VaultPress
March 30, 2010
The image shows some of the disasters that can befall people and things, including blogs. If I still lived in Boston, the flood would be befalling me right now. It wouldn’t get my blog, though, because that’s hosted elsewhere.
This blog, and millions of others, are hosted by Automattic at WordPress.com. One of the free features of WordPress.com is its “like-a-rockness.” Updates to the blogs happen at three different datacentres.
What about WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere? (Such blogs are usually referred to as self-hosted, or as WordPress.org, blogs.) Could they use the Automattic vault, even though they’re not hosted by Automattic?
That’s what VaultPress means. To quote from Matt’s announcement post:
The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.
There’s some interesting language on the beta signup page.
I know you’re planning to charge about $20 a month for this, but in a perfect world I’d pay $? a month to cover all my blogs. I’d call myself a ? user.
The first ? is a request for beta applicants to indicate how much they would pay (the number of blogs is captured elsewhere on the signup page). The second ? is actually a drop-down box showing the following: personal; pro-blogger; small business; enterprise. So Automattic is still working out the pricing.
My main question is: what is the difference between VaultPress and the WordPress.com vault? I initially formed the impression that it’s the same backup infrastructure. But, according to Matt: “On a technical level it’s a different infrastructure. I could see it being offered to WP.com users in the future.”
I first read about VaultPress at TechCrunch. There are some interesting comments over there. Several of them relate to cost. There’s the usual “it should be free” comment.
More interesting, I think, is the comment about ~$15 a month being a lot when compare with ~$10 for hosting. Matt responded that it might make more sense to go with the cheapest host feasible, and spend the $ on protecting your blog.
It might also make sense to move to WordPress.com for hosting, get the WordPress.com vault for free, and pay for WordPress.com premium features. If the price for VaultPress seems high, it might serve as a prod toward WordPress.com hosting.
Edited a few hours later, to reflect Matt’s response to my question.
Corporations are people too
March 25, 2010
If corporations have rights, such as free speech, where do these rights stop? Can a corporation, for example, run for congress? My fellow Silver Spring resident Murray Hill wants to find out. Murray Hill is a PR firm, rather than a person. Or is a firm a person?
So, Murray Hill Inc. for Congress, as we say on Facebook: and Reddit, and NPR. And Youtube as well, but I’ll embed the video here to save you the trip.
Tumbling Toward Freemium
March 24, 2010
Tumblr is a microblogging service (which I first covered about two years ago). It’s recently become freemium: the basic service remains free of charge; there is a cost for premium features.
I’m very interested the freemium model and how it is implemented. So are others, if the excellent discussion on my recent post on freemium at WordPress.com is anything to go by.
Posts on Tumblr premium themes at Mashable and at TechCrunch are positive. Comments following each of those posts is more mixed, with some indicating a preference for rival microblogging service Posterous.
At Tumblr’s own site, there was of course a blog post about the new themes. “They cost between $9 and $49 (most of which goes right into the pockets of the brilliant designers behind them).” Some theme designers also posted about their new premium Tumblr themes (e.g., WooThemes).
I think that the price is for use of a theme at Tumblr forever (but someone please correct me if it’s on some other basis, such as annual). The Tumblr theme garden now includes a premium plot.
I looked for the Tumblr support forum to gauge the reaction of the Tumblr community. I couldn’t find one, so I looked in the FAQ. No mention there. To my surprise, no mention either of the ad policy, since that’s one of the perennially hot topics at WordPress.com.
I filled out the email support form with my questions. Email support is impressively prominent at the Tumblr site, and the response was equally impressive in terms of speed and of actually answering my questions. There is no official support forum. AdSense is allowed, with a couple of caveats.
In closing, I’ll throw out a more general thought about freemium: or rather, I’ll post it, hope for comments on it, then do some more thinking. There are two types of freemium service.
- Here’s a free service. By the way, here are some premium features you can pay for and use if you want.
- Here’s a service. You pay to use it. But here’s a very limited version, so that you can try it out for free.
