Online Aspect by Josh Fraser

Join top sites in protesting censorship on the web

2012-01-16T20:35:49Z

Recently many large sites on the web, like Reddit and Wikipedia have announced plans to black out their sites in opposition to the bills that have been proposed in the US House and Senate in the name of “stopping piracy”. The problem with these bills is that they would give the government the power to censor content on the web while breaking the underlying infrastructure of the internet. Corporate supporters of HR3261 (SOPA) and S968 (PIPA) demand the ability to take down any web site that affects their profits, without due process or judicial oversight. Hoping you wouldn’t notice or care, the majority of our elected representatives want to give them that right.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP (PIPA) act are just another instance of the government meddling in things they don’t understand while giving themselves more power.

While progress is being made at stopping these bills, it is important that we continue to raise awareness of what’s going on. There have already been illegal seizures by Homeland Security’s ICE that highlight the danger of allowing the government to block sites at will.

This weekend at Torbit, we built a JavaScript widget that makes it easy for any site to join the protest against SOPA, PIPA and other censorship on the web. Just paste a snippet of JavaScript into your website to add an interstitial to your site with information about SOPA and how to contact your local representatives. By default it will only be displayed on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC). It’s available as a WordPress plugin, Blogger widget, Typepad widget, as well as a simple javascript snippet. Check out the screenshot below to see what it looks like or click here to try it out.

What are you doing with your talent and energy?

2011-11-06T19:04:53Z

Bill Gates to members of the Harvard community:

I hope you will reflect on what you’ve done with your talent and energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you work to address the world’s deepest inequities, on how well you treat people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Google Reader export to bookmarks.htm

2011-11-05T17:57:43Z

I was one of the small group of Google Reader users who actively used the sharing functionality before Google killed it with their latest upgrade. While the number of people I shared with was small, the quality was incredibly high. I don’t blame Google for wanting to consolidate their social graphs (makes sense to me), but I will miss the conversations I had there.

A friend asked me if I knew how to export the shared items JSON file to a standard bookmarks.htm file. I didn’t, but I managed to whip up a quick PHP script to do the trick. Here’s the code for anyone who is interested.

<?php

// bump this limit up as it can be quite memory intensive if you have a lot of shared items
ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');

// update to use your own file here
$json_file = "/tmp/shared-items.json";

// output the std header
// http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753582(v=vs.85).aspx
echo <<< EOT
<!DOCTYPE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<Title>Bookmarks</Title>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
EOT;

$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($json_file));
echo "<DL>\n\t<DT>";
foreach ($json->items as $item) {
echo '\t<A HREF="'.$item->alternate[0]->href.'" ADD_DATE="'.$item->published.'" LAST_VISIT="'.round($item->crawlTimeMsec/1000).'" LAST_MODIFIED="'.$item->updated.'">'.utf8_decode($item->title).'</A>\n';
}
echo "</DL>";

?>

Mentorship

2011-09-28T16:38:29Z

One of the things I have greatly benefited from is being surrounded by good mentors. I was once advised to surround myself with people who are smarter than me (it’s not a high bar, I know). Getting mentors involved in my life and company is one of the things I’ve done consistently over the last five years and I attribute much of the success I’ve had so far to the involvement of those mentors.

People sometimes ask me how they too can find great mentors. For me, it was at TechStars where I really learned how to find mentors and keep them engaged. If you’re an eager entrepreneur craving good mentorship, then TechStars is a great place to start.

I’m honored this year to be a mentor myself at two of the TechStars programs — TechStars Cloud in San Antonio, TX and The Next Big Thing in Greenville, SC (which is part of the TechStars network).

I’m excited to have the chance to give back and share some of the lessons I’ve learned with some other young entrepreneurs. If you’ve got an idea for a company and want to increase your odds of success, I encourage you to apply to one of the TechStars programs. There’s a good chance it will change your life, just as it did mine.

