Regardless of your opinion or affiliation, this is an amazing, inspiring moment in American history.
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Regardless of your opinion or affiliation, this is an amazing, inspiring moment in American history.
]]>At my last position, I rarely got to work on anything that I could point people to and say “I made that!”. With Six Apart, I’m getting to do some great work for sites that I can actually point you to!
In the last few weeks, Six Apart Services helped Talking Points Memo, the political blog and community run by Polk-award winning journalist Josh Marshal, re-launch the site on Movable Type 4.2. Even more importantly, we helped TPM move from a custom set of community tools to the community platform built into Movable Type. Andrew Golis, one of TPMs editors, explains it in this episode of TPMtv that he posted about on his new personal blog on the site.
I’m particularly proud of the new Community Dashboard, an action stream that shows all the activity (posts, comments, recommendations, and who-followed-who) for all the users you are following on the site. It was my largest contribution to the site, and it really ties the site together brings a whole new level of interactivity to the site and a much better sense of what’s happening in your personal circle within the larger community. The Dashboard is built as a plugin that builds, in turn, on Mark Paschal’s Action Streams plugin for Movable Type.
This migration, upgrade, and enhancement of the TPM site was a big project for us, and while every large migration has its issues I’m really proud of what we accomplished. Go Team!
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The view from my cab, driving away from Manhattan after my visit to Six Apart NYC a couple weeks ago.
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Thanks to Google’s “Search 2001” special feature, I can point out that at one time, this site was the top “redmonk” (link will be live for only one month) and redmonk.com was selling christmas products.
(Sorry James! :-P)
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A bunch of us from Six Apart NYC went out to dinner tonight at Joya, a Thai place in Brooklyn not far from the hotel where Lisa (Six Aparter visiting from Seattle) and I are staying.
The space was pretty loud, but the music was good, the food was even better, and the company was great. :-) 8 of us went: Natalie, Angela, Matt, Lisa, Finn, Tracie, Kevin and I. I took some pics - you can find them on Flickr.
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The view from my window at the Nu Hotel, Brooklyn.
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I’m in NYC this week visiting the mothership. I forgot how much flying East sucks. Longer time in the air, time change, jet lag. Pheh. On a good note, however, I’ve gotten to meet my new boss and a bunch of my new co-workers (waves at David, Kevin, Natalie, Lisa, Angela, Gercek, Adam, and Matt).
Although it’s only 3:30pm PDT right now, I got up at 3:30 this morning so I’m starting to fade. Hoping that means I’ll be able to sleep tonight…
]]>Once starts out slow, with a hand-held documentary (read, “cheap”) feel that puts the viewer in intimate proximity to the two protagonists, credited as “guy” and “girl”. Indeed, names are never used in the movie, and rather than distance the audience (ok, Jodi and me) from the film it kept us curious. The whole film is an exploration of a friendship and the music that draws two different individuals together.
The movie progresses linearly, but the driver is not as much a plot as a series of musical vignettes that simultaneously speak to the characters relationship to each other as well as to the relationships that define each of them. Jodi and I were marveling at this simple film that keeps pulling the viewer in close, sharing moments both quiet and full of passion.
We loved it, and I bought the Once soundtrack the next day. It’s as good as I expected, featuring all the songs from the movie pretty much as they appeared in the film (including “Broken-hearted hoover-fixing sucker guy”!)
Check it out - if you can get past the full-bodied profanity, the film is refreshingly lacking in Hollywood sensuality and cliche - I think you’ll love it.
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I spent 45 minutes or so today in IRC this morning, in a staff meeting. It was pretty effective, actually, just missing some faces to make the experience a little more personal. Due to technical difficulties the meeting was not conducted over XMeeting as planned, but if it had been, the experience would have been about as close to the Virtual Office as I’ve ever gotten.
For years in the late 90s and early “aughts”, I kept reading about, talking about, and waiting for the Virtual Office. In this paperless digital utopia we would communicate effortlessly, transfer 10s of megabytes (Megabytes, I say!) of pure information at light speed around the aether, hold meetings in virtualized 3d environments, etc.
I’ll wait while you clean up the coffee you probably spit out your nose at that thought.
Yes, so the Virtual Office we all envisioned so naïvely back then never quite materialized. Or, immaterialized. Second Life aside, really working remotely never quite “got there” for most of us. There seem to be a few reasons for that, some technical, some business, and some personal.
Technologically, most places in the world don’t have the bandwidth for the real-time connunication that effective distance working requires. Bandwidth in the US, for example, has only barely grown at the rate needed to handle real-time two-way audio and video, and the quality is nowhere near the immersion we expected 10 years ago.
