30th Aug, 2005
Monthly Archives: August 2005
25th Aug, 2005
10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company
Stole this link from Nat on Radar, 10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company
I liked this one, especially after all the feedback we got from our beta testers with the early launch of Connection:
2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product. The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas. They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don’t like stuff. You couldn’t have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers. Don’t rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he’s not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.
23rd Aug, 2005
The Most Common Design Patterns
There’s two types of design patterns, those that show up in books and those that show up in the wild.
3.7 Absolver
The Absolver Pattern is evident in problem ridden code developed by
former employees. So many historical problems have been traced to this
software that current employees can absolve their software of blame by
claiming that the absolver is responsible for any problem
reported. Also known as It’s-not-in-my-code.
18th Aug, 2005
RSS for Starters
Tried to set my friend Marci Alboher up with Bloglines over the weekend. What a nightmare. She’d heard of RSS and had tried one other RSS reader before. That didn’t make this any less confusing. Sometimes RSS is called Atom. Sometimes Bloglines autodiscovers, but sometimes you need to add the url manually. And lots of times there’s more than one option. When you think you’ve got it going, Bloglines doesn’t pick up the feed. A total mess.
So I followed up with this tutorial (I’d love to hear any other tips for getting people started with Really Simple Syndication):
The basic premise is simple, most blogs have a computer-friendly version that’s been specially formatted so that other computers can read it. Bloglines sucks the computer-friendly versions of blogs into your account so that you can read your favorite blogs in one place. Your job as a blog reader and Bloglines user is to tell Bloglines where this computer-friendly version is. People call this subscribing to a blog.
Unfortunately, geeks like me have completely muddled this idea by calling the computer-friendly version of the blog 100 different names. The most common are RSS, Atom, Syndication, Feed, and XML. If you stick to those five names, you should be able to spot the computer-friendly version.
Often you’ll find more than one of these names on a blog. For legacy reasons, there’s many different formats of the computer-friendly version. You can safely ignore these and pick the first one listed.
There’s also a bit of confusion when it comes to subscribing to a blog. Here are you best four options.
1. You had the most success when you were able to find a button on the page that said “Subscribe with Bloglines.” Keep using this if people provide it. [This surprised me, I'd never noticed these buttons before. Marci did, and kept using them.]
2. When you’re reading a blog click the “Subscribe with Bloglines” button on the bookmark toolbar on your browser (it’s the left-most link on the third toolbar, i.e. look at the top left of your browser) [I had previously added the bookmarklet to her toolbar].
There’s one very nice thing about this approach – Bloglines will search the blog for you and automatically pick out computer-friendly versions that it can subscribe to.
There’s two not so nice things. Often there will be a several options – pick the first one. There’s only a 50% chance of this working correctly – click preview before finishing the subscription to see if it worked.
This is how I normally subscribe to blogs.
3. Find the url of the computer-friendly version and add it manually to Bloglines. To find the url first find and click a button or link that says RSS, Atom, XML, Syndication, or something similar. If you see a really ugly page that’s full of text and angle brackets you’re in the right place. Copy the url from your address bar, this is the location of the computer-friendly version.
Now go to Bloglines. Click on the MyFeeds tab located in the upper-left of the screen. Click the “add” link underneath the tabs. Enter the url from above in the text box that’s labeled “Blog Feed or URL.”
4. Give up and bookmark it. Some blogs don’t offer any sort of computer-friendly version. In this case all you can do is keep coming
back to the site.
9th Aug, 2005
Favorite O’Reilly Connection Feature
O’Reilly Connection aggregates technical things that people in your network of friends are doing and then provides it as an RSS feed. It’s only got O’Reilly articles, weblogs, codezoo tips, and article/weblog comments so far, but it’s already my favorite feature. Here’s the RSS feed from my network.
Today’s batch of items turned up the secret of project management:
If there’s a secret (and this is what the agile development community has been saying for a while — neither Andy nor I make a secret of that) it’s that you have to be relentlessly honest about what you can and cannot handle. You don’t have to have perfect knowledge, but you have to stop deluding yourself and your customer that changes are free, that you’ve made more progress than you have, and that your initial estimates and guesses are completely right and will never change.
Also, I found out that I’m lovable. Not sure how I feel about that.
I’m working on aggregating more, like external RSS feeds, open source contributions, credit reports and del.icio.us links.
1st Aug, 2005
Five Days of Social Networking
We launched a career-oriented social network, O’Reilly Connection, to a group of FOO’s last Thursday, put fliers in the OSCON bags, and now Tim has publicly announced it.
Here’s a couple of observations.
People are addicted to the friend collection competition. It’s guaranteed site activity. In six months, when traffic starts to slump, we’re going to delete all the friend connections and start a new competition. Seriously! Well, ok, I’m not serious. I’m in fourth, btw, behind Tim O’Reilly, Nat Torkington, and Derek Sivers. Darn that Sivers!
It took two days for the number of connections to exceed the number of sign-ups. We’re now averaging two friends per user.
People want more data! IM, del.icio.us, flickr, more RSS.
Comments are running 50/50 for understanding that Beta means more features coming (people seem fine with Beta meaning buggy). Releasing early has been a fantastic way to get feedback. Maybe Beta is the wrong term, Preview might be better.