategy and make sure everything was fairly locked down. Update: I’m certain it was the noindex thing, which looks like it was on for about a week. Let’s see how long it takes to bring everything back and if I rank the same. Update 2: Everything is back to normal. 🙂
Pubsub
“Our days are numbered. A recent attempt to execute a merger has been blocked and we’ve been blocked from raising equity financing that would allow us to continue to pay salaries and pay off our $3 million in debt.” Of course it’s only one side of a story, but sounds messy.
Cave Explorer
Just came across this interesting blog from a bloke who explores caves and such all over the world. There are some really interesting posts like this one on cave ecosystems and how a dead log can sustain life for years.
WordPress no-www
After being frustrated with mod_rewrite
mojo, I wrote a quickie no-www plugin for WordPress that redirects people to the non-www version of your URLs, in the spirit of no-www.org. Update: This is now built into WordPress through the “canonical URLs” feature, just go to the General Settings page and remove “www” from the blog and WP URLs.
Beeping
About five minutes ago, the beeping stopped.
I was in Texas last week for BBQ, clouds, and a wedding. At some point when I was gone, something in my house started beeping. When I arrived home there was a high-pitched chirp about every 45 seconds to a minute, coming from somewhere in the house. Generally when things beep annoyingly it’s one of the UPSes which like to complain loudly after a power outage. The one at my desk and at the closet both had a weird light on back saying “Building Wiring Failure.” (Probably because I removed the ground plug to plug them into a two-socket extension cord.)
I tweaked the UPSes for a good hour or two trying to get them to stop beeping, I pressed the buttons, reset the circuit, unplugged them, left them off, I even flipped my master breaker. (Which reset all of the thermostats to 62, a chilling fact I realized the next day.)
Eventually, I realized the beeping wasn’t coming from a UPS at all, but rather from the smoke detector in my office. I stood on a wheeled chair and sure enough there was a 9-volt battery in there that looked pretty dead, yet it was still wired into the wall in a way I couldn’t disconnect easily. Now that the problem was identified, I just had to find a 9-volt battery (I didn’t have any) and everything would be okay.
That was three days ago. Since then, I came to live with the beep. I found that if I closed the office door and my bedroom door I couldn’t really hear it while sleeping, any more than a cricket chirping. I took calls in my living room instead of my office. Even sitting at my desk, not 5 feet from the smoke detector, I was able to get productive work done with the beeping like a minutely metronome that was hardly noticable. For days.
Engineers do this all the time. We ignore the high-pitched beeping 5 feet away from us that would drive any normal person insane because whatever gene that gives you the programming knack also makes it disturbingly easy to focus and ignore things we’re familiar with.
This is why releases are so important, they force you to clean up your house like you’re having company coming over.
Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner. Let the nagging details of what you do grind like nails on blackboard and amaze you that you have ignored for months or years something so familiar yet so annoying. Obsess about it until you can’t do anything else except fix it, and take the 10 minutes to walk to the store and get a 9-volt battery.
GigaOM Goes Full-time
Om Malik is taking GigaOM full-time. (!) Update: This picture of Om is actually why I started reading his site.
Google Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync is the best tool of its kind I’ve seen, and it’s a problem that has been my own personal pet peeve for a REALLY long time. It looks like Google is going to be the one to finally unify desktops. For pure-bookmarks sync, Foxmarks actually much smoother, and lets you use your own FTP server for the tin foil hat crowd.
Gallery: 6-10-2006
Auto-imported from old gallery:
NSA Microformats
Podsession Responses
There have been two interesting responses to the podcast I did with Om and Niall the other week. The first was Scott Johnson who responded in a podcast. As I expected, most people are taken aback by my statement to “let the engineers pick” what language and enviroment you use for your product. I think there is one important assumption that wasn’t articulated in that statement: you have brilliant engineers and you trust them. As a psuedo-engineer, I find it insulting when people suggest engineers are unable to factor anything other than their selfish language preferences, things like loaded costs, hardware costs, platforms, long-term viability, hiring, etc are simple variables that can be considered by any intelligent person. If anybody in Automattic came to me that was writing a tool in Python, C, Perl (it’s happened) or whatever, I might ask a question or two but at the end of the day I know they’re able to weigh the costs and benefits just like I would. If you’ve hired an engineer that isn’t able to make these decisions as well or better than you, then you’ve already lost the battle and over time more and more of your time will be spent plugging holes in a descent to mediocrity.
The second response was on the Pronet blog which in an amazing feat of blogging acrobatics managed to mention and link every single person tangentially associated with the podcast except me, even though I’m quoted in every heading. The Google Pages example is brought up again to illustrate that all the hardware in the world sometimes solve a scalability problem, but I still think that’s faulty because none of us had any idea why Pages was slow when it launched, it could have been a faulty router for all we know. Pronet responds to “Go with what your happiest working with” with a set of points to consider for a language, but again with the right people none of that matters. Happiness, in all things not just the language, should be the number goal and metric for everything in an early-stage startup. Happy engineers work smarter, longer, more efficient, attract better candidates, and have a better quality of life. (A corollary is that if you’re already set on a language path, don’t hire anyone who isn’t thrilled with working in that language.) For an example of how this can work in a really extreme case, I suggest everyone read the story of Viaweb and Lisp. (Another talk.)In my mind Lisp is a ridiculous language to build a web application in, but to them and their engineers it was heaven and they had better products earlier than their competition as a result of their unusual choice.
(As an aside, I wonder how many people said the same thing about Ruby for web apps before David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails, and 37signals, or even about PHP before Yahoo and Wikipedia? An example (and a little bit of promotion) is better than a thousand whitepapers.)
Whoops!
Sorry for the interruption in service, things should be back to normal now. *ahem* If you missed it, someone guessed my not-at-all secure password to this blog and posted an entry and changed the “siteurl” setting.