Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

When you’re working for yourself, not just working from home but really working for yourself, you don’t have to stick to 9 to 5. 9 to 5 is only used because it’s easy to control by companies, anyways. Nobody is productive from 9 to 5. I never heard anyone say: “Jee, I’m really at my best from 9 to 5.”

So when you work for yourself, instead of a structure that tells you when to work, you have to find your rythm. The times of the day when you get certain stuff done.

For me, after a coffee in the morning, I have a few hours of very creative, focused attention in which I get a lot done. Rythm has a lot to do with how you eat, by the way. But it’s different for everyone. So, finding your rythm. Figuring out when’s a good time to do coding, versus when’s a good time to go to the bank.

See also: Get your rythm

I’m up early today, couldn’t sleep with the heat. It’s 4:00 am. Yeah, that’s ridiculous.

So I figured I’d do an experiment. Since I work mostly from home these days, I’m always trying to find the best rythm. I know that usually, I get up and from like 8:00am to noon, I’m very productive. In the afternoon, not so, so I do chores then.

What can I get done this early? Is it a time to code? To wax philosophically? To read up?

What do you do?

After I learnt basic PHP (I coded for a living for a while), I became an information architect, and never really had to code again. All my little projects didn’t need more than my basic PHP.

Since I’m working on Mefeedia.com though, I finally feel I’m becoming a better coder again. In the sense that I’m learning to really set up an object model, a db model and a set of actions on those, and keep that pretty separate from the service or website itself. I might play with Rails a bit in the future. If there is time for playing.

Life With Alacrity: On Being an Angel: “Thus when entrepreneurs complain that VCs will not invest in their company, it is often because the VCs can’t figure out how to invest a minimum of $25M and turn out at the end with $250M.”

Good thing that, for many internet projects, you don’t need VC’s. Pfew.

Six Apart - Movable Type News - The benefits of static web pages: “# Static pages are easier to index.
# Static pages show a better face to external search engines.”

I can not believe that the Typepad guys would put such self-serving bullshit on their website. The above are patently NOT true, and pretty much everyone with an ounce of technical understanding knows this.

Of course they list these as “Byrne’s” list. This tactic is known as willfully spreading lies or myths that benefit your product. I didn’t believe Typepad would do that.

I’ve been running Google adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher network ads in an A-B test for over a month now. I had a script randomly serve either a Yahoo or a Google ad in the same place. The ads looked almost exactly identical (in color and layout) too.

The end result is that Yahoo (right now, for my site) is paying 10% more than Google ads.

Each ad network got 9000 page impressions per day, for over a month. That should be enough to be statistically relevant. But then the stats start to diverge in interesting ways.

Google’s ads got an average of a 2.3% clickthrough rate per day. Yahoo only got an average of 1.3%. BUT: the average daily revenue per day from Yahoo is 10% higher than the average daily revenue from Google.

In other words: Yahoo seems to serve (for my site) higher paying ads than Google. So even though the Yahoo ads get less clickthrough, the end result is that Yahoo pays 10% more.

Of course, these numbers will probably differ for your website. The 10% difference is statistically valid for my website, but you can not extrapolate that to other websites. The content will be different, so the ad inventory that each service has will probably be different as well.

Your final conclusion should be that Yahoo and Google pay pretty much the same, although there may be small difference (5, 10, perhaps up to 20%) in what they pay for specific websites. The only way to know for your website, is to run them both, next to each other, for a month or so, and see which one pays more for your website. If you are making 100$/day or more, 10% can end up being quite a bit of money and doing these tests and optimizing may be worth it. If you make less, don’t bother, just use one of the two for now.

And of course, you should repeat the test a few times a year. These things always change.

I am trying to find good podcasting tools. Here’s what I need: record Skype conversations, mix some audio, then upload it somewhere (preferably the internet archive for longevity). Should be easy, and on Windows. Google is no help at all. I am willing to pay 50$ for a good tool that does it all. I don’t want to pay for crappy tools that do 1 thing kinda ok. I want an easy solution.

