You know, this guy:

He’s the guy who any sports-loving kid who grew up in the early 80s knows as the random rainbow wig dude who showed up every major sporting event and managed to get on TV. I’m guessing, like me, pretty much everyone assumed he was a well-intentioned goofball, just trying to get on TV.

I think we all just assumed he was a precursor to the modern day Jumbotron morons who get wear stupid outfits, do stupid dances, or hold up stupid signs, all in the name of getting on the in-arena Jumbotron (not even getting on real TV).

Except, turns out, he was a grade-A certifiable nutjob. And that’s the amazingness of the interwebs. You can start your day reading about technology, sports, the weather, whatever, and end up seeing the John 3:16 guy, finding him on Wikipedia, reading some of the articles about him, and then adding the documentary about him to your Netflix queue. Learning about how he went from wearing a rainbow wig to attempting to buy a gun to shoot then candidate Bill Clinton.

So yeah, he’s not just a cuddly crazy guy, he’s a legit crazy guy. It’s worth the read. A guy who, in a different era, would have been likely exiled to the dustbin of history, only remembered in microfiche, has his story told in a documentary, written into Wikipedia, and available to everyone at the end of a hyperlink or search query.

Ah, the interwebs.

“You can’t replace pants with shorts when your definition of shorts is: everyone buy pants and cut the legs off — pants will still be a viable business (the consumer is just altering the usage). Same too with Twitter, Facebook, et al, they are still relying on email for certain parts of their service (like adding new users or sending notifications) while wanting to replace email at the same time.”

I hadn’t really thought about the ubiquitousness of email from this angle before. Even the services that are trying to replace email as the primary communications channel require you to have an email address. Obviously, this is because a) today email is the way they are used to getting their communication of passwords, logins, etc., and b) you have to have a way to communicate to people before they start using your service.

But, it would be pretty ballsy for some new service to require either email or a phone number (or <insert your method of identity here>).

(via The Brooks Review)

»

Pow: Zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X: “Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute.”

Holy awesomesauce. Build (or clone from github) a bunch of Rails or Rack apps on your local machine, run them with a tiny server using real hostnames based off of symlinks.

This is just one of those tiny “why didn’t I think of that” things that makes 37signals so good.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

That’s when I realized how much Twitter had taken over.

I hadn’t logged into my web interface in a bit, so I had a WordPress update, 4 plugin updates, and a bunch of pending spam. I cleared that out and then started crafting a post in MarsEdit. As I went to post those fateful words, MarsEdit choked on an XML-RPC error complaining about bad content.

I quickly scanned through recent post, looked for bad characters. I used the Googles to try to find an explanation. Finally, I noticed that each page of my blog was spitting out a PHP warning (because, you know, PHP is pretty dumb, and I’m too lazy to have turned off warnings) that it couldn’t download my latest tweets from Twitter.

One quick click of “Disable” and MarsEdit sprung back to life.

Twitter was breaking my site.

At which point, it dawned on me, that at this point, Twitter being down is like having part of the internet’s routing being down. It’s tied into so many systems, and so much traffic/content flows through it, that when it goes kablooey, all that content has to route elsewhere. Which then floods those systems, and they start to struggle and burst at the seams a bit, and then folks overflow into another system, and so on.

Until, the end result, of course, is that Twitter was breaking my site.

Here’s a graphical representation:

It’s fixed now.

My site, that is, not Twitter, which is still down.

If you do any web development, this tool is awesome.

It’s pretty daunting, pretty complicated, and can occasionally be pretty cool.

On the flip side, it’s now 2:55AM Eastern in Boston (where I started my day), but I’m in Phoenix where it’s actually only 11:55PM. That’s a sign that maybe things didn’t go quite as smoothly as one would have hoped.

The step we’re on is a step where we take over DNS for folks. It’s always somewhat difficult, because we’ll get a big list of domains and have to figure out whose record (our nameserver’s or the other nameserver’s) is the “real” record. It’s not generally too tough to figure it out (you can judge by the SOA of the records) and the number of domains is usually short of 100k, so as long as you’re accurate to within 1-2%, it’s not too bad. That’s 1000 guys who might break, which is pretty easy to handle with a good support team and some quick script fixes.

Let me take a step back. The process is actually that our nameservers need to become the authoritative nameservers for the domains we’re moving. This allows us to later change their DNS to point to their new home, and it all kinda works. We have to get the domains, merge them into our nameservers, become authoritative, and then fix what breaks.