O’Reilly interview about Torbit

2011-07-18T21:44:12Z

I recently attended and spoke at the Velocity Conference. While I was there, Mac Slocum grabbed me and we spent a few minutes talking about mobile performance. Mac is the Online Managing Editor for O’Reilly and it was fun to get to share some of the ways we are thinking about mobile performance at Torbit. The video is less than 5 minutes long. Check it out.

Live every minute that you have

2011-10-16T23:25:31Z

I’ve been thinking again recently about what I want to accomplish with my life. I have a few specific goals. I want to see the world from outer space. I want to build a school in a third world country. I want to build a product that touches 1% or more of the people on this planet. I have other audacious plans. I also want to write a book and visit at least 50 countries.

I’ve already seen the pyramids, gone sky diving, started a couple companies and experienced more in 27 years than many people experience in a life time. I’ve been incredibly blessed. I also think it’s important to step back every now and then and ask yourself if you’re living the life you want to be living. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I wasted time on things that don’t matter.

Tonight, I randomly stumbled across a ReadWriteWeb interview of Brad Feld from 2008. I’ve heard variations on this quote from Brad before and I really like it.

When it’s over, they dig a hole in the ground, put you in it (or spread your ashes somewhere), print your picture in the newspaper and write some nice things about you, and then life goes on for everyone else but you. Live every minute that you have.

Whether you’re an Atheist like Brad or believe in an afterlife like me, it’s a good reminder that our days on this planet are limited. Let’s make this week count.

Goodbye Boulder. Hello Mountain View.

2011-06-24T00:51:43Z

Just over 4 years ago, I moved from South Carolina to Boulder, Colorado. I instantly fell in love with this town. Boulder is a perfect playground for adults. Boulder has 300 days of sunshine with amazing skiing in the winter and great mountain biking in the summer. Boulder is a place that fosters smart people who care about balancing work with fun. Boulder has an incredibly high concentration of computer geeks and I’ve felt at home from the first moment I arrived. I’ve never been a part of a more supportive community. I’ve made hundreds of friendships here, many of which I know will last for the rest of my life.

Boulder has been an amazing place to live, but the time has come for me to move on. On July 1st I will be packing up my things and driving a U-Haul out to Mountain View, California.

A couple months ago I realized I had a tough decision to make. Where did I want to build my company? Of course, there are pros and cons to building a company in any location. The easy decision was just to stay in Boulder. (Did I mention, I love this town?) But as you know, the easy decision isn’t always the right one. In our case, moving to the Valley just makes more sense. Many of the engineers we want to hire are currently working and living in the Valley. Many of our customers and potential partners are there too. We still have a small team and still have the flexibility to make the transition. Jon and I are doubling-down on our commitment to Torbit and believe this is the best decision for our company. Boulder is still an amazing place to build a business and I’ll fight anyone who dares to suggest otherwise. It’s just time for a change.

Since the first time I heard about Silicon Valley I had a feeling I would eventually live there. I’m not sure how long I will stay, but I know it’s the right place for me to be right now. I plan to work in the tech industry for the rest of my life and moving to the Valley gives me a chance to build relationships with some of the most influential people in my industry. I’m young and don’t have much tying me down so I figure this is as good a time as any to make the move.

Boulder is amazing and I’m sad to be leaving it behind. I’m incredibly thankful for all the friends I’ve made during my time here. And don’t worry, I’ll still be around. As Micah said, “I’m not leaving Boulder, I’m just not going to live here anymore.” Most of my friends are in Boulder and it’s a cheap flight back. I also hope you’ll stop by if you’re ever in town. I’m getting a two bedroom apartment just so I can have an extra bed for any friends who want it.

Leaving Boulder is bittersweet. I’m sad to be leaving, but also incredibly excited to see what’s next.