Does anything like this exist yet?

I am working with a starting Indian development shop, and even though it is challenging sometimes, and we’re still trying to make it work, answers like this about last months’ bill really make my day :)

From my provider: “payment: I dont know what the best way to bill for the last month is. Since various people jumped on various tasks at various times. Why dont you decide on the value of delivered items. If its more than zero we are making progress!”

Is there a (preferably free) and easy way to track the responsiveness of a site? As in: how fast does it serve its pages. Something that checks a number of times a day would be perfect. Thanks!

(Yes, I’m back from my holiday. It was great.)

And what i don’t like ;) As you know, the Mefeedia directory is a side project, so there is always more to do.. But there are a few things I really like:

1) Browsing feeds is really nice now. You can go to http://mefeedia.com/feeds/44/ and just click “next feed”, “next feed” and so on, and get a really nice feel of the videoblogs out there. Next thing to do: add “related feeds”. I’m still figuring out an algorythm for that. Or go to http://mefeedia.com/feeds/reviewed/ to see the recently reviewed feeds.

2) You can add descriptions to a tag now, like a wiki. Try it. Example: http://mefeedia.com/tags/vloggercon/ I really like adding descriptions to tags, then clicking a related tag and describing that.

3) Tagging an entire feed. You can now go to a feeds details page (try your own feed) and just tag all the videos in the feed, right there on that same page. That rocks.

4) BlogThis! Revlogging! I love revlogging videos, and you can do it from any page, from a tag page, from a feed detail page, or from the watch page. I like that I can drag and drop images into my post and revlog straight to my blog.

There’s a lot I don’t like about the new Mefeedia too, of course :) That’s for another post. What do you like?

My personal favourite new feature in Mefeedia is a tiny one that I decided to program in in a few hours. I’d been thinking about it for months. I call it WikiTags.

You can now write a wiki-like description for each tag. See screencasts for an example.

The thing I realized is that many tags are not really descriptive words, and could use a explanation. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes. If you click the edit link you can find an RSS feed of all edits, which might be interesting.

I have done quite a bit of testing of websites in my day, and reporting bugs is never a joy. But I think I have found what may be the absolute fastest way to report bugs.

The approach consists of a few different parts:

1. Get a Flickr account and download Grabbr. Grabbr is great for taking screenshots and sending them to Flickr: you click shift F-12, and the app opens with a screenshot in it. Then you click the upload button. Then you open your Flickr window in the browser, click “my fotos” and the screenshot shows up.
2. Now you are looking at a screenshot of the bug. Click “add note”, and add a few notes on areas of the screen describing the bug. I find this works really naturally, adding the notes forces you to describe what happens, and about half website bugs can be easily described in a screenshot.
3. Next, I add a bugreport to my bugtracking system. Often, it is just a title and a “see http://….” (the flickr link). That’s all that’s needed for the developers to reproduce and fix the bug.

Here’s an example bugreport at Flickr. Hover over the photo to see the note.

This is really the fastest bug reporting system I’ve ever used. It takes between 30 and 60 seconds to report most bugs. For real. And you need a lot less text to describe a problem with a screenshot and the notes feature.

Of course it doesn’t work for all bugs. Some bugs take more time. What do you think? Useful? I’m loving it!

Business 2.0 :: Magazine Article :: What’s Next :: Google vs. the Venture Capitalists: “Yet since it started the practice in 2003, Google has snatched up 12 companies, many of which had raised only small amounts of funding and sometimes no venture capital. And lately its pace of acquisitions has quickened. In the past six months, the company has purchased five microscopic startups.”

