Over the past few months, Not Too Stale has become quite the opposite. The frequency of my posts here have been reduced to a slow crawl. I can legitimately use excuses like being busy with work and the holidays, but the primary reason is that some of my posts have a new home. You can find them on my Tumblr blog.
Since most of my posts are links to things I find interesting, videos, images, and quick thoughts, a tumblelog is a great fit. Plus, with mobile posting by email and other quick post methods, Davidville’s Tumblr is also dead simple to use.
From Tumblr.com:
What’s a tumblelog?
To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.
You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.
You can find more information on Wikipedia.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still lovin’ the WordPress and this blog will continue to be updated with longer (and hopefully more thought out) posts. But the stream of consciousness posts are best suited for the tumblelog.
Hopefully, this will be a better use of my time and yours!
View the Tumblelog
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December 31st, 2007
Without intending to throw so much love towards 37signals tonight, I feel this is worth mentioning. Over the last few hours, I was unable to access the 37signals website in addition to our Highrise and Basecamp accounts (both 37signals web-based products). Here was the explanation just posted on their blog and in the top section of Highrise:
Downtime summary
On the evening of Monday, November 12, we experienced a few of hours of downtime due to an explosion at our main data center in Dallas, TX. This event lead to the eventual failure of a backup cooling system. Without adequate cooling, our servers had to be shut down to prevent permanent damage. We have detailed the events that led to the downtime. We deeply apologize for any inconveniences this may have caused and will work hard to make sure we reduce the likelihood of this happening again.
What they did well:
- The decidedly non-techie tone.
- They told the truth (as far as I know) and provided a detailed account of what happened.
- The notification posts were up as soon as the servers were.
- 37signals did not throw blame directly on Rackspace, their hosting provider.
Even though it was obviously a Rackspace issue.
- Their apology and offer to credit concerned customers.
Thanks for hanging in there.
Will be using this situation as both a wake-up call and a learning experience. While our systems are engineered to chug through major failure, this “perfect storm” chain of events beat both our set-up and our data center’s sophisticated back-up systems. We will work hard to further diversify our systems in order to make an future downtime event like this even more rare.
We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime caused your business. If you feel you were significantly impacted by this downtime please send an email to support and we’ll credit you for the downtime.
Will I be asking for a credit? Absolutely not, because I was not significantly impacted (now ask me if I would take a credit from Verizon or Comcast that I did not technically deserve). Well done, 37signals.
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November 13th, 2007
I have been a long-time user (in Internet time that equates to somewhere between one week and a few years…) of TinyURL.com to shorten long, ugly URLs into something a bit more manageable (and copy & paste-able). The service is quick and easy and does what it promises, but it is U G L Y. Almost to the extent that I don’t want to use it.
If you feel the same way and are looking for a similar service that is easier on the eyes, check out RubyURL.com
As for other URL shortening site designs, does this URLtea.com background make anyone else’s eyes go crossed?
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August 14th, 2007
Today I received an invite code for Pownce.
Pownce is a way to send messages, files, links, and events to your friends. You’ll create a network of the people you know and then you can share stuff with all of them, just a few of them, or even just one other person really fast.
Pownce is the newest creation by Megatechtronium, a company that includes Digg.com founder Kevin Rose, among others.
Excited to see what Pownce had to offer I started the pleasurable and quick account creation process. In addition to a great site design, Pownce uses well-designed tooltips that guide you through the registration process:
The copy/wording is great as well. Not trying to hard, but just humorous enough to make the process fun (and more applicable for some):
Okay, all signed up, now what does this service actually do? Well, you can message your friends, send them links and files. But, it is necessary to actually have “friends” in order to do this… Since not one of my friends, that I know of, is a Pownce member yet, I am out of luck. So, I opted to publicly post a link and a message to test the service. Easy enough, but since this is now being used as a micro-blog, you must tell people about it in order for it to be of any use. Why not just use a service like tumblr, which seems to better fit the micro-bloggers simple needs?
In the sidebar I noticed an “Pro” version that you can purchase for $20 annually.
The Pro version removes the ads and allows you to send files up to 100 MB to other registered users. Once again, must have “friends”. Would it be better to use senduit, my favorite file transfer site? Senduit allows you to send anyone files up to 100 MB for free, by creating a unique, expiring URL for the file download. Seems better to me.
But, since I am a firm believer that web convergence is the future, maybe Kevin and crew are on to something by combining these services - only the future will tell. For now, it seems to be just another service that people need to sign up for and will only reap the benefits when Metcalfe’s Law kicks in and the network (and your friend list) grows.
Note: Only mentioned senduit and tumblr because they are great products. It just so happens that they are from the same company, New York-based Davidville. Hmmm…maybe they should combine them and give Pownce a run for it’s money.
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July 23rd, 2007