Most freemium services are of the first type. Of firms providing the second type of freemium service, the most prominent is 37signals.
I welcome your comments on this post, on the freemium model, and on how it is used at Tumblr and elsewhere.
Safety Advisory
March 22, 2010
The best thing that can be said about the photo is that nobody died. The worst thing, for me, is that my parents were in the car pictured. To return to the positive side: they were wearing their seatbelts.
This is a Toyota: a Yaris, to be precise. Other posts tagged with Toyota have focused on the recent recall, mainly on the PR aspects. The Toyota in the photo did not malfunction. It functioned rather well, in that it protected its occupants during an impact with a much larger vehicle.
Reader, please wear your seatbelt, and follow other safety rules, such as: no cellphoning while driving. I posted on another blog about spring and safety, using the same photo. Cross-posting is something I usually avoid, so as to save it for important issues – such as safety.
Freemium and Fencing
March 14, 2010
Freemium mashes up free and premium:you can use a freemium service, such as WordPress.com, at zero cost; you can pay for premium features. I pay to add two such features for this blog. One of the features maps the domain changingway.org to changingway.wordpress.com.
The other paid feature I use is custom CSS (see one of this blog’s first posts for an account of how I use it).
The fence between zero and any positive cost is perceived as high. So some users of freemium services seek means of effectively getting a premium feature without paying the price for it: these “loophole-lookers” seek holes in the fence.
The WordPress.com custom CSS upgrade seems particularly prone to attract loophole-lookers. I base this mainly on posts in the WordPress.com support forums, some of which include arguments such as: some other hosted blogging services don’t charge for CSS; I only want a little bit of CSS, so why should I be hit with the full charge?
One particular forum thread started about a week ago with a question about changing the background color of a theme. Responses so far include:
- You need custom CSS to change the background color.
- No you don’t. Here’s some code you can include in a text widget to style the background color of the whole blog.
- That loophole is going away soon.
The 3rd response is particularly interesting because it’s by Matt Mullenweg. He does use the word loophole.
This raises the question of how WordPress.com will change with respect to inline styling. And indeed, that question has its own forum thread.
I hope that WordPress.com will not, as one response in the thread suggests, use the blunt instrument of stripping out all inline style attributes. I think it would be reasonable to allow the occasional use of inline styling for things like using a font or image positioning appropriate to a particular post.
It would also be interesting to watch. The fence between free of charge and paying for custom CSS would see a fencing match. WordPress.com will plug the loophole of style code in a widget to style the whole blog. The riposte might involve putting similar code in a sticky post.
What do you think WordPress.com will do? What do you think it should do? I’d welcome comments addressing either or both of those different questions.
Job Hunting and Dogfood
March 12, 2010
I like the expression eating one’s own dogfood. I also like the encouragement it gives to organizations to use their own products and services.
I was reminded of dogfooding during my current job search. Google asked for my phone number and for my resume. Those two requests are reasonable, and usual, but I was surprised at how closely Google stuck to the usual (Web 1.0ish) script.
Google has the usual categories for phone number: home, work, mobile, if memory serves. Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you could have a number that you could map to whichever phone you happen to be next to? Yes there is, and it’s called Google Voice. I’m surprised that wasn’t an option for phone number on the job application.
I’m also surprised by the option for sending a resume: upload, or paste into a window. Why not ask for a link to an online resume. Perhaps one at Google Docs? Yes, I am aware that people sometimes want to keep their resume private, rather than putting it on the web, and that one could use the paste a resume space to paste a link, but still… I uploaded my resume in Word format. Guess I could have used PDF…
I’m surprised that the application process didn’t steer me toward the dogfood made by the firm to which I applied (Google). Instead, it steered me toward the firm where the dogfooding phrase originated (Microsoft).
A Couple of Good Reads
March 10, 2010
It’s interesting to keep track of what one reads, and to see what others are reading and what they think of those books. Yes, I said books, thus consigning this post and its author to the dustbin of pre-postliterate history.
