Six Apart News & Events: November 2005

Dick Costolo of FeedBurner has posted an astute analysis of the changes that are happening in the creation, distribution, and publication of XML feeds.

The entire post (and the 300 kb PDF report it's excerpted from) are worth reading, but an early highlight is the succinct description of three critical benefits that feeds provide:

1. A notification mechanism for updates to a specific channel of content
2. The ability to subscribe to content, creating a persistent link between publisher and subscriber
3. A semi-structured version of the content

The Technorati team is celebrating the third birthday of the popular blog search service. Congratulations to the whole team, and thanks to Niall Kennedy for the reminder.

Niall's blog, like Technorati's official blog, is powered by Movable Type, which means that sending an update notification ping to the service is really easy -- just check the box and you're set. (TypePad and LiveJournal users don't need to do anything; Both services send updates out through the Six Apart Update Stream so Technorati can grab them directly.)

And once you're letting Technorati know your content is updated, you'll want to claim your blog and then check out cool features like the brand-new Technorati Mini. We've been enjoying the hyperactive little popup search window, and we think you will too.

The team at Macromedia has just launched Macromedia Labs, where you can check out new and upcoming technologies that might be making their way into Macromedia's products in the coming months.

With offerings ranging from the Flex framework to new versions of the Flash player, there's a little something for almost every developer. You can even read a full overview of what the labs are about, a copy of this month's Macromedia newsletter, or check out the Macromedia Labs blog. It's a great channel for talking about these unreleased technologies, and Movable Type makes it easy to power the dozens of public blogs that help keep Macromedia so tightly involved in its community.

(A bonus for web developers: The team that created the Labs subsite has posted some notes on the CSS techniques used to distinguish the site's design.)

I appeared briefly on The Early Show on CBS speaking about teenagers and LiveJournal. Considering that it was 4:15 AM, I'm pretty happy not to have stumbled on my words. In retrospect, I do wish I had challenged my co-guest about his statement that sometimes "teenagers are dumber than mud." Thankfully, I believe I presented LiveJournal and teens being online as something quite normal and not intrinsically dangerous.

In preparing for the show, I realized that I've been online since I was about thirteen -- around 1990 -- and I turned out just fine. I participated in BBS message boards, chat and early Internet services and there were the usual bad things out there, but I was focussed in researching and talking about my interests. Kids and teenagers need guidance and encouragement and not just a dose of "Vitamin N" (see the clip to understand).

For example, when I was a teenager I was really interested in drawing programs like Fractal Design's Painter and Deluxe Paint and creating pictures pixel by pixel. My dad was aware of this and since he worked at a software company, had someone from work -- a graphic artist -- come to my house and give me lessons. This was a huge part of directing me to graphic design for the web.

Encouraging kids to communicate is a good thing and saying that they can't talk online can seem as arbitrary to them as saying they can't talk to friends on the telephone. It's good to be aware of what your kids are doing, but don't expect a stern "no" without explanations to amount to anything other than making your kids more determined to what they want to do.

For a parent, I'm sure this is obvious advice. And as someone without kids, I'm writing about my own experiences being a teenager rather than parenting one. My hope is that LiveJournal can encourage kids and teens to write, express themselves and make a really difficult life transition period a little easier.

During the last month, we’ve been very open about TypePad’s performance problems and the solutions we're implementing to bring the service up to a high standard. We’re happy to say that, since things have stabilized, we’ve been able to offer compensation to our customers for the inconvenience caused by slow service and downtime.

As Barak said in his email and post, we offer our sincere apologies for any inconvenience and hope that customers of TypePad view the compensation as fair.

Not only did the people here at Six Apart feel the pain of poor performance (as employees and users), but we also spent a great deal of time reading customer emails, comments and posts which helped us understand that every customer is different. Some customers didn’t want any compensation, they just wanted us to spend resources fixing the problems; others felt that the performance of TypePad hindered their businesses and personal communications; and some didn’t notice any service degradation at all.

So, what are the lessons?

• Read what your customers have to say
  This is the most obvious piece of advice, but the most important. Customers who are invested in a service usually want the company that's supporting them to succeed. The best advice comes from your customers, and they aren't afraid to tell it like it is. That said...
• Ignore the tone of nasty complaints, but pay attention to the underlying messages
  When people are disappointed, their frustrations are often expressed in the form of anger. But at the same time, the fact that they took the time to write what they feel rather than shrugging it off indicates a deep desire for a solution, not just blame. We're all human and the nasty stuff hurts, but we love passionate users, so that involves taking the good and the bad comments in stride.
• Understand that the people giving feedback represent many who remain silent
  For every person who complains, realize that there are probably ten people conscious of the problem but not interested in speaking out publicly. Problems viewed through customer email are often larger than they may appear.
• Don’t spend too much energy on distractions
  The noisiest people during our problems are often not TypePad or Six Apart customers. And while we are trying to make good to our own customers, it's difficult to focus when we know that competitors are actively marketing toward our base of users (and with pretty negative tactics). That's the way some companies operate, and it's a fact of life. Just don't let it take cycles out of real problem solving.

