Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I am trying to grow my ability to roll out cool stuff quickly.

If you’re developing projects for yourself, that’s the number one thing you need. The 37sig guys have a lot of good ideas for that. Joelonsoftware has a lot of good ideas. What I like about them is that they are not afraid to go against “common wisdom” in software development. 37sig doesn’t do specs. That’s scary. And so on.

But I’m finding that there are many ways to do software development. Here’s one: I am working with a team in India. No idea if this is going to work - I’ve worked with overseas teams before and I’m well aware of the risks. I’ll report back later - can you roll out cool stuff fast working with a team in India, or will you get bogged down in communications/spec problems and misunderstandings? We’ll find out.

Anyway, back to this post. I spent this week working on my ability to roll out cool stuff fast. I’m working with a team, so I needed CVS. That’s installed now. I was getting painful wrists from all the typing, so I bought a computer desk today that is ergonomically better than the table I was working on. Check. I’ve set up my local development environment - http://mefeedia.peter. Working fine. I learnt to work with PHPDocumentor. No idea how much that’ll help my ability to roll out cool stuff fast - I’ll report back on that too.

What else? I have gathered the names and tels of a bunch of people willing to do usability tests. And I’ve set up a way to do remote testing. So I’ll start doing that too. Test the competition. Test my designs. I’m gonna do half a day of testing every week we develop. Will report back.

I’m off now. I’m gonna hang a bunch of stuff on the wall. So I can roll out cool stuff faster.

(Other stuff I’m trying is: Backpack, IM, mailing lists, …)

83 Degrees | web2.0 software. For god’s sake! How 2.0 Cool Site Compliant can you get? I’m getting so sick of tags, ajax, numbers in domain names and all that superficial shit companies pull (me included) to come across as web 2.0. Jeeses.

Technorati Weblog: Welcome to the Blogosphere, Google!: “I welcome the competition. We’ve got some tricks up our sleeves too.”

You have to admire a company that is brave enough to take on Google in search, of all things.

I wonder though, Google’s big advantage is the server infrastructure they’ve built up. They know scaling better than almost anyone on the planet.

There is no doubt in my mind that Technorati’s search is superior to Google, but they are having serious scaling problems. Google doesn’t have to be better, in fact they can be worse than Technorati and still win, if they’re just Good Enough and Fast. Technorati is better than good enough, but not fast. Which is a problem.

This reminds of of Bloglines. The weird thing with Bloglines is that they have lots of crazy features (have your own blog, a great API, …) but I bet that 90% of their users use them only for one thing: reading blogs. They got that right.

I have the same problem speccing the next release of Mefeedia. Coming up with lots and lots of cool features is easy. Way easy. But finding the real value in a video aggregator and nailing that is much harder. Perhaps sites have to just develop stuff and some of it will stick? Flickr started as something quite different from what it is now, the photosharing sticked so they went with that.

EMAIL: Dreamhost to me: “I had to add indexes to several of your mefeedia_live tables because they
were *really* bad.”

Now that is beyond the fucking call of duty for a hosting service.

No wonder they’re out of dedicated servers until December. I’ve been with Dreamhost a few months now and I love them. I love them as much as my morning coffee. Their servers are zippy. Their support is good, and they know what they’re doing. They add indexes to your tables! And it’s a great deal if you have some small sites to host (and even if you have big ones, although they are growing fast and out of dedicated servers right now).

(Disclaimer: I get a bonus if you sign up through the link on this post, but that’s now why I recommend them. They add freaking indexes to your tables! Now you might think, I don’t want some sysadmin adding indexes to my tables. But if your tables were as bad as mine, you would.)

And: if anyone knows of another host with managed dedicated servers I can use with similar prices (US$ 2-300/month), please recommend.

Where are all the UK start-ups? (plasticbag.org). Indeed! And the Belgium ones? In Belgium, for example, startups US style (a few people come together and create a great product) are almost non-existent. It’s hard to get money, it’s hard to get any kind of support, you have no peers and everyone looks at you like you’re crazy.

In NYC, on the other hand, a week doesn’t go by where I don’t have beer with people doing startups. The difference is amazing.

Joel on Software - Hitting the High Notes: “You can’t afford to be number two, or to have a “good enough” product. It has to be remarkably good, by which I mean, so good that people remark about it.”

Sometimes he slips but Joel can really - really - write.

Recent patent applications result in talk about Google ranking. Basically: incoming links still matter a lot. And some other stuff.

Sometimes a picture works better: this is how Mefeedia (the first video aggregator) supports rel=”payment”. If you put a link with rel=”payment” in your blog post, Mefeedia will show a support link in its interface.

When we thought of it, it made sense. Only slowly am I realizing now why it makes sense, and why it might make less sense for text bloggers.

Rich media aggregators (or enclosure aggregators) like FireANT, Mefeedia and iTunes, don’t get their content from the RSS feeds that’s already been syndicated. The media content is linked from the RSS, not embedded, like text content. So you HIT the owner’s bandwidth every time someone watches or downloads a movie or a podcast. It costs them. That’s why it makes more sense to have a payment link for rich media than for text media.

Or it might just be the early morning coffee.

If you haveWordPress 1.2.2, and you have your blog directory in, say, http://domain.com/myblog/, and your wordpress directory in a different directory, say, http://domain.com/wordpress/, and you delete your cookies, it can be impossible to log back in, even if you have the correct username and password.

How can you tell? You are trying to log in, and it doesn’t let you but reloads the login form, but without an error. That means you have the right username and pass, but something else is wrong.

Here’s how to fix this problem.

1. Go to Mysql, you can use PHPMyAdmin, most hosts have that installed.
2. Go to the options table, and find the row in which the option_name field = http://domain.com/myblog/. On the command line, or in PHPMyAdmin’s SQL page, you can enter this: SELECT * FROM `options` WHERE option_name = ‘home’;
3. Change the value of that field to your wordpress directory: http://domain.com/wordpress/
4. Now go login to your wordpress. It should work fine and let you log in.
5. Back to the same row in the database, change the value back to http://domain.com/myblog/
6. Go check your blog. It should work fine.

You’re done.

iTunes 4.9 - 1 click subs on your site!. iTunes now does podcasts (and videoblogs!), and lets you create 1-click subscribe buttons.

It’s a little bit tricky to create a one click subscription link for iTunes.

Create the xml file like this (via here):

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>< !DOCTYPE
pcast PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PCAST 1.0//EN" "http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/pcast-1.0.dtd"><pcast
version="1.0"><channel><link rel="feed" type="application/rss+xml"
href="http://www.deltaparkproject.com/feed.cfm" /><title>Delta
Park Project</title><category>Comedy</category><subtitle>A
great weekly show with comedy clips, pop culture reviews, the small town police
blotter and funny songs. Hosted by married duo Jason and Anna.</subtitle></link></channel></pcast>

Save it as a file and give it a .pcast extension (it requires that so iTunes can pick up the file, so a .php extension won’t work. A query string extension also doesn’t work, so .pcast?id=4 doesn’t work.)

Now link to it. You can use an image or just a text link. Then, when a user clicks the link, if they have iTunes 4.9 installed, it will subscribe to the feed.

I tried to upgrade Wordpress to 1.5, got a weird “allowed memory” error on the upgrade script. This sucks. I am getting less and less patient with installation problems. Meanwhile, I am still logged out on my laptop and cannot log back in.

Joel: “Summer interns at Fog Creek have better chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft programmers.”

Headshift :: smarter, simpler, social: “Headshift is a specialist Internet consulting firm with a strong technical capability and a deep understanding of the social impact of information and communication technologies.” In other words, they get companies to try social software, bottom-up metadata and such.

Is this too specialized for a consultancy?

Ahhhhhhh. They finally installed cable internet in the new appartment today which means no more stealing of the neighbours’ extremely spotty wireless. Good.

Seth’s Blog: Small is the new big: “Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

Small means that you can answer email from your customers.”

I find Godin’s writing to be a bit too much of the all-American-self-help-book style, but hey, it beats my writing any day. And he hits some nails on the head in this post. Good to hear that staying small is ok :) A client told me I could make a lot of money by hiring a bunch of IA’s and starting an IA consultancy. Probably. But I don’t really want that responsibility, that need to be billable, to hit certain sales figures every month just to stay alive. I like the flexibility of staying small.

The Garamond Agency: “The Garamond Agency represents authors of non-fiction exclusively. Our clients are academics, scholars, journalists, business people, and writers whose books make important ideas accessible to a wide audience of readers.”

It now seems to be ok (legally) to share your Google adsense revenue.

