@lindsay.at

I don't normally watch these things too closely, but in scanning my logs, I seemed to get hit a few times by a particular search. I checked on google myself, and was surprised at the results:

This and the referrals thing are the little buzzes like winning 20 bucks in the lottery that keep me blogging, I guess.

Nothing says "classy" more than seeing Comic Sans.

In a spreadsheet.

So, when Joyent announced its referral programme, I signed up, because I've been experimenting with this monetisation thing on my blogs, and thought there was nothing to lose. As soon as I was approved for the programme, I went back and added links to an entry from the recent past. I checked on my account tonight, on a lark, and noticed I actually got a clickthrough commission.

The Google ads have been there from the start, and seem to have garnered some clicks as well. I get a (tiny) thrill when I check on that account and notice my running total go up. But, well, the numbers tell a story:

Google AdSense earnings to date: $0.58
Joyent Affiliate earnings to date: $209.85

Anyway, this is not meant to boast or gloat or drive more revenue. Perhaps it's even unwise to reveal such personal details. I just thought that it might be an interesting data point from a guy who gets page-views per day in the dozens (yes, if you're reading this, you are special). And I fully expect that the Joyent commission will be a one-off thing.

Still, it makes me reconsider the value of splashing ads all over my blogs. And if you sell high-value and/or high-volume products through the web, it seems like you could do far worse than enabling an affiliate programme through shareasale.com.

(Oh, and if you're the magical person who clicked through and bought that 3 Martini Lunch, step forward: I owe you (at least) a beer...)

A photocopier has been jamming almost constantly here at work, and I'm the sort of guy who will muck in and help clear the jam when I notice it. There was yet another complaint of it jamming. I cleared it, and decided to give a mini-lecture on paper curl to my colleagues:

For future reference, when the paper jams again, (after you clear the jam) figure out which tray it was feeding from, and flip the paper over.

Why? It's about paper curl. It's been a long time since I've had to worry about this, but with 1) cheap/thin paper, 2) cheap copiers/printers, and/or 3) high-performance copying (seriously), the "endianness" of the paper really matters. With this batch of paper, the ream should be placed in the copier paper tray "seam-side up" where the seam is on the packaging.

Uh, that's hard to describe, but dead simple when you see it. Email me if you want a demonstration.

I actually refrained from going into further, scarier detail. Y'see, paper is manufactured and stored as massive rolls before being cut into sheets. The natural curl is always going to be present, and (naturally) more pronounced with thinner sheets. Add heat and pressure to the mix (such as the fusing stage of Xerography), and a thin sheet of paper is going to show its curl.

Well, that's a bit of nostalgia from my misspent youth. The smell of high school to me was the smell of ozone from the school district's Xerox 9900 copier (yes, high-performance copying, indeed), which I operated for four years as a part-time job, during lunch and after school. I very rarely sat in study hall – all my spare time was spent making copies, doing spare bits of desktop publishing on the mac there, doing paste-up for my Model UN club's newsletter, or videotaping sports events. Then there was my paper delivery route, once I got home. Is it a wonder I still have an abiding love of paper, printing, typography, and multimedia?

He peered at Richard seriously. "Do you have a good sofa?" he enquired.

"Well, yes." Richard laughed. He was cheered by the silliness of the question.

"Oh," said Reg solemnly. "Well; I wish you'd tell me where you got it. I have endless trouble with them, quite endless. Never found a comfortable one in all my life. How do you find yours?" He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, a small silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port and three glasses.

"Well, it's odd you should ask that," said Richard. "I've never sat on it."

"Very wise," insisted Reg earnestly, "very, very wise." He went through a palaver similar to his previous one with his coat and hat.

"Not that I wouldn't like to," said Richard. "It's just that it's stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which leads up into my flat. As far as I can make it out, the delivery men got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned it around any way they could, couldn't get it any further, and then found, curiously enough, that they couldn't get it back down again. Now, that should be impossible."—Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Rosemary and I got a new sofa. Guess what.

[Note: The events and deals described in the post are currently in flux. I advise not acting upon the information contained within, for the moment.]

As a quick followup to yesterday's post, I just wanted to point out that Jason once again carries the day with a pitch-perfect post further clarifying what's happening with the shared plans:

On the "Connector" level (aka Joyent Core), there are three plans: shared 1, shared 2 and shared 3.

Everyone will be put in as one of those, and only those plans.

Did the mixed grill people put more into the pot? Yes, they did.
Will just throwing all lifetime accounts into shared 2 so we can move on and get everything rolled out probably justifiably make people who spent a little more upset (for a little bit)? Yes.
Will we fix that real soon with some special stuff for mixed grillers? Yes.
Will there be stuff to make sure the original VC200 knows how much they're appreciated? Yes.

Remember what we've all done here (and we means you), we've built a good solid company (that's at 18 full-time employees! and has customers) in 2 years (and it's really only been a year since there's actually been "staff") and we've done it ourselves (and again, we means you). And we want as much of the stuff from this last year to be rolled out and movin' by the end of the year, because there's some even cooler stuff to move us all onto.

Which ought to be enough to make everybody happy, and end the anxious speculation. It also pretty much keeps my record as a prognosticator on this blog at about 0%. Of course, I'm right in bigger ways, as it's now time to move from bugging TextDrive about what the plan is to bugging TextDrive about when they're going to implement it. It's also a smart move to simplify the service levels, because I'm sure it was causing no end of headaches keeping track of who got what when, and where they upgraded to.