There’s also the problem that most of our communications mediums (email, blogs, IM, IRC, Skype) are not particularly effective at providing the human-contact experience that we depend on to really feel like we’ve understood another person. Face-to-face contact is so incredibly high-bandwidth that there’s almost no way to reproduce it technologically. Think about the things that we perceive in a conversation that communicate something about the situation and the person we’re deal with: how they look, how they’re dressed, their demeanor, are they harried or relaxed, eye contact, their tone of voice, subtle facial expressions… All these and more communicate much more to us than their words do.
And it’s because of this loss of bandwidth that most businesses (even “internet” businesses) still insist that most employees be onsite.
I’ve been very fortunate to be allowed to work from home; I’m learning that at least for some of the more technically savvy of us, working remotely (“virtually”?) can be effective and fun. Some thoughts on my first week working for Six Apart from home:
Working remotely via today’s technologies may not be the mythical Virtual Office, but it’s working pretty well, and it’s only going to get better.
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]]>As you can see, SquirrelFish Extreme as of today is nearly twice as fast as the original SquirrelFish, and over 10 times the speed you saw in Safari 3.0, less than a year ago.
<burns>EEeexcellent<burns>
]]>Thanks for your patience!
]]>I’ve added a blogroll back in the sidebar - it’s not formatted quite like I want yet, but over time I’ll get it fine tuned. Update: removed because there are still issues…
Also, I’ve upgraded to a Dreamhost Private Server - my sites were finally hitting resource limits that made shared hosting unworkable. I’ve got my VPS setup with the minimum of RAM - 150mb - and with fast-cgi setup Movable Type is humming long quite nicely.
If you’ve tried to comment so far (waves at Dustin and Lisa) then you know that commenting is b0rk. I’m hunting down a javascript error that’s messing with the comment form, and I’ll post again when it’s all better.
At one point, I thought that I was going to need to switch hosts completely as my resource usage was floating at around 300mb+ and I didn’t want to spend the extra $30/mo (Dreamhost PS runs $1/10mb of RAM) on top of my hosting fees.
So I began to research hosting sites which provided VPS’s. The two that kept coming up were Slicehost and Linode. Linode’s base plan, the Linode360, provides more operating memory (360MB v 256MB), more disk space (12Gb v. 10Gb) and double the bandwidth (200Gb v. 100Gb), all for the same price ($20/mo). I signed up for Linode’s 360 plan, which was prorated so it only cost me $9.30 for the rest of this month.
The difference between Dreamhost’s PS and Linode’s VPS is this: Dreamhost’s PS is really a sandboxed environment just like your typical shared hosting environment, but where your CPU and RAM are guaranteed; Linode provides a true virtual box: what you get is a bare linux box with your choice of distribution and root access. This is a blessing and a curse: while I loved the cheap access to more memory, I wasn’t looking forward to maintaining a whole box.
Thankfully, Robert at Dreamhost’s Customer Service finally came though for me, explaining that the overwhelming majority of the resources my sites were using were really just Apache webserver instances that the system spawns automatically based on available RAM. Dreamhost defaults new VPS’s to the full 2300Mb limit, so my sites had 200Mb worth of Apache instances running. Once I dropped it down to the minimum 150Mb of RAM, memory usage dropped down to a slim 100mb-120mb.
I titled this section to help google find it; this really ought to be documented because I can see users buying more VPS than they really need due to misleading memory graphs. Update: I also amended Dreamhost’s wiki entry on trouble shooting Dreamhost PS to reflect this particular case.
I’ve kept my Linode account, though I deleted the VPS I had created and was notified that the balance of my charges ($8 and change) would be returned to my credit card. So overall it only cost me $1 to get a bit of experience with Linode’s VPS offering. At the moment, Dreamhost is still a bette deal since I can save myself the effort of learning to admin a linux box, and saves me the time moving everything over. But if, in the future, I decide that I need to go full-bore on a VPS, I’ll be using Linode for sure.
Via email:
]]>“You actually have a very good point about the free week giving skewed usage approximates. I’ve forwarded it on to our dev/admin/everyone else team so they can have some food for thought.”
I woke this morning with no commute ahead of me. What was this? Time to think?
Nope. Time to ride! I got up and went for a very short (2 mi) bike ride to get a pound of coffee from Dunkin Donuts, whose coffee I really like. Turned out the DD I was headed to doesn’t open for another week. Crum. So I turned around, and rode another 2 mi to the Starbucks, where I traded shiny gold rocks for a pound of rather more expensive Anniversary blend beans - although I must say this morning’s coffee was not bad. I’m going to have to investigate buying Peet’s over the internet, though. Finally, ride the last mile home.
Note to self: Ride more, you’re pathetic. After riding it was a quick dip in the pool, the shower, coffee, do some dishes, another coffee, and - time for work!
Walk to the guestroom/office, put on some tunes, and log into mail, intranet, IRC. Hey, new friends! Overall my day was spent getting access to various resources, “meeting” my fellow employees in IRC/IM/Skype, getting familiar with how the team does things, and getting my first assignments.
Yeah, this is going to be awesome.
Highlights of the day: