Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

EFF wins protection for time zone database

Every time I proudly wear my EFF member t-shirt, people ask me what is EFF.  And every time I explain and point them to EFF.org for more information.  It’s a shame that many of those who even live and breath online don’t know what EFF is and what those guys do.  Have a look at their most recent victory:

In a statement, Astrolabe said, “Astrolabe’s lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one’s property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint. We deeply regret the disruption that our lawsuit caused for the volunteers who maintain the TZ database, and for Internet users.”

“It’s a fundamental principle of copyright law that facts are not copyrightable, and Astrolabe should have known that,” said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. “While the lawsuit should never have been filed, we’re pleased that the legal threat to an important resource has been eliminated.

You can help them do what they do, by joining and donating.

The history of Page.ly

I came across an excellent “behind the curtains” series of blog posts, telling the fascinating story of the Page.ly project.  Page.ly is a user-friendly WordPress hosting, providing hassle-free setup and configuration of WordPress websites.  I haven’t used the service myself – being a fan of WordPress I do enjoy diving into the code and learning the details – but I’ve heard a few good words about it.

For me personally, the interest in this story is not only in technology, but also in the ways of thinking.   Running a profit-oriented company (and a small start-up at that) on and around Open Source Software is guaranteed to provide a number of challenges – from competition and marketing to community managing.   And even though there are many companies that do business around Open Source Software, an insight into ways of thinking, the system of values, and into specific challenges is rare.  Building Page.ly series has plenty.

In 2010 we saw the arrival of a handful of what most would refer to as competitors, it was inevitable. We did the hard part proving the space had legs and there was revenue to be made. And no good idea goes un-copied for long. We were also starting to make a name for ourselves in the WordPress community and that helped quite a bit to get the word out.

A couple interesting points regarding these new arrivals. At SXSW in 2010 I went to the WordPress BBQ at a co-working space in Austin where I handed out a few shirts and were talking to folks about what Page.ly was. One fellow I distinctly remember talking to must have really been listening, a few months later he was a co-founder of a competing company. Around the time this company was launching their other co-founder solicited us about using our technology to power their new offering rather than ‘re-inventing’ the wheel. I was amicable to the idea (fits squarely with our collaboration over competition philosophy) and agreed to a phone conversation which never took place. They decided to roll their own and off they went.

One of the other new players was not happy merely re-factoring our idea, but went so far as to be heavily ‘inspired’ by our marketing to the point I had to have a private conversation with them about the overt similarities between our website copy.

At the end of the day, we did not then and we still do not see any of these chaps as competitors at all. We work from a mindset that with 30+ million WordPress powered sites out there the space is deep enough to support 5-10 page.ly’s and we rather pull clients over from the econo-hosts like bluehost, mt, and godaddy. 

Inspirational and insightful, to say the least.  Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

The permanence of temporary

I came across this little story about the Gmail logo.

How many times have you been told not to leave something for the last minute, but when you did, it actually turned out better than expected? Well, Gmail’s logo was the product of this situation — it was designed by Dennis Hwang (who’s responsible for most of Google’s doodles at the time) the night before Gmail launched. Former Google designer Kevin Foxtells the story on Quora: “The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.”

The last minute bit reminded me of something else.  A few years ago I was involved in a project with a rather hectic release plan.  There was too much work to do, not enough organization, and the deadline appeared much sooner than expected.  The team was in the office pretty much since Friday afternoon and it was already just after 11pm on Sunday night.  Everyone was stressed and exhausted, and we thought that the painful release of the project was just about done.

It was then that we got a report from the support department that something is wrong with our outgoing emails.  And the problem was that they weren’t going out much.  Clients submitted forms and were told to expect activation / verification email with code.  And those emails weren’t coming for a while already.

It was then that we realized that in all the chaos we actually completely forgot to implement that bit functionality.  There was nothing there that was sending emails.  Oops!

I kicked everyone out of the room, locked the door and wrote a very quick Perl script.  I spent not more than 15-20 minutes.  We just needed something really quick to get the mail queue out of the way.  We would rewrite it properly next day, when the dust settles a bit and everyone is rested and thinking clearly.

Can you guess when we actually rewrote it?  One and a half years later!  That’s  right!  Something as temporary as that lasted and did the job for almost two years.  Turned out that the job I wrote it to do on the first night was pretty much the job it would be doing 24×7, and there was no need to even update it.  It supported templates, multiple languages, and pre-configured attachments based on the template and language.  And it was efficient enough, since when I was writing it we already had a few thousand messages in the queue and I wanted to send them out as quick as possible.

Even later, when the rewrite happened, it wasn’t for any new functionality, but for better integration with the rest of the project.  After all, it doesn’t make much sense to have a single standalone Perl script in the project that is completely written PHP.  It was ported almost verbatim.

Every time I tell this story, especially to my Russian friends, I keep hearing the same response: “Nothing is more permanent than temporary“.  You build something to last for years and it gets destroyed, redesigned, and rebuilt every 6 month.  You throw something together to get you through the day and that lasts a century.

The Gmail logo reminded me of that.  Designed on the night before the release, the logo is still here…

Money scam via Skype

It’s been a long while since someone tried to scam me online.  But today I got lucky.  Someone knocked at my Skype door and I opened it.  Here is the full transcript of the conversation.  Pardon me for having some fun in the process.

[2:26:57 PM EEST] micheal2455: hello
[2:27:06 PM EEST] micheal2455: how are you

Before, when most of my online friends were technical people, a username with numbers in it pretty much guaranteed that you are talking to a spammer or scammer of some sort.  But in recent years a lot of non-technical people got online and all bets are off.  So, I allowed a person in.

[2:27:09 PM EEST] micheal2455: my name is micheal ofori,a regional manager of almal bank limited i discover a domant account what of 5.6MILLION UNITED STATE DOLLARS.Iam looking for a honest person who can help me to move this money out of were i kept it in self keeping custdy.i agree to give you 20% for your mutual help.i do not want my c0-worker to raise eyebrow toward this fund.

That’s a very standard, direct, to the point, proposition.  That’s all you need to see to know with absolute certainty that you are being scammed.  You have two options from now on.  Either end the discussion immediately and block the person from every talking to you again, or try to scam them back, for fun, and see what they have to say.  I’ve chosen the scam path.

Continue reading Money scam via Skype

Personalized phone call from Santa

Gmail team, as awesome as it is, has outdone itself.  Here is a little tool they’ve created for the seasonal greetings – SendACallFromSanta.com .  The idea is old but the application and execution is fresh and excellent.  Basically, you just provide a bunch of information about the recipient and then gets either an audio or video message from Santa, very personalized and unique.  Here is a video message that it created for my son Maxim after I answered all the questions.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lmbbO4XfQ8]

Try it yourself – it’s fun and cool!