Michiel . van Vlaardingen

SEOmoz seemed to have some nice tools,  so  we decided to give it’s PRO account a try.     And indeed the tools are quite nice.   I especially like the idea of Linkscape and  Ranktracker.    Linkscape shows you exactly what pages are linking to your site.  And better: you can easily filter them to see which do not come from your own website, which ones have  nofollow on them, etc.     Ranktracker does what you expect from the name:   track  search engine positions for different keywords over time.    There is a bunch of other tools as well, but those are not really impressive and maybe even a bit outdated.

However,  the site and tools are SLOW,   a significant portion of my requests  fails or take ages.     I’ve tested it during multiple days, so it’s not a one-time thing.    In my opinion  as a programmer I’m better of reproducing the tools with some small scripts,  because unresponsive sites really annoy me, especially if I pay $79 a month for them.     I do not think  I lost that first payment though, because there is also some great paid content over there.  But that’s not nearly enough to justify paying  $79 every month.

An Idea I do like it that I can take a questionnaire after I cancel  and get another week for free.   Because on our sites people usually don’t want to take the effort to tell us why they cancel.

My previous post was a bit generic, but now I’ve encountered the perfect example of how building a Framework slows you down:

Lets say we are building basic user account confirmation. In a plain-php way I would write:
mail($email, “Your account confirmation”, “….”);

Now in our framework it has evolved to something like:
mail($email,  $settings->getSetting(CONFIRMATION_MAIL_TITLE), “…”);
and the actual text is loaded from the settings table in the database (so our non-tech partners can edit as well).  So all is now configurable and nice and quick and smart right?

NO, because in a new project, the database is clean, so I get a nice “confirmation.mail.title setting is not defined”.    And now this is where I slow myself down:  Instead of just adding this entry to the database I think:  hey, I shouldn’t get this error, this should have a default setting.   So now instead of having to write this one simple line of code I have to:
- find a way to store all default settings in some file in the framework distribution
- adjust the settings mechanism to use those defaults if there is nothing in the DB
- retrieve all data in the settings table from a previous project and store it in the file

And as soon as I have this thought cross my mind, the focus on the original project is gone and we are back at the infinite task of the perfect framework.

Almost two years ago  I got some paint and a canvas for my birthday, but I never got around doing something with it.  Until today:

I think it came out a bit weird, but I’m happy with it for a first (and quick) effort.

I had a design for our business card lying around for more than a year.   There was a nice offer from VistaPrint so I thought I’d give it a go:

It’s quite ok, but I think having the blue printed as a single color, instead of using CMYK would give it a better look.  Also I would really like to put the illustration we have on our website  on the back, to make it a bit less formal.

Anyway,  I don’t really need business cards,  so probably the next edition will not be printed soon

I thought to give Linux another try on the desktop.  It has been eight years since the last try and things probably have advanced enough to warent a better experience.    After some fiddling with splitting the existing ntfs partition and a failed installation (screen went to black and it froze)  I now have Ubuntu installed.    Now the only thing that’s not working by default is my Dual-Screen  Matrox P650 Graphic card…. so i’m still stuck with a single screen.  The driver provided by Matrox is not working out of the box, so I’ll have to dive into forums, etc. to get it fixed, I hope.

What I never expected a few months ago: I actually like twitter.    Although it seems like an overflow of non-interesting information at first sight,  it’s actually pretty useful.  For me it’s especially keeping up to date with new developments without having to read through tons of lengthy blog posts.      For myself I try to keep a schedule of at least one twit a day. That should not be to difficult to stick to.  Finally I’ve added the feed to this blog (bottom right).

I gave twitter another chance.  I created an accounts months ago, but never got past the first message.  I reconsidered it’s usage yesterday.   Why?

1:  I like the Facebook status updates and a lot of people seem to update them from twitter, so why wouldn’t I like twitter as well?

2: At MovingLabs we build software for the web,  how can we build the best if we don’t understand what’s going on?

3: I was (re)reading a discussion about the usage of twitter for marketing purposes. It seems to fit in perfectly.

So after my first day I think I’m going to persist to use it for a while.  I especially like the concept that you can follow someone without the need for some bidirectional (friendship) relation.

Facebook is catching on everywhere for some time now, but in the Netherlands Hyves is still the  major player.  I had a Facebook profile for some time, mostly for exploring it’s application platform. A lot of people I know have some presence over there for some time. However the last few months I see a change:  people are starting to use it!     People I know are starting to join groups, updating their status and uploading photos. And, very important:  my sister has an account, meaning it is way past the early adoption by tech-interested men.

I believe it’s just a matter of time before  Facebook will become more important than Hyves.   First of all:  most people past 16 have a world outside The Netherlands too.   Furthermore,  Facebook doesn’t look like a highschool project gone-wrong, so you can actually connect with someone above 30 without silently laughing at them.   While at Hyves it really looks very very wrong if a parent or a teacher joins.   So I believe Hyves will probably become  for kids even more than it is now and it’s empire will sink like the previous dutch profile site that seemed unbeatable:  cu2.nl.  (do you even remember it?)

I got tired of the old look of 2vi.nl and decided to go for a quick facelift.   Basically I have removed a lot of excessive layout and information  and tuned some of the colors a bit more towards orange instead of the hard red it was.    Overall I believe it looks less agressive and better reflects the type of websites I design.

I know, you can’t keep everybody happy,  but it still feels like the best thing to do most of the time.  However, keeping everybody happy by adding more and more features to PicturePush made us run out of resources soon, making the site slower. We would have to add extra resources, making the business unhealty…  The Free model just does not work very well for us in terms of income.   Last week we almost ran out of storage space, forcing a hard decision:  closing uploads or do a major investment. We choose to do something in between: We will expand storage capacity with minor means,  but also put severe restrictions onto the Free membership level.   It won’t harm the existing wealth of photos stored there, but it does restrict new uploads to 200 MB per month.

This choice will probably slow the growth of our service down and might even cause some of our members to leave unhappy.  However, it will also make PicturePush a more healthy undertaking, making it future proof in terms of growth and self support.  In the long run we will be able to offer a service of much higher quality to those members that really value our offe