Mark: “Since August 6, 2003, I have made $7915 from Google Adsense. My daily revenue peaked in April 2004 at about $18 per day and has been steadily declining ever since. Last month I averaged just under $9 per day. I have ads on Dive Into Python, Dive Into Accessibility, Dive Into OS X, and dive into mark.”

I’ve made $3,641 since June 2003 - in 4,638,888 pageviews. Not bad. Most of that comes from ads on my Colombia forum. Very little from the ads on my blog, that I have turned on and off at different times.

What this means for working for yourself: ads on a blog won’t get you much $$, unless you’re a super A blogger and even then. Building a useful community site seems to work much better for generating ad revenue.

Nielsen-Norman can really chop up their tutorials. Here’s a FULL day tutorial on Presenting Company Information on Corporate Websites. In other words, a full day about how to do an About Us section. You have to admire their business chops: do some research, Jakob writes an alert box, they sell a report for about 100$, and they get full day workshops out of it. Not bad.

Boxes and Arrows: Interview: Steve Krug: “BA: What was the trigger for your book?
SK: Honestly? I wrote it so I could double my consulting rates.”

If you work for yourself, take note.

Running your company on web apps. Still figuring out this one myself. Backup is a big thing as well. Any recommendations there?

Donna and Lou point out Knowspam, my favourite spam filter, is shutting down. Now I, like them, am looking for another one.

Also: what’s the story behind them shutting down? Lack of cash? Lack of interest from the developers, who might prefer to spend their time on other projects? Maybe someone wants to take over the service?

Skype launched SkypeIn, which means you get a phone number people can call (before you could call ‘real’ phones but they couldn’t call you), and more. This is brilliant for traveling. I use Skype regularly, and now I’ll probably even use them more.

Joho the Blog: Advice to young terrorists: “I have been pulled aside for special searches four out of the previous four times I’ve flown. Yesterday I asked the supervisor at the US Air desk at Logan Airport about it. He said that if you test positive for any two of the following three tests, the computer marks you for searching: A one way ticket, a ticket purchased in the past 24 hours, or paying by cash. On this particular trip, I met the first two criteria. Thus, I am a likely terrorist.

So, here’s a word of advice to today’s would-be terrorist: Splurge on the round-trip. Sure, it’s going to cost an extra couple of hundred, but at the end of the trip, you’re not going to care. Also, try to plan your murderous attack well in advance.”

Ah, so that’s what that is about :)

Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine: “Delicious Monster is the Mac software company behind the hit Delicious Library, [...] the company’s headquarters is a Seattle coffee house.”

Joshua (from delicious): “After seeing my little project go from a small hobby to a large one and then consume all my waking hours, I’ve decided to quit my job and work on del.icio.us full time. I’ve given a lot of thought to how to make this happen, and ultimately decided that the best way forward is to take on some outside investment.”

Good luck!

About being “first to market” with new functionality. I just realized something. Sometimes you need to roll out new functionality quickly, before the competition does. The reason is not so much to lock in users or to get early adopters, it is to influence practices of technology use. Because new technology gets shaped by its users as much as by its designers. If you can join that dance with your users early on, you will shape each other, and in that way set examples for the future and shape the world.

Anyone has experience with versionhost
?

Gerry McGovern: “In 1996, I started this weekly opinion piece with the objective of helping to build my personal brand name. I wanted to become known as an expert in web content so that I could make a good living from this area.”

Is it just me, or is there new life in the home-grown software business? When Microsoft and Co made it pretty hard for anyone to run a small software business in the 90s, the landscape wasn’t looking good. But now, with web apps and web-driven apps, there seems to be a new creativity out there, and a bunch of new small software developers.

DrunkenBlog: Inside Ranchero with Brent and Sheila Simmons: “One of the joys of running your own business is that you can tell the hypothetical MBAs to hypothetically get lost.” Love that quote.

I have a MySQL database optimization job: I need some tables optimized and some queries written. I have a short spec explaining things in detail that I’ll send to you. I can pay a small amount of $. Get in touch at peter van dijck (no spaces) at gmail… and I’ll send you the spec. It’s for Mefeedia.com

I am looking for someone to have an ongoing relationship with- little jobs. I write decent specs, but often we need to discuss requirements before implementing. If you’re a “just tell me what to do” kind of guy, don’t bother. If you’re a “yeah, but is that good for the user?” kind of guy, or “here’s a simpler way that’ll scale much better”, I want to talk to you.

Since I can’t get my external harddrives to work correctly with my laptop, I am using a different backup method now: FTP. I use SyncBack (free) to set up daily backups to a webserver I run. I’ll report back about how well this works. So far so good, I’ve started backing stuff up.