I’ve used a few different what-am-I-reading web services, and have settled on Goodreads. My profile/history shows mainly fiction. It excludes much of the nonfiction I pick up, because I refer to it rather than read it. It also excludes most of the books I read to my kids (6 and 3) because they are my kids’ “reading” rather than mine.
I have recently made a couple of exceptions to this policy. One is for Stink and the World’s Worst Super-Stinky Sneakers. As those of you versed in the classics will know, Stink is the younger brother of Judy Moody.
In Stinky Sneakers, we find out that Stink is a discriminating sniffer as well as a smelly-sneakered source of scent. We also find out how he got the nickname Stink. This is not a book for the faint of heart or nose, but it is my favorite of the half-dozen or so Megan McDonald books we’ve read.
The other exceptional book is WordPress For Dummies. I admit that it’s not the first For Dummies book I’ve read, or considered good. Then again, I didn’t really read it.
As usual with tech books, I scanned it rather than read it, I was aware of the danger that it might already be out of date, and I know that a lot of the information is available online anyway. But if you want a book on WordPress, this one is pretty good. It sets a fairly gentle pace. At the same time, it covers a lot of ground: for example, there are chapters on setting up WordPress MU (multi-user).
I see that a new edition of WordPress For Dummies is due out later this year. I presume that’ll cover WordPress 3.0, which is due out soon.
Book Chapter on WordPress as Mass Customization
March 10, 2010
A couple of years ago, I submitted a paper about WordPress to a conference on Mass Customization. The paper was accepted and, in October 2007, I presented it at the conference at MIT.
A book based on the conference has just been published. I’m posting my chapter, A Mass of Customizers: The WordPress Software Ecosystem, here. I hope you find it interesting.
The fact that the book has just come out is a comment on the slowness of the traditional publishing system. There is a danger of bibliolescence: the book becoming obsolete. Indeed, I note that the chapter refers to Version 2.3 of WordPress, and we’re now on 2.9.
That said, the point of the chapter has become sharper, rather than duller, with time. WordPress is now a better example of mass customization. There’s more mass, in that there are millions more WordPress blogs. And there’s more customization, in that there are many more themes, plugins, etc.
Indeed, Table 2 of the chapter is a rather handy summary of the means by which WordPress can be customized. Take a look, and feel free to leave comments on the chapter at this post.
GK Chesterton and YA Fiction
March 8, 2010
The Quote of the Day gadget today shows me this one from G.K. Chesterton.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Then I saw (via Largehearted Boy) an LA Times article about adults reading young adult fiction.
Attracted by well-written, fast-paced and engaging stories that span the gamut of genres and subjects, such [adult] readers have mainstreamed a niche long derided as just for kids… Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.
The same passage provides four examples of YA lit. I read The Book Thief a while ago. I recently finished The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) and have started on the sequel.
So I’m a pretty good example of a YA-reading adult, especially since The Hunger Games is on my wishlist. I won’t mention the fourth example from the LAT article: you can probably guess, and I won’t be reading it.
There are several links between the GK quote and the LAT article. First, the quote is an explanation of the article. But it’s only a partial explanation. The tired grownup who reads the first Percy Jackson often turns into the grownup who’s eager for the second – and possibly even more tired, having stayed up late to finish the first.
Even leaving aside the sequel syndrome, some YA novels are good enough to deserve eager readers.
A second link between GK and YA is that some YA writers are fans of GK: Neil Gaiman, for example. There are many more links, and much more to be written: but not by me, at least not right now.
Google Ate My Picnik
March 1, 2010
Google acquired Picnik. Liz at GigaOm leads with the fact that this is the latest in a series of deals by which ex-Googlers have been brought back into the fold.
I’ve yet to see an answer to my main question about the deal: how will this affect the relationship between Flickr and Picnik? It’s been posed in several places, including the comments on Picnik’s post about the acquisition.
When I’m using my Flickr account and click to edit one of my photos, it’s Picnik that starts up. Apart from wishing that it would start up rather faster, I’m happy with Picnik.
