Archives for October 2007

The Man in the Arena

by Jeff Hester · Oct 12, 2007

Tech investor Yossi Vardi spoke recently at TechCrunch40. Vardi is perhaps best known for being the original investor in instant messaging pioneer ICQ. Michael Arrington describes Yossi as someone who invests in people, not business plans.

To help make his point and establish his philosophy for investment, Vardi quoted Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech at the Sorbonne:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs and business provocateurs.

Working with Joomla for BigBlueBargains

by Jeff Hester · Oct 12, 2007

A number of sites on the BigBlueNetwork are in desperate need of some tender love, or at the very least, an updated look with fresh content. One such site is BigBlueBargains. The site was previously driven primarily by affiliation with MyCoupons, but most of the links have gone dead. And the site itself looks like something out of the ’90s.

While I’m at it, I’m taking time to revisit the tools to manage the content on this and other sites in the network. Previously I’ve looked at Drupal and even used it for other projects. It’s a great system, but the administrative side is really bare-bones and difficult to decipher.

For BigBlueBargains I’ve been developing an entirely new site with fresh content using the free Joomla content management system (CMS). Joomla is probably the closest competitor to Drupal, but the administrative interface is much easier to use and much more robust.

I need to do some load testing to make sure Joomla will scale to handle the volume of traffic I’m expecting — while co-existing with the other sites on my server. But so far, for someone with limited time to maintain a number of sites, Joomla is looking very promising.

I’m still fleshing out the content, structure and design of the new site, but would love feedback. If you’re interested in taking a sneak peek, leave me a comment and I’ll email the link to you.

Google Mishandles Urchin

by Jeff Hester · Oct 11, 2007

Ars Technica has a great article on how Google dropped the ball with their 2005 acquisition of Urchin — a web analytics company based in San Diego. Urchin provides web site administrators with the ability to analyse their log files and understand how people use their web site. To Google’s credit, they took some of the Urchin technology and came out with Google Analytics, providing really nice (and free) web-based web analytics. I use Google Analytics on all my public-facing web sites, and highly recommend it.

But… there is still a valid need for local analytics, particularly at large organizations with intranets that cannot be served by Google Analytics. This is where Urchin fit the bill nicely. Urchin is a commercial product. You can still buy Urchin from Google, though you must work through one of their certified consultants. Unfortunately, since Google’s acquisition of Urchin back in 2005, there has been little or no progress on updates.

Personally, I would love to see the charting and data presentation of Google Analytics integrated into their standalone Urchin product, but it appears that Urchin, like so many other Google acquisitions (remember Dodgeball?) is withering on the vine.

Radiohead gives the finger to the big record labels

by Jeff Hester · Oct 10, 2007

I’ve been a fan of the band Radiohead since discovering their 1997 release OK Computer. Their music treads territory well off the beaten path. And while I don’t like all their music, I admire their spirit.

Now the band has done it again, but this time upending the music business. The band has bypassed not only the big record labels but even iTunes. Their latest release — In Rainbows — is available for download with a “name your own price” model. You can download it for free, or pay $10 or even $100 for the album. Pay what you want.

Of course Radiohead isn’t the first band to do this. But they are the first commercially successful band to do so, and may be paving the way for others.

This democratization is made possible by the cheap distribution afforded by the Internet. What will be interesting to see is how many people pay, and how much. Normally artists make a small portion of the actual sale price of a CD. In this model, the hard costs of distribution are minimal, so in theory the artist could end up with the largest portion of whatever revenue is generated. Will Radiohead fans put their money where their mouth is? Stay tuned.

For now, I’m off to try to download In Rainbows (the site has been slow and unresponsive as of this writing; no big suprise). And no, I won’t be paying initially, but if I like it, I’ll gladly return and send a few quid to the guys in the band.

Quick Update:I managed to download the release without too much trouble and just completed my first listen. In Rainbows still doesn’t equal OK Computer or Thom Yorke’s solo effot, Black Swan. Maybe it will grow on me.

WordPress 2.3 Upgrade

by Jeff Hester · Oct 2, 2007

I’ve been having weird problems with the WordPress admin console. I didn’t get they nifty little icon bar for TinyMCE when composing a post. When I bulk moderated comments, only the first change would actually be applied (the other changes remained in the moderation queue). Things just didn’t always work the way I expected them to (or the way they used to).

I thought maybe an upgrade to the latest version of WordPress might fix things up, so I upgraded to WordPress 2.3. The process went quickly and smoothly, but the problems persisted. It turned out all of the problems were related to the Squid proxy I was using. Eliminate the proxy and all the symptoms disappeared.

Since there are times when I have no choice but to use the Squid proxy, this doesn’t entirely solve the problem, but at least now I know where to look (and how to get around it when I need to post here).