• Don't be afraid to communicate
  We decided to err on the side of offering a lot of information. Take the post about the technical solutions we were putting in place. I read on a few weblogs people questioning whether it was good for our company to reveal so much about our architecture (for proprietary reasons). We felt the good outweighed the bad since it helped our community feel fully informed.
• Trust your customers
  I take back what I said about reading what your customers have to say being the most important piece advice. Trusting your customers is key to keeping them happy, and from our experiences, is always the right decision. Our customers are amazing and have responded in a way that keeps us motivated to provide the best experiences possible.

Based on the feedback sent along in the survey and from customer weblogs, we feel incredibly rewarded to have people in the community recognize our attempts to make things right. While we’d rather avoid incidents like poor service, downtime, and customer compensation, we are constantly trying to learn how to be the best company possible. Believe us, when we read negative posts, they hurt, but every positive post goes a long way to lessening the sting.

Thank You.

In a move that's sure to delight lots of developers, eBay has announced that the eBay API is now available for free. In addition, membership in the eBay Developers Program and standard application certification for your apps which use the eBay API are now free as well.

It's great news to see another major Internet company open up their API for free, especially since eBay has a strong economy formed around its services. This means developers can really make money and create value by building on top of the API. That's on top of the fact that eBay's paying up to $5000 to developers who enter their Developer Challenge.

If you want to get started, we'd point you at the eBay Developer Program blog, which is powered by TypePad. And we'll be talking in the coming weeks on the Professional Network blog about how building on top of blogging APIs is a natural complement to web services like eBay's if you're a developer who'd like to benefit from and profit from your work.

Many of you spend a lot of time and effort just trying to convince your company or your clients to start a blog. But we think that, in many cases, the need is even greater: Many companies need to start a number of blogs. Though there's been so much attention paid to business blogs in the past few months, we're still in the early days of awareness. Whether it's saving time in communication, improving the connection with customers, reducing the cost of gathering feedback, or just participating in the conversations around your industry, there are a number of ways to make the case for business blogs, even if a company is nervous about entering the blogosphere. The good news is, those rationales for business blogging seem to be working: For every scare story about blogs, there are dozens of positive examples of how blogs can help build a business. Judging by the 59 percent of CEOs who find blogs useful, the message is getting through.

Continue reading 'Why does a business need more than one blog?'...

It's been less than a year since Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path coined the term "Ajax" to describe many contemporary web development techniques, but since then the term's become so popular it's inspired its own mini-hype cycle. Fortunately, Adaptive Path is helping to clarify the ideas around Ajax and explain them in simple business terms for the overwhelming majority of companies that just want to know what Ajax can do for them.

With their new free Executive Brief on Ajax, there's a clear explanation of the term that Professional Network members should find invaluable in explaining concepts to your clients, customers, or coworkers. As more and more developers make use of platforms like Movable Type as part of their chain of tools for managing XML and web services, we expect even small companies that aren't deeply into technology are going to ask about Ajax. Now there's a good resource to bookmark so they have a place to start.

In our previous post, Ben pointed out some of the issues that led to TypePad's poor performance in October. As he mentioned, a large portion of the Six Apart staff was working day and night to solve those issues and deliver our customers the performance they're paying for. Barak's post detailed a number of the specific tactics we were taking.

And so, over the past week, we've made a very significant number of changes: we've upgraded database hardware; we've optimized the application in a number of different places, including stats, publishing, and general database access; we've upgraded our network; we've added more application hardware; etc.

And over the past three days, we—and a lot of you—have noticed the improvements. We feel confident enough to say (and, being superstitious, knocking on wood every time we say it) that we've made a huge amount of progress in the performance of both the application and the
published blogs. TypePad's performance is better than it's been in months—in fact, it's quite a bit better than it was even in the months prior to October.

We're not sitting back and resting, though. We have a number of performance enhancements and upgrades still planned, as well as finishing the last few steps of our data center move. Some of the new hardware we'll be adding may require some scheduled maintenance, but we'll be sure to give you advance notice. Being pessimistic in general—or, at least, acknowledging the number of unexpected issues we've had in the past couple of weeks—we're also wary about declaring victory too early, so we're not promising to be out of the proverbial woods yet.

But we're very happy with the progress we've made so far. Thanks to everyone who has written in appreciation of the improved performance, and thanks to all of you for your patience.

In last week’s installment of “Building on MovableType," I described how to reuse the display options widget for the storage of your own user preferences. While Movable Type uses this mechanism for display preferences (i.e. the number of items to display on a page, the sort order, etc.), technically it can be used to store any user preference. This week we learn how to reuse the pagination controls widget.

If you are a developer like me you have probably written and re-written the application logic for displaying pagination controls about a million times. When I first wrote Media Manager, I fell prey to re-inventing of the wheel once more and created yet another implementation of “next page" and “previous page" links for displaying items on your queue.

Then one day, while thumbing through the Movable Type source code, I saw how pagination was implementednoting that it was abstracted out into a template file. A couple minutes later I had ripped out my own somewhat fragile pagination control implementation and replaced it with Movable Type’s. Doing so was easy and now my implementation is much more reliable, flexible and portable.

Continue reading 'Building on Movable Type Part 3: Creating Pagination Controls'...