Jeffrey McManus

Plug-In Comment Systems Suck

2009-07-18T16:15:14Z

I do a lot of commenting on other peoples’ blogs, so I pay a lot of attention to the user experience for comments. In the last year or so I’ve been noticing the rise of third-party plug-in comment systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate. I understand the value of these systems (single sign-on, presence, control over comment content and ability to subscribe to discussions), but I always had concerns about the cost (not in dollars, but in terms of loss of control and reliability).

I host Wordpress on a server I own because I have this crazy notion that no individual or company should come between me and my printing press. Plug-in comment systems interfere with this by introducing a new point of failure into what should normally be a very straightforward process. Commenting isn’t complicated, but by using a pluggable remote system, you risk exposing your users to this:

(That 504 Gateway Time-out business is where Disqus was supposed to have been.)

There’s a larger trend at work here, the notion that a publishing system (or any software) is inoculated from gaps in its feature set because it happens to be modular/pluggable/hackable. This is one of the big lies of open source software (the reasoning is, if you don’t like the way it works, just roll your own). Wordpress owns Intense Debate now; they should roll its feature set into the core Wordpress product so I can host it myself and don’t have to rely on some disinterested third party to keep the otherwise very simple process of storing and displaying blog comments working.

Web Developers: Don’t Do This

2009-07-15T17:40:27Z

I’m not including the URL of this page in case somebody figures out how to turn this into an exploit, but in a way I almost wish somebody would, because after filling out these guys’ survey and getting this horrifically amateurish error message on the final page, my first impulse was to figure out a way to crawl into their database and delete all my personal information out of it.

(BTW, if you’re looking for customizable online survey portal software that’s free/open source and not horrifically amateurish most of the time, check out Tinypug.)

The Associated Press Discovers Tagging

2009-07-12T17:52:15Z

The Associated Press is floating the idea of creating a tag taxonomy that would provide metadata about their news stories to automated crawlers.

Setting aside the fact that this would appear to be an attempt at creating their own niche set of copyright regulations, I’d be surprised if the AP will even be able to pull this off, since they can’t even be bothered to include bylines on most of the stories they syndicate to their member organizations through their traditional distribution channels.

Matt Mullenweg: “Wordpress Themes are GPL, too”

2009-07-02T20:08:00Z

Link: WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too

One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

I don’t see this doing much to calm the shitstorm over commercial Wordpress themes (missives from attorneys seldom do); it definitely draws a line in the sand and clarifies something that had been a subject of debate among the Wordpress developer community. At the same time, it would be nice if the Wordpress business did more to support commercial plugin and theme developers (whether the code is GPL or not shouldn’t matter) rather than just providing the occasional blog link or issuing/refuting fatwas.

Blow Monkeys, “Digging Your Scene”

2009-07-02T19:47:37Z

I missed this when it originally came out in 1986; I found the song after hearing the 2002 Ivy cover. Both versions are awesome!

“The Best Laxative to be Found on the 103rd Floor”

2009-07-02T16:52:48Z

Link: Gizmodo - You Sure You’re 140? - Sears tower glass

The Sears Tower Skydeck is four separate glass retractable “protrusions” that can each hold up to five tons, and is probably the best laxative to be found on the 103rd floor.

This Paterson Guy Is A Riot

Testimony to the New York City Council on Intro 991, Proposed Legislation for Open Data Standards

2009-06-30T03:50:49Z

Link: Testimony to the New York City Council on Intro 991, Proposed Legislation for Open Data Standards

Beyond a permissive regime around the availability of data, the City will also need to allow companies to make a market, and to charge, for the value-added services they build on top of the public platform. Certainly, companies should not be charging for the mere redistribution of the data, but they should be permitted — indeed encouraged — to build user-friendly front-ends, interesting “mashups,” innovative analyses, and inventive integrations of the platform’s data.

My buddy Andrew rocks the NYC city council on open data. He brings up a couple of red herrings (like SOAP and the notion of open data == open source which nobody outside of Planet Microsoft is actually confused about) but all in all, this is terrific work. I would love for somebody to lay the same kind of smackdown on the SFMTA board.

Reasons to Not Start a Michael Jackson Moonwalking Flashmob

2009-06-28T18:17:02Z

Link: Rob Manuel: How I started the Jacko flashmob by accident

I have stuff to do, I have a newsletter to write and a meal to cook for my wife. She’d demanded Spaghetti Bolognese and tells me, “you cook the best spag bog in North London.” She delights in calling it “bog”, it’s her reference to my Midlands origins, and she never misses an opportunity to mention it. Hence we then spend the next 30 minutes imagining a soap opera set in Birmingham called “Brummies” featuring a 38 year old bloke called Dave, who’d obsessed with Neds Atomic Dustbin and lives with his keeping-up-appearances mother. Dave has dreads, wears long shorts, and tries to be down with the kids by handing up C90s of mash-ups based upon early 90s greebo culture. You see, we were busy.

