Coffee on the Keyboard

Exploring the Web

Last week, as I was demonstrating Ning in my office, someone asked me how I find things like this. Honestly, I could not remember when or how I discovered Ning, which prompted me to pay attention over the past week, and to ask you.

(It was also a good excuse to write a short post since I’m still recovering from some wrist strain.)

So what did I find in the past week or so, and where did I find it? Twitter, unsurprisingly, has been the best source, though not always directly. Second best is what I’ll call “secondary finds,” when I visit one project and then follow to the author’s other projects. Blogs were a close third.

I should admit that I didn’t keep notes or stats, but I’m fairly good at keeping track of things like this, so I trust my own numbers.

CheckYesOrNo.info is a nifty, Twitter-friendly site for yes-or-no poll questions like “Will you participate in Mozilla’s FF3 Download Day June 17th?” (Yes.) Found it when @benrasmusen tweeted a question.

Issuu is a publishing social network. They have some kinks to work out but I see definite potential here. Found it when my cousin tweeted a link.

Twingly is like Technorati reborn, a new, more focused blog search tool. Chris Brogan blogged about it.

LaterLoop helps you store sites to read later. Very popular on Twitter.

TimeToMeet.info is from the same people as LaterLoop, and is a very slick multi-timezone meeting planner.

These are just some of the highlights of this week. I’ve perused quite a few little projects here and there, some good, some bad. I think there are three things that lead to discoveries like this:

Keep your eyes open. When people link something, check it out (or use LaterLoop and do it later).

If you see a link like http://checkyesorno.info/93, try getting rid of the “93″ and visit the site itself. Visit the site, not just the page.

If you like a site, scroll down and look at the footer. Most projects, particularly by independent developers and small companies, have links to the developer’s site, which probably has links to other projects. Look at their other projects. If someone had one good idea and put it together, odds are they’ve had others.

Any more ideas from out there in the blogosphere?

Tags: discover, exploring, find, links, Reading Material, search, Social Networking, twitter, Web 2.0
Posted in Uncategorized

How do you find New Things?

In lieu of a guest post, I’m just going to ask a question:

What is your best source for finding new things on the web?

Do you rely on search engines and find what you need when you need it? Do you check out the sites linked by Twitter pals? Read 200 blogs?

And a follow-up: What’s the coolest thing (blog, app, service, whatever) you’ve found on the web this week?

I’ll post my answer as soon as my wrists heal.

Tags: discover, exploring, find, new, new things, search, Social Networking, Web 2.0
Posted in Uncategorized

Computer-Related Injury

I am attempting to stave off full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome.

I’ll try to line up a guest post but I will be avoiding typing as much as possible for a little while.

Tags: carpal tunnel, injury, My Site, teh suck
Posted in Uncategorized

Help Me Scale

I’ve been reading Eran Hammer-Lahav’s intelligent posts on microblog scalability, and now I’m concerned about my own “microblog” site, Picofiction.

Similar to social networks, social updates, social messaging, social… Like many social web sites—amongst our weaponry…—Picofiction lets you “follow” your favorite authors, displaying all their posts along with yours.

I handle this very naïvely: everything is offloaded to the database. There are three tables involved here, one of users, one of posts, and one of follower/followee bindings.

Here’s the basic structure of this query:

SELECT post_id, post_body, post_date, post_type,
  user_name AS author_name, user_id AS author_id
FROM posts
LEFT JOIN users
ON posts.author_id = users.user_id
WHERE author_id = 'CURRENT_USER'
OR author_id IN (
  (SELECT followed_id
   FROM followers
   WHERE following_id = 'CURRENT_USER')
  )
ORDER BY post_date DESC
LIMIT PAGE_START,20;

Here’s where I need help: this works great on a single database, but it does not scale horizontally.

Since this horizontal scalability is such a hot topic right now, I’m asking for ideas. I’d like to put in the infrastructure before there is a need for it.

Eran points out that caching is not as simple a solution as we’d like to think. What do you cache? How do you keep caches in sync?

Does anyone have experience with MySQL Cluster Servers? It seems like the best way of scaling is to make the process as parallelizable as possible. The database then handles the parallelization, so the less I can do in the program the better, right?

Tags: Back-end, Code, Database, db, load, microblog, MySQL, PHP, Projects, query, scalability, social messaging, subquery, twitter
Posted in Database, MySQL, PHP

Do You “Designed By”?

A debate has cropped up over “designed by” links, those (hopefully) little links a designer puts on a page to take credit and get themselves some traffic and customers.

On the one side, Pat Dryburgh argues word-of-mouth is superior to self-advertising: “If the design is good enough, they will ask my clients, and if they like me enough, then they will tell people about me.”

In rebuttal, Sophia Lucero at wisdump.com claims your “designed by” link should be like a Louis Vuitton logo: “Your brand should never hurt your creations, it should enhance them”.

To me, there is an issue of “ownership” to consider. If I put my name on something, I take responsibility for it as much as credit. My name means “I did this, I’m proud of it, and I want to be associated with it.” I think we’ve all done work we’ve left our names off, because we were rushed or a client demanded changes in spite of our best advice or… well, you get the idea: we weren’t proud of it.

So what do you do? Are you a “designed by” designer? Do you stick to code comments? What if you’re a back-end developer?

Edit: I should link Chris Brogan’s series on personal branding. It definitely applies to this question.

Tags: brand, Code, Design, Marketing, search, seo, web design
Posted in Design