PodGuide.tv: Mefeedia video podcast directory: “If, as I have, you’ve been discovering the wild and sometimes bizarre world of podcasts with your newly-acquired iPod, you may want to visit Mefeedia, a directory that lists thousands of video podcasts. It’s the place I go to find some of the channels I feature here on the site. The depth of the directory is astounding.“

What’s web2.0 about mefeedia? There are no rounded colors, few pastel colors, little AJAX (only when really necessary), … Buzzword compliance no achieved! Yet it’s implementing what I think is the future of online media strategy: centralized subscription management. It’s not a new idea, Odeo gets it, Yahoo gets it.

But is it web 2.0? (God I hope not!)

DV Guru: “Mefeedia has been around since the beginning of videoblogging time (well a little bit afterward). In fact the founder, Peter Van Dijk, also helped start the yahoo videoblogging group with Jay Dedman - which is like a mecca for videobloggers (seriously, talk about a community).

Just recently, mefeedia spruced up their web site features by adding reviews. So now, not only can you subscribe to your favorite vlog, you can also see what other people are saying about them and write a review yourself. You can also apply tags to the videos you see and have your own video queue on the site, which you can apply an RSS feed to. Also, if you have videos on the site, you can bunch them up into an archive and show them off as thumbnails on your own site. Right now there are 1141 vlogs accounted for. Seriously.”

You know how, when you write a book, they assign you different editors? A grammar editor who looks at the book from the point of view of grammar and vocabulary. A technical editor, or factchecker, who checks there are no mistakes in there. A content editor who checks whether you’re talking about the right stuff and it’s interesting.

When you edit text yourself with those hats on, your really find a lot of things you don’t if you just try to improve the text without focusing on 1 area.

So the same can apply to websites.

You can go over a beta site in various rounds, and wear a different hat every time:

• Focus on editing text.
• Focus on writing the right text for usability.
• Do a usability test.
• Focus on the overall layout of each page: does it have a clear beginning? A clear title? A clear focal point?
• Focus on interaction: is it consistent throughout the site?
• And so on.

The advantage of focusing on 1 specific area and spending an hour or 2, 3 doing only that is that you really start to refine the site in a way that just general looking at it wouldn’t do. And if you refine it in enough areas, you get something shiny. Nice.

Do you use this idea of editing rounds with very specific hats on?

Netcraft: Podcasts Help Drive Demand for High-Volume Hosting: “As podcasts and video blogs consume disk space and bandwidth, will these large media files reside with major web hosting providers, niche startups spawned by the Blogosphere, or perhaps Yahoo or Google?”

Hosting videoblogs is a large-scale game, which is why I think it will soon (within a year) be the exclusive game of the big boys. Not to say startups like Blip.tv aren’t doing an amazingly excellent job - they are. But they’ll need serious cash to scale this up, whereas the big guys already are strong in that area. What startups do well is innovation, and where’s the innovation in free hosting? That seems to be an inherent problem with many of the video “free-hosting” startups.

Just to say I’m glad I’m working on a directory for videoblogs. Not only is it easier to scale, and easier to compete with Google/Yahoo/MSN. But it’s also, in my view, a more valuable project. Directories, especially for video, are super important, because search will not be able to play the dominant role for video taht it plays for the text web. Video search just isn’t enough, because video itself demands much more supporting metadata before you decide to give it your attention (you can’t scan it quickly and skip it). Video search is an unsolved problem, and will stay that way for a while, not because we can’t search video, but because the requirement for you to decide wether you want to watch or skip this video is much higher than just a list of search result.

In other words, video directories/sites that help you find the good stuff will have at least 5 or 10 happy years ahead of them (until video search becomes good enough). And the reason that doing an independent directory is important is that the big media companies (who have deep pockets to promote their stuff) are jumping on internet television.

If we create a world in which the internet video most people watch is that coming from big media, we’ve missed an opportunity. If we create a world in which the long tail of video can find itself, we’ve won.

That’s the challenge, and that’s why I hope that in a year, there will be dozens of videoblog directories, hundreds of community video sites, thousands of revlog blogs, filtering out that long tail, making it easy for you to find video you are interested in, not video that commercial interests think you should watch. That’s the vision.