Speaking at Velocity Conference

2011-06-03T20:31:59Z

In a couple weeks I’ll be speaking at O’Reilly’s 2011 Velocity Conference. Velocity is an annual gathering of people who care a lot about web performance. The tagline this year is “Automated, Optimized, Ubiquitous”. Of course, “Automated” describes nicely what we’re doing at Torbit — taking cutting-edge performance techniques and making them available to anyone with a website. I’ll be speaking on the 15th and I’m looking forward to sharing some of the things we’ve learned.

The conference is taking place in Santa Clara, CA on June 14-16. Each year Velocity attracts the best known names in the industry and speakers from companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft present their latest research and findings. The schedule is crammed with great content and I’m honored to be included on the roster. My talk will focus on mobile optimizations and I’ll be going into more detail on the new localStorage optimizations we have developed at Torbit for delivering amazing mobile performance.

I’m looking forward to the event and I hope to see lots of familiar faces there on June 14th. Let me know if you’re planning to attend as I’d love to meet up and make lots of new friends while I’m there.

Update on Rolling Curl

2011-05-21T08:13:44Z

Back in 2009 I blogged about using curl_multi() in PHP without blocking. The goal was to provide a better way to process multiple HTTP requests in parallel. The code was well received and I ended up turning my original snippet of code into a full blown PHP Class and setting it up as a project on Google Code.

And then I got busy. Meanwhile the list of bugs and feature requests began to pile up.

Thankfully, a few guys have picked up my slack on the project. Alexander Makarow has been diligently maintaining the code for me, fixing bugs and making it better. Fabian Franz forked it on Github and added some of the top requested features.

Thanks to their efforts, Rolling Curl is in better shape than ever. This is why I love open source.

3 types of winning

2011-05-18T06:37:42Z

Each month I pay Comcast for internet access at my house and their service sucks. I have the option to switch to Qwest but I’ve heard they are just as bad. As a customer, I’m not very happy but dropping my internet isn’t exactly an option. In this transaction there’s one clear winner, and it’s not me.

When I go to concerts, I often end up buying tickets through Ticketmaster. When I do, Ticketmaster makes money and the venue that selected Ticketmaster as the payment system gets a financial kickback. Event-goers are pissed over the exorbitant fees, but both the company (Ticketmaster) and the customer (the venues) are happy. It’s a win for both the company and the customer.

Occasionally you’ll find a company that provides a triple win. I click on Google ads as they’re often helpful. Advertisers are happy to pay for my clicks because on average I’m going to spend far more on their store than I’m going to cost them. Google, of course, is happy to take their cut as well – a great example of a win/win/win. Everyone is happy: the company, the customer and the world.

There aren’t many companies that can get away with being a single winner. These types of wins are really only possible when they have near-monopolistic control of the market. Since everyone hates them, they’re guaranteed to be overturned unless there’s some large market force keeping the status quo.

The vast majority of companies in the world are a double win. You have to make at least one customer happy to have a business. Most double win companies aren’t hated by the rest of the world like Ticketmaster, they’re just invisible since they don’t make much of a difference to anyone besides the customer.

Triple win companies are pretty rare. It’s hard enough trying to satisfy your customers without trying to please everyone else while you’re at it. But of the three types of companies, triple wins are the most fun. Other than your competitors, the entire world is cheering for you to succeed (well, at least until you get big).

One of the reasons I’m having so much fun working on Torbit is that our product is a triple win. I regularly see tweets from people recommending Torbit to websites that are slow. Everyone on the Internet appreciates fast loading websites, even if they have no idea who we are or have no conscious recognition of the difference we make. Our customers love us because we make them more money by making their websites faster. And of course, as long as we’re providing value, people will happily pay us as well.

At the company where you work, who’s winning? For the entrepreneur, what kind of company are you building? I want to make money just as much as the next guy, but it’s not what drives me to get out of bed in the morning. You can be wildly profitable no matter which path you choose, but my guess is you’ll have a lot more fun if you find a way to make the world a better place while you’re at it.