Comparative Pricing for Virtual Hosting Providers

2009-06-26T15:31:43Z

Rackspace just launched a new suite of cloud computing (really virtualized hosting) products. We use a bunch of these products from different companies. We also have a consulting practice dedicated to Amazon’s EC2 offering, so I wanted to take a closer look at how the different offerings stack up in terms of price and features. I also compared the new Rackspace offering to Slicehost, which we’ve used for a while and are very happy with. (Slicehost was acquired by Rackspace in October of last year, so they’re the same company, but very different products. It looks like they’re continuing to run Slicehost as an independent brand, which I think is smart.)

Anyway, here’s my comparison. Bear in mind that this is not an apples/apples comparison (the details are below):

	Rackspace Cloud	Slicehost	Amazon EC2 Small
RAM (MB)	256	256	1700
HD (GB)	10	10	160
Processor	Some vaguely-defined fraction of a quad-core server	Some vaguely-defined fraction of a quad-core server	Equivalent to a single-core 1.0-1.2Ghz 2007 Operon
Price/Hour	$0.015	N/A	$0.10
Price/Day	$0.36	N/A	$2.40
Price/Month	$10.80	$20.00	$72.00
Bandwidth Out/GB	$0.22	100GB fixed pooled	$0.17
Bandwidth In/GB	$0.08	100GB fixed pooled	$0.10

So it looks like the Rackspace-branded offering significantly undercuts the Slicehost offering on price in every category as long as your bandwidth is less than about 42GB per month. If your site uses more bandwidth than that, Slicehost would be a better value, particularly if you run more than one instance, since Slicehost pools bandwidth allocations across all the virtual machines you run on their service. Rackspace Cloud is also cheaper than Amazon EC2 across the board except in one area (bandwidth out).

The chart doesn’t reflect this, but Amazon extends volume discounts on outbound bandwidth starting at 40 terabytes. We refer to this as “the Smugmug discount”; I suspect that not too many of their customers beside Smugmug hit this limit in practice (and we certainly never have), so it didn’t factor into my analysis here.

I included Amazon EC2 in this comparison because they get so much attention in this area. To be fair, Amazon has never positioned EC2 as a low-cost offering, instead emphasizing flexibility and the ability to pay as you go. But this comparison shows that the Amazon offering has a weakness in terms of price points (as opposed to price in an absolute sense). There’s no such thing as a “tiny” EC2 instance; their “small” size doesn’t correlate to the Rackspace/Slicehost offering, so they’re missing out on the low end (which in this case is a single-processor virtual machine with under 1GB of RAM). The smallest virtual machine you can run on Amazon’s EC2 has 1.7GB of RAM and 160GB of storage. This makes Amazon EC2 unappealing for a lot of developer use cases, such as temporary staging servers for QA, private/small workgroup collaboration servers (low-traffic blog hosting, file shares and version control servers), and so forth.

(You can pay for a year’s worth of EC2 service in advance and get a pretty significant discount on the per-hour charge; Amazon calls this a “reserved instance“. This might make economic sense depending on what you were looking to do, although it’s not going to beat Rackspace for on-demand scenarios. Again, the problem with the Amazon’s EC2 offering isn’t with price per se, it’s with the price point — they just don’t offer a low-end virtual machine.)

It’s also worth noting that the offerings differ in another area: the ability to spin up and manage machine instances programmatically. Amazon EC2 is far and away the most robust provider in this area, with a web services API that enables users to control most aspects of their virtual machine instances. Slicehost has a rudimentary API, while Rackspace Cloud’s programmable API offering is “coming soon”.

Slicehost also has one feature that we really like: they provide DNS hosting for their customers at no extra charge (their DNS service is also part of their API). Amazon doesn’t appear to provide DNS (although they do generate a DNS name automatically when you create an instance — if you want to designate a host name of your choice, you’re on your own).

Amazon EC2’s large library of machine images (including the ability to create and publish your own machine image) is a big strength and one that many developers have taken advantage of. It’s probably the most compelling feature of their offering in a world in which they are not particularly competitive on price.

Finally, it’s worth noting that of these, only Amazon EC2 offers Windows hosting (which Microsoft will make you pay through the nose for). The Slicehost and Rackspace offerings only contain operating system images for Linux (although they support a bunch of distributions).

I’m spending a lot of time thinking on this as I figure out how to create a hosted service out of the Tinypug project we’ve been working on. For now, we plan to continue to use Slicehost and Amazon EC2 to host client sites as we evaluate the Rackspace Cloud offering in more depth.

Teaching This Fall

2009-06-24T17:12:38Z

Big news! The University of Victoria’s program in Business, Management and Technology has asked me to teach a class. This will commence in September of this year and will be repeated in January 2010 (assuming I don’t totally cock it up). The course I’ll be teaching is Web Design and Management I, a very basic and not-very-technical course covering how the web works.

This is an distance learning course taught through the university’s Continuing Studies division, so I’ll be doing the teaching from my office in San Francisco (and our other projects and the consultancy won’t be affected).

Jeffrey McManus

Plug-In Comment Systems Suck

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