I’m working on the nav of Mefeedia, the experience you have when watching videos in your queue, moving between your queue, feeds you are subscribed to and so on.

I could have specced this out, but I’m finding that just building it really works. I’m changing my mind all the time about how exactly it should look - I spend 5 minutes changing the layout, then putting on my users hat and playing with it for a few minutes… then thinking about it and making a change.

There is no way I could spec this and give it to a developer, because the spec would take longer to think through than actually building it. And I wouldn’t have so much opportunity to change my mind.

I was thinking yesterday that there really shouldn’t be such a line between people who spec stuff out and people who create. But it’s impossibly hard to find good programmers who can also make good decisions on what to build and how it should look.

Send2Fax review by PC Magazine: “Send2Fax offers four basic plans.”

I’m looking for a simple online fax service. Requirements: being able to receive faxes and send faxes, and cheap. I only send and receive like ten faxes a year, so monthly fees are kinda annoying. Any recommendations?

If Google can do it, so can I.

Before I started this development effort on Mefeedia (we launched R1 last week, and we’ll be launching a lot more stuff soon), I made a list of priorities. What makes for the ability to roll out cool stuff fast?

• Short development cycles. I didn’t get this at first, but mike from Blip.tv told me they use 2-week development cycles. So I started doing that, and it works. Two week development cycles rock. They really focus the mind, set deadlines. Two weeks I can handle.
• Few specs. 32 signals is famous for saying specs are bad (no functional specs!), but I disagree. The truth is, it depends on your developers, and the relationship you have with them. I have 2 developers in India, and every 2 weeks I write a 2-4 page spec with the new functionality. I also give them page mockups, already integrated in the site (ie. non-working pages). That seems to work so far. The trick is: I don’t make a big spec in advance, I only spec things that we’re implementing in that 2 week cycle.
• Take the time to remove functionality. The hardest part with innovating is: you have to find the functionality that rocks. Especially in a new field like videoblogging, where none of this has been done before, it is very easy to develop functionality that doesn’t, well, rock. There are 100s of functions I could develop. It’s not a lack of cool ideas. But some work, others don’t. And you need to be lean. So what I do is rather ruthlessly remove functionality. It does take some work to remove a function, but in the future you’ve gained less testing, less maintenance, and more focus. So spend the time to remove stuff.

This is what’s working for me right now. It’s a struggle, keep trying to find new methods to increase the ability roll out cool stuff fast. When you’re competing in a hot space where everyone and their dog has lots of VC money to throw around, focus is the only answer. I’m lucky to have my focus: a directory for all independent videoblogs. That’s plenty to bite off for now :)

I need a plan for Unicode support in Mefeedia. Amazingly, PHP is rather bad in this regard. I’m using PHP and Mysql. Here’s a page that clearly shows the need for this.

So I have a question: what is the basic approach?

- Make sure stuff is stored in UTF-8 in MySQL?
- Make sure HTML uses UTF-8?
- What about the PHP part of the equation?

Any pointers to common sense around this are very welcome. Any good libraries?

Jon Udell: Good enough for government work: “Here’s the proof that tail doesn’t matter much. If it did, we would not be successfully pouring the majority of our web writing through TEXTAREA widgets in blog and webmail composers.”

What features matter and which ones don’t? The question is driving me crazy, now that I’m developing my own software. What are the killer features? There really isn’t a way to know without having users have a go at them. And then what - do you remove the not so popular features? A kind of featuritis darwinism? That’s what I’m doing with Mefeedia for now, forced by limited resources. It might well be the best approach. Less features is less stuff to focus on, less testing, and faster improvement cycles.

Perhaps the answer is: throw out features you think will work, then get rid of the ones that didn’t, then refine the ones that did until they *shine*.

But I may well be totally wrong here.

ben barren - rss’ing down under: WM Talent Agents, Viral Video + RSS.