I’m quite happy using OpenOffice, except for its presentation program. Powerpoint is just so much better. So I want to buy Powerpoint. It’s 200 US$, can I get it somewhere cheaper? It seems such a drag to buy Powerpoint, I just want to get the key and pay. Microsoft has a free trial, but they send a CD - you can’t download it! I don’t want to wait for a CD! It’s already installed on my Dell laptop, I just want the product key.

Something I have learned: in the USA, if you get an overdraft notice or something, just call your bank and ask them to remove the penalty charge, and they’ll almost ALWAYS remove it. Just ask, and give a reason they can enter in their computer system, like “I was out of the country” or something. It almost always seems to work.

I still have the same problem with my harddrive. I would pay someone to tell me how to fix this.

Basically, I have 2 external firewire harddrives, and they work fine on one compute, but with my laptop (using a firewire card), they ‘break’ if I write more than a few MEgs to them (like in a backup). It happens again and again. I have SP2 installed, which is supposed to fix the problem. More details in the link. I would really love some help! I depend on my laptop and I need to back up my files, and dragging them in one by one just doesn’t cut it.

A really good and easy guide on which free software to use to get your Windows machine protected: 2BrightSparks.com | Resources | Safe Computing

I’m looking for a PHP/MySQL programmer for some freelance work on database optimization. If you LEFT OUTER JOIN in your sleep, email me at peter van dijck at the google email domain (you know, gmail). There might be some ongoing freelance work there, it all depends on how things work out.

This is a small project for now, but a fun one - I’m a demanding client but a really good one: you won’t have to do much of that client “management” stuff (that’s what they all say though!)

I have a problem with backing up files to my external harddrive (on Win XP).

When I drag a large folder (a few gigs) to the harddrive, it starts copying, but after a while (5 minutes), the harddrive “dissapears” - it no longer shows up in my list of drives, and the copy gives an error. I have to then unplug the harddrive and plug it in again to make it show up again in my list of drives.

I have this problem with 2 computers, and with 2 external harddrives, so I don’t think it’s a problem with either the computer or the drive. Small folders are ok, it’s just the larger folders that show this problem.

Is it impossible to back up large folders by just dragging them? Should I use a backup program? If so, which one is good (and cheap or free)? PC Magazine recommends the free SynchBack so I’m trying that out.

Later: damn! I tried but the same problem happened, after copying for 5 minutes, the outside drive just ‘dissapeared” from my computer, and the copy program reports an error. So it’s not just with drag and drop, it’s any copying to those drives (remember I have 2) that makes them “dissapear’ from windows. Any ideas?

Later: I ran Windows update and all, tried again, still the same problem.

Later: This article seems to describe the problem, in short: Windows XP can have problems with harddrives larger than 138Gigs, upgrade to Service Pack 2 (something I’ve been holding off on) to fix it.

Later: I successfully installed Service Pack 2, after it crashed on me once. I tried again, STILL the same problem. Arg.

Later: Alright, I am downloading more updates from the Windows Update site. The words “critical update”, “strongly recommend” and “security” were plastered all over the page so I figured I’d better say yes.

Later: I installed all latest Windows updates, doublechecked again (no updates), restarted, tried again, and fuck: still the same problem.

I am running out of ideas here…

I’m Mozilla based (Firefox, Thunderbird) on Win XP - any recommendations for a good calendar application that also lets you pop up reminders (of meetings and such)? Mozilla’s Sunbird is in v0.2 and recommended for testing only, so doesn’t seem like a good bet right now.

I opened an account with Broadvoice (20$/month for a nyc phone nr using voip and unlimited calls to USA, Canada and a bunch of other countries including Belgium).

Setup surprised me. You just plug the tiny box they send you into your router (a wireless/router is like 20$ these days), plug in any standard old phone and it works! No setup. No websites to navigate to. No codes to enter. You don’t even have to turn on your computer. Pick up the phone and you get a dialtone, and call mom in Belgium and it works. Nice.

A little stat: for a month, I ran a skyscraper google ad with 2 ads instead of the skyscraper google ad with 4 ads on a website. Clickthroughs went down from 0.4% to 0.3%. The detailed stats make me believe this change wasn’t a random fluctuation, but due to the change. (A change from 0.4% to 0.3% clickthroughs means a 25% decrease in revenue. )