We did that yesterday. Except it wasn’t 100k domains. It was 1.2 million. And the domains weren’t coming from a single, well-maintained nameserver. They domains came from three, somewhat munged together nameservers. There were internal conflicts, conflicts with our servers, missing zones. A host of issues. We thought we’d worked most of them out and gotten the problems down to, at most, 4-5k domains. That’s a lot, but in reality, it’s less than 0.5% of the total domains.

“Pretty good,” you say.

“Not quite,” I say.

For you see, there weren’t just three nameservers. There were five. So there’s a couple thousand domains we missed. And we also missed some of the conflicts (either by omission or by grabbing the wrong data). In the end, it was closer to 12k domains that were wonky.

That’s still only 1%. Damn good, given all of the variables.

Except 12000 broken domains leads to a whole lot of phone calls and emails. And some angry customers. And some tired folks staying up to fix things that they weren’t responsible for breaking. And one tired folk–me–staying up because he feels guilty for only being 99% good enough.

DNS is a fickle beast. Thankfully, it’s pretty quickly fixable. Once we’d identified some global problems, we could fix them rapidly and put big chunks of the broken domains back in working order.

I often argue with people who think the “Chinese Market” is a valid business plan. You know, the folks who say “hey, if we can just get our product in front of 100 million people, and get 1% of those people to buy, we’ll be rich!” Except, of course, it doesn’t really work that way. It’s hard to get a product in front of that many people who would be interested in buying, and it’s hard to get 1% of any audience to buy anything.

Well, not in business plans, at least. It does work that way in technical issues. If you’ve got a huge enough base of users, the smallest mistakes can have a big impact on your company and team. In these cases, sometimes being 99% accurate isn’t good enough.

Here’s a graphical representation:

You see, with 100k domains, you never quite reach screwed. It’s manageable.

With 1.2 million domains, you’re pretty much totally screwed.

Holy crap. That’s ugly.

Clicking the little link to vote takes you to a Thank You screen that says that voting will help ensure the best stories are presented. I would have expected something more interactive, more (dare I say it) Web 2.0-y.

Then I actually read the Thank You message:

“Thank You for participating in the Slashdottit Rating System

Your vote in the Slashdottit system will help insure the best stories are presented to our readers, with hyper accurate numbers to indicate their relevance and general awesomeness. Only by requiring the contribution of every random user of the internet can we guarantee the most scientifically perfect numbers will be generated. These numbers will guarantee that every story that appears on Slashdot will be interesting, insightful, and flawless. Vote early, vote often.”

Ha. Clever. April Fool’s. Well played.

It got worse when AdSense came along, and it got even worse as Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and the other social networking-type sites got big. Now, not only were people gaming the engines, they were throwing up lame articles and gaming other systems to get both the search juice and the traffic. Their spammy site gets the best of both worlds, and the rest of us deal with more spam–just not of the email variety.

This week was a big to-do about one of these SEO/SMO guys who got banned from now-Yahoo! owned blog widget because he was posting how to hack it (and, quite frankly, being an all-around douche). So, a guy who games the system for a living was bitching about being banned from a free tool that he’d been posting how to hack. Topping it off, a whole bunch of other SEO folks (many of whom I’ve been reading for a few years now) hopped on and defended the guy.

I just don’t get it.

I understand that the whole idea behind this widget (MyBlogLog) and behind other sites (like Digg, Flickr, etc.) is community. You build a community and you get more than just the functionality of the widget, you get the benefit/fun of the community. It’s all so Webtwopointohy.

Finally, a voice of reason came through my feed reader. I’m hoping we’re reaching a tipping point. I’m hoping we’re reaching the point where every sales and marketing guy out there looking to score some quick money doesn’t look at every new site and widget as something to game and make money. Now, I’m not against making money. I’d love to create a site that has some value to people and figure out a way (ads or not) to make some money. But the group of folks who exist solely to put up a site with ads, get it on Digg, and get enough sheep to click on it need to go away. They used to be called spammers, and it’s about time we go back to calling them that.

Well, I don’t have to anymore. ProfileLinker did it for me.

TechCrunch pointed to them today, which means they’re bound to get a good bit of traffic today. Reading through the comments, folks are hitting on many of the reasons I never got energized to actually do anything about it: the networks could cut you off; users would have to really trust you to give you their login/pass; there are so many networks that you’d be constantly trying to keep up as new networks emerged (as well as keep old networks working).

Partnering with the networks is the only way to make it work long term, I think, and that’s a tall order given that any centralized management system removes page views from their site, thus removing ad views from their site, thus directly reducing their revenue stream.