Goddamn “viral” video. A lot of the new video sites’ business plans revolve around putting ads around “viral” videos. Is that the best we can do?

It’s this idea that the only valuable video coming from the “masses” is the “viral” video, that the best we’re gonna see is the funny fat kid dancing, that really pisses me off.

What excites *me*, is that we can take back a medium from BigCo television. That real people can make interesting video. Fascinating stuff. Not just funny home movies. That anyone with a laptop, a camera and an internet connection can have a voice through this medium. I’m focusing Mefeedia.com 100% on *those* videos. I don’t give a shit about the funny viral video of the day.

So I guess what annoys me today is the limited vision of these free-hosting-viral-video-ad-income companies that are popping up all over the place. In 18 months, most of them will be gone, thank god.

I think we need businesses to build this ecology of a million channels. But not with those business plans. That’s just not going anywhere.

I had a chat with a journalist last week, here’s the article. I like my description. “Entrepreneur” ;)

Private Equity Week: “Manhattan based-entrepreneur Peter Van Dijck, who runs MeFeedia, says VCs are calling him about wanting to invest, but he’s not even calling back.

“I’m not looking for any money, but I’ve gotten a few calls,” he says with a laugh. “Usually, they email me first. I think they’re trying to figure out what’s happening in the market, and where it’s going.”

MeFeedia catalogs more than 1,000 vlogs (or video blogs, which are Web logs that use video as the primary content), which encompass tens of thousands of videos, up from 100 vlogs six months ago. Van Dijck says the business costs just $2,000 a month to operate with the help of two contractors. He says he doesn’t know how he will make money, though like many entrepreneurs in the space, he envisions growing profitable either by selling ads or by charging fees for premium levels of service, which he says that he is currently developing.”

the weblog of Lucas Gonze: “I am surprised to find that there isn’t much community will to work with Apple to fix the one-click spec, but there isn’t, and given that it doesn’t make sense for me to pursue it on my own. On top of that, it turns out that others’ attempts to get Apple to clean up their RSS have made much difference.

My guess is that the addition of podcasting to iTunes knocked the wind out of the first generation of podcasting software developers. They’re working like mad to carve out a niche, and feel like this is a minor issue at best.”

Lucas is a pioneer. He’s right, I think most developers feel they have better things to do than to get Apple to clean up their act. Me included.

We’re wrong though.

Apple is contaminating the ecology of RSS with its implementation, and that spells bad news for everyone.

They’re like a 1,000,000 pound oil tanker, leaking oil all the way, drifting slowly into the beautiful natural coral reef that is RSS.

Fixing 1-click subscriptions (not just Apple’s, but everyone’s) should be a priority of everyone in this space, but I personally can’t be bothered to fight this fight. Fighting for standards is tiring. Been there done that.

It worries me that Lucas can’t be bothered either though. He’s a crusader. He fights the good fight. When he gives up, it’s like the Greenpeace guys saying: “You know what, whatever. I got better things to do.”

Template Tags « WordPress Codex.

I have a Wordpress question, if someone could point me in the right direction…

I have wordpress in domain.com/blog/. On another page (domain.com/index.php), I want to display the latest 10 posts in certain categories. How can I do that? What files do I need to include, and such.

A pointer in the right direction would be enough - I’m just not familiar with the whole Wordpress Way, so not sure which files to start hacking.

Thanks!

A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis: “I have been using a lot of new web services lately. It’s part of my job to do that. New companies submit business plans for us to evaluate. The first thing we usually do is use their service. Most of what is getting built today requires a fair amount of user participation and thus a lot of attention.”

Sam Ruby: Actually innovative: “If you’re working for an actually innovative startup, please consider thinking about i18n, unicode, and all that jazz. Actually, do more than consider it. Just do it. Not everyone speaks English, and there’s no reason to restrict “Web 2.0â€? (there’s that involuntary shudder again) to English speakers.”