Once again, the excitement and enthusiasm of the whole Joyent crew for what they do is palpable, and it's no small thing: it leads to the substantial and loyal following they have.

[Note: The events and deals described in the post are currently in flux. I advise not acting upon the information contained within, for the moment.]

It looks like it's happening again, in another venue.

One of my first posts here was on why apple-watchers/users have an overgrown sense of entitlement. TextDrive has much of that excited buzz about it, albeit on a smaller scale. The forums, featuring the founders' regular commentary, attract a rabidly loyal following. Over time, people like Jason Hoffman have tuned back their announcements of what's to come from explicit promises to somewhat cryptic allusion.

Earlier promises of what would come to customers (in the forums dominated by the hosting-for-life customers) often ran into implementation delays, and so there have been multiple instances of managing expectations with the delays. These have always been handled by Joyent/TextDrive with graciousness, generosity, and aplomb, but the journey to customer satisfaction has not always been pretty, mostly thanks to the enviable customer buzz and loyalty cultivated by TextDrive. Even announcements on when news will be made available have been greeted by customers with the solemnity of a contract.

So, while there have been no explicit announcements laid out on what the precise future of shared hosting is at TextDrive, there have been enough hints to set people abuzz with excitement and speculation. One current meme/worry now (most likely prompted by my "harmless" observation on the forums) is that the people who paid an extra $199 to upgrade their TextDrive lifetime accounts to go onto the MixedGrill plan will have nothing to distinguish themselves from the VCers who did not upgrade. Someguy embodies this fear in this Joyent forum thread:

It looks like the VC accounts at TxD have been bumped to 10GB quota which matches with the mid-level TxD shared hosting plan. Once the Joyent Core gets rolled out it would appear that the VCers will end up with the 25GB/25 user mid-tier Joyent and SS accounts.

Will the MGs also be in the mid-tier but get access to the soon-coming additional apps, or something else?

In other words, if I'm "special," and pay TextDrive earlier/more, shouldn't I always get the special goodies? While a part of me marvels at TxD's loyalty to customers who no longer provide active income, and live off the increasing returns while the hosting company repeatedly pumps millions into its network, storage, application, and processing infrastructure, another part thinks, "yeah, we paid more, shouldn't we get more?"

Here comes the irresponsible speculation, deliberately kept off the forums: I think MixedGrill customers will stay special, and receive Strongspace and Joyent Connector apps at the "Plus" level of service (25 GiB, 25 Users). I think VCs will join those users at the "Shared 2" level of TextDrive hosting, but will not receive the full "Plus" plans of the others. The Joyent Core upgrade will introduce Strongspace and Joyent Connector to the VCs at a lower level. "Startup" (or 5 users, 5GiB storage) seems too low, but if you double it to 10/10, it sounds just right, and still far enough from the MixedGrill users to show a respectable differentiation.

Here's my prediction, though: no matter what is announced, someone is going to think it's unfair, and complain loudly on the forums. Most people will see this as being craven entitlement, and will shout the person down. Life will be a little more exciting for some people for a while, then settle down afterwards. :-) (I reckon that's a safer prediction than past ones on the blog...)

So, in response to a recommendation to try OmniWeb in the TxD forums, I was asked,

Why is OmniWeb better than Safari?

I responded that it's the little usability tweaks that keep it ahead of the game. I like the benefit of being on a slightly more modern build of the web kit. I've become used to -- and fond of -- the thumbnail tabs, and the Cmd-up/down arrow way of navigating between them. I've come to appreciate the different location-bar completion (matching on full text of the URL, not just the beginnings of the URL strings), allowing me to reach the new posts on TextDrive's forums with http://forum.textdrive.com/search.php?action=show_new simply by typing "w_n" as the shortcut.

But the killer is that the browser remembers workspaces. I don't have to clear out tabs for a restart or quit. I don't need to panic if the browser goes down because of a nasty incompatible page.

The drawback with this way of working is that it encourages working with lots and lots of tabs. I stress my PowerBook's memory a lot more nowadays as a result, and there's a point at which, under low memory, OmniWeb just gets inexplicably slow. However, a quit and relaunch will fix that situation, with no work lost.

(Also, I bought a license ages ago, way before Safari. The educational OmniWeb 5.0 upgrade price was something silly like 6 USD, which I did just on principle, even though at the time (and until a couple months ago) I was a regular Safari user. There's currently (November 2006) a sale on, where a full license is available for $10. I would definitely recommend it to anyone serious about browsing at that price.)

I've spent a lot of the last couple weeks looking at OpenID and related technologies more in detail. I had already placed my claim at ClaimID, but I've been looking more into the technology in the large. It just seemed to be in the air lately, along with some work reasons. I was pleasantly surprised to find that FluxCMS (here, on this site) is an OpenID server itself. Additionally, there was a MicroID function written within the site, but no integration. After a first draft and some suggestions from Flux-meister chregu, here's a small patch to insert into the master.xsl template:

<meta name="microid">
<xsl:variable name="fullRequestUri">
  <xsl:value-of select="php:functionString
       ('bx_helpers_uri::getRequestUri','')" />
</xsl:variable> 
<xsl:attribute name="content">
<xsl:value-of select="php:functionString
                      ('bx_helpers_openid::microid',
                       'me@mydomain.tld', 
                       concat(substring($fullRequestUri,0,
                            string-length($fullRequestUri)),  
                          translate(substring($fullRequestUri
                              string-length($fullRequestUri),1),
                                   '/','')))"/>
</xsl:attribute>
</meta>