Still, it’s an idea that needs to happen because managing multiple profiles is just silly.

I want my own small little corner of the internet!

Awesome! I’m going to assume you’ve got a domain name (how else can you have your own cool little place without owning www.coffeepotamus.com?). What you need now is web hosting.

Actually, what you need now is an idea of what you’re going to do with your site. Maybe you’ll have a blog and some images of your friend and family? (Using friend rather than friends was unintentional, but funny, so I decided to not correct it.) Maybe you want to throw up those mp3s of your band that you’ve kept squirreled away on your hard drive.

Or maybe you want to go full bore Flash with games and forums and a whole site devoted to the awesomeness that is you.

In any case, you need to make a couple of estimates: how much disk space you’ll need and how much bandwidth you need. For a lot of folks, this is the toughest part of getting a website as it’s the largest way web hosting companies differentiate themselves from each other.

But … I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

It doesn’t matter.

These days, almost any plan that runs you $7-8/month is going to come with gigabytes of diskspace and tens of gigabytes of bandwidth. Guess what? Unless you’re really really popular, you won’t even use a tenth of that. Most people won’t even use 1/100th of that.

The lesson here? Pick a hosting company based on things that will have a bigger effect on your life. Do you prefer to use email and forums for support? Pick a host who focuses on that. Want someone on call 24/7? Pick a host who offers support in that fashion. Want to be able to install and update software with the click of a button? Look for a host who offers one click software installation and upgrades.

Basically, just identify what matters to you and realize that if you’re really going to use all of that disk space and bandwidth, you probably shouldn’t be using shared hosting.

There’s one other tricky question — Windows or Unix? I think this ones pretty easy though. Unless you plan on using ASP or ASP.NET (two web scripting languages), you should go with Unix. Many of you are now thinking to yourselves, “but I use Windows at home? Why wouldn’t I pick Windows?” The answer, quite simply, is that you don’t have to run the server so you just want to pick something that works well. And web hosts have been doing Unix hosting forever. It just works. Plus the cool SysAdmins all know it inside and out and can make it do crazy things.
So, we’ve figured out that you will:

1. Pick shared web hosting
2. Ignore disk space and bandwidth and go with the host that fits you best
3. Pick Unix (unless you need ASP or ASP.NET)

Basically, now you just need to shell out the dough and start building your site.

The next lesson?

Do NOT use Microsoft Frontpage.

It’s not that it’s a bad product. It does it’s job really well. It’s also a pain to support, has a startling tendency to decide to change your page without asking, and a tendency to become corrupt and break your site entirely. Plus, Microsoft is done with it. So it’s a dying product anyway.

Save yourself the time and money and grab one of the many nice free editors. Nvu is a good one.

Now just build your site. Try not to reinvent the wheel. If you picked a host who has one click installers, try something like Gallery2 for image galleries, or WordPress for a blog. You don’t need to do it yourself — the one click installers can make it very easy to build a site without much work. However, make sure you stay up to date. If your web host offers upgrades or patches for your installed apps, take advantage of them when they become available.

If you don’t, you could login one day and see that your site says:

“Haha you suck you’ve been h4xx043d”

In other words, some ingenious little kid has hacked your site because you’re using a 4 year old version of some guestbook software your Uncle Dale (who smells like fish) gave you. You curse to yourself, “I’ll always upgrade from now on, now I just need to get my site back.”

Which, because you follow my last lesson, is a piece of cake.

Always back up your site on your hard drive.

I cannot tell you how many sob stories we hear about customers who are running their “business” off of their account, but don’t have their own backup. When their site gets hacked, they expect that their web host will have a copy of the file they uploaded 5 months ago. Here’s a little secret: most web host do have backups, but they are rotated out quickly (daily, weekly, or semiweekly). What that means is that if you get hacked while you’re on vacation, you may come back and find out that the only backup your host has is of the hacked file itself.

Thanks Uncle Dale, you fishy bastard.

Backup your files. Keep a copy on your hard drive. If you use a database-driven application, ask your host (or, better yet, look in their knowledgebase or forums) if there is a way for you to get backups of your database.
So, you want to build your own little site?

1. Pick shared web hosting
2. Ignore disk space and bandwidth and go with the host that fits you best
3. Pick Unix (unless you need ASP or ASP.NET)
4. Don’t use Frontpage
5. Backup, backup, backup

That’s it. Everything else you really don’t need to care about. And, by the time you need to care about it, you’ll be a superstar web expert and won’t be reading silly stuff like this.

In Part Three, we’ll disuss what to when you plan to make your living online.