And: ”
Totally disagree. i18n is extremely resource intensive. Everything being equal, the startup that iterates on the English product will easily beat the one that doesn’t iterate on the multi-lingual product.”

It depends. I18N can let you win over a lot of markets the other guys are ignoring. Big deal.

All that alpha, limited beta and so o web2.0 stuff these days. Them kids! Mefeedia went into public beta after I coded it together in two days in December 2004, and has been running happily ever since.

Oh, and today we moved to the new server. Dedicated and shiny :)

You’re It! » Blog Archive » Peter Morville: the Tagsonomy interview: “the semantic poverty of tags.”

We’re fixing that, though.

Just when I wanna try AdWords, I get this: ” AdWords will be offline for 4 hours beginning immediately.” Damn!

I’m working on version 2 of Mefeedia, my personal crazy project. In about a month plus some, it’ll go live. And:

• It’s not Web 2.0. What happened with web 1.0? Or the plain web? Is anyone getting excited about that anymore?
• It’s not the Flickr for video. Clearly, Flickr will be the Flickr for video.
• It’s not ‘an amazing new way to’. OK, so it is the best place to find indie video. But it’s not that amazing. Jeezes.

Thought I’d get that out of the way.

For the next version of Mefeedia, I got 2 great developers. That’s important for what follows.

I coded Mefeedia in PHP, in a weekend, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. A lot of projects start that way.

Over the past year, I’ve been spending months and months of real time developing the site. The architecture and the code aren’t bad. It’s kinda scalable.

I was talking to my devs, and they said: “Why not use Rails”. It’s the new hot thing. And i’m sure it’s got lots of advantages. But I also know the power of refactoring, and that’s the way I really wanted to go.

In the end I decided to go with Rails. Throw away all that code. And we didn’t have a lot of technical discussions about the pro’s and cons of both approaches. I made up my mind when one developer said: “I’ve been dreaming of a chance to work with Rails.”

Happy developers are productive developers. And that’s all there’s to it.

I’ve started to use Subversion for versioning, together with the excellent TortoiseSVN client, and I am hosting my SVN repository with CVSdude.com. I was just about to get pretty giddy about how cool this versioning really is when working together with other coders, but this morning they’re down. What a dependency!

What do you use? What do you do when your repository host goes down?

MySQL 5.0 release candidate is out with goodies such as stored procedures and such.

Goodies?

Mysql is trying to emulate Oracle. I see the same thing happening with PHP. It’s is trying more and more to emulate JAVA et all and trying to get acceptance in the “enterprise”. Zend’s site is all about the “enterprise”. And that’s all wrong!

Meanwhile, things like Ruby on Rails are stealing PHP’s lead in easy and fast web development. I heard a talk by a Google engineer trying to convince a MySQL crowd that they shouldn’t try to emulate Oracle, they should try to shoot higher than that and become the next web OS database. I don’t think the MySQL guys got it. That’s always the problem with a lot of open source software - they emulate leaders - they don’t lead themselves. Open office is the same - sure, they copy Microsoft Office. But MS Office is much more usable than OO - always a generation or two ahead. At least last time I checked (a few months ago).

Anyway, back to PHP-MySQL. The dynamic duo. Are they loosing the plot by trying to be “enterprise” friendly, instead of focussing on fast and cheerful web2.0-style development? I worry. Discuss.

I need to find someone who can hack together a small firefox extension for a (very cool I think myself) project I’m doing.

I haven’t been able to find out where to find someone. Email to peter van dijck at google’s email system (you can piece this email address together, right? No spaces.) I can pay you some $$, not too much. I’m a big believer in browser-based stuff, and I want to start playing with some ideas I have for Mefeedia. This is something you should be able to put together in a weekend or two…

I always assumed that “communication problems” with remote teams were mostly about culture and the difficulty of explaining stuff when you’re not standing next to someone. But I’m learning it’s also simply about the electricity going down or your phone battery running out.