Tag: failwhale

WordPress.com Downtime Lowdown

This blog, like millions of others, is hosted at WordPress.com. I’ve been very happy with the service.

I’m still happy with it, despite today’s downtime. I have to applaud Matt’s downtime summary. He didn’t attempt to downplay the downtime. He quantified it, to the tune of 5.5 million lost pageviews (not all of which are mine, I must admit).

I had to smile when I first saw the news about the downtime. It was a Mashable post about “tweets pouring in.” That just reinforced to me how much more robust WordPress.com is than Twitter, which I still think functions best as the home for the fail whale.

Happy New Twitter

I’d say that the biggest social media successes of 2008 were Twitter and Facebook. I’m not a big fan of either service. But I decided to start 2009 with a chirpy new year tweet.

I was delighted by what I saw when I signed on to Twitter: our old friend, and my favorite feature of Twitter, the fail whale.

Now, let me see what delights await me at Facebook…

Fail Whale, New Yorker Style

This is the image in question. If you don’t see an image with roads, then the New Yorker’s fail whale has failed (or perhaps just changed).

This is the Wikipedia article that sent me on the wild whale chase. Of course, it may well have been fixed by the time you read this.

This is a previous post on Twitter’s Fail Whale.

If I knew of a page about Fail Whales and their relatives, I’d link to it. Ideally, it would collect fail images.

My Favorite Twitter Feature

Well done if you guessed from the image that my favorite Twitter feature is the Fail Whale. It’s the work of Yiying Lu. She’s not a one-hit wonder; as pointed out on Drawn!, she has an impressive portfolio. Here are some of the spades from her playing card set, Natural Symphony.

I don’t see a link to buy a set of these cards. If I did, they’d get strong consideration as presents for my card-playing parents.

Sarah Perez recently told The Story of the Fail Whale.

The Fail Whale story is one that shows the value of open content. By making the art available [for free], Yiying is now going to profit in more ways than if she had simply made the art available for purchase. She will be earning profits from merchandise at both shops and from the sale of her prints and she will certainly win some future design work from this as well. Of course, her successes come from more than just the work itself, but also from the power of the community who embraced it.

Yes, the Fail Whale is my favorite feature of Twitter. I tried to tweet to that effect, but of course, when I tried to, I saw… this time you get no congratulations for guessing what.