When you write an authentication system with username and password you never display an error like "that password is incorrect", because then the attacker knows that the username is a valid one.
Why does everyone here assume that it's a vast conspiracy when, if they returned everything they had on you, it would be a giant red flag to anyone who was denied that they were being explicitly monitored?
The only way to guarantee secrecy for records that should rightfully be secret (whether you agree with the collection methods or not) is to deny everyone's request.
There is clearly a niche for these small "CMS" tools, but let's be real about what these CMSes are generally not offering: User authentication, localization, custom field indexing, internal search...
Yes, it "manages content", thus is technically a "CMS". But at the level of many of these tools, so is my file system. At best, these tools are useful automated markdown renderers.
This seems especially difficult for a web-based model, and I've personally questioned why anyone would want SaaS when:
1. The company already pays for and supports infrastructure.
2. The company already has a development/IT department that can support an installed product.
3. Viable Open Source alternatives (often using open standards) exist and can be tailored specifically to the company's business needs, either by the in-house team or by eager contractors.
It seems to me that the majority of SaaS providers don't have a way to make their data interoperable with their competitors' products and don't have a way to tailor their product to the specific needs of the business. Worse, there is an impression that SaaS services will offer support better than having someone internal to the company learn an installed or custom tool, when the reality is that many SaaS companies throw up a Get Satisfaction page and call it a day.
To me, a better SaaS sales pitch would include a few key points:
1. Describe the way that the company's data can be taken elsewhere and how well it will work. ("If you decide to cancel, you can push this button and drop the downloaded data directly into X-competitor's product, but we hope to impress you enough with our offering that you never need to do that.")
2. Describe the concrete benefits of a recurring payment over a one-time or per-upgrade fee. ("We are constantly making improvements and refinements to the product based on real client use. Here is a list of the last two iterations of updates, which happened on our regularly scheduled update cycle of X weeks/months.")
3. Describe the specific support and technical infrastructure that the SaaS provides that the company would have trouble or lag time implementing themselves. ("We constantly adjust our infrastructure to your needs, implementing load balancing, reporting, localization, etc. Our techs are on-call via phone/VoIP for your support issues during our regular business hours if there are any issues.")
I'm not suggesting that SaaS isn't a viable business model. I merely posit that the real and valid objections purchasers may have to locking themselves into a perpetual SaaS contract have not been addressed within this post, and are quite common with SaaS products in general. Rephrasing how you present the contract may sell better, but it doesn't change what you're offering.
I used to work in a large company with internal IT that also used quite a few SaaS providers. To your point #1, yes the providers had to provide up front how they would get our data out if we wanted to switch. They didn't have to switch it, but provide the data in a typical format (CSV, tab delimited, etc...).
Why we used SaaS was a mix of we didn't want to find and internalize the knowledge of having to do it ourselves (think payroll complexities) and we liked the flexibility of easily scaling up and down the users.
What SaaS allowed us to do was focus our IT on items that added direct business value and not commodity items like payroll.
This is exactly what I was wondering. If your SaaS pitch fails because people are multiplying costs out as if they were fixed and are worried about existential risk/switching costs then either don't sell to them or sell up exactly (1-3).
I—for one—love this line when you can afford it: "we have n engineers full time on this project so you can't possibly have an internal product that grows as quickly".
> I've personally questioned why anyone would want SaaS when:
> 1. The company already pays for and supports infrastructure.
> 2. The company already has a development/IT department that can support an installed product.
Because adopting a SaaS offering instead means the company can greatly reduce the need for (or entirely get rid of) the infrastructure and staff which both cost exponentially more.
Be careful about making this argument - the people whose job you're trying to eliminate might be the people who are making the decision. A better argument, if it applies, is that you offering reduces non-core work, allowing staff and resources to be focused on core work. Any company that has IT staff will likely benefit from continuing to have that staff, just focused more on value-add activities rather than chores.
Sometimes the IT department has more important things to work on. If the company makes "widgets", then it's usually better for their IT department to be working on something to make their widget making more competitive (faster, cheaper, better, whatever). So they "outsource" payroll, other HR and whatever else doesn't directly benefit "widget" making.
What is of interest to me in this crowdfunding of celebrity projects is that it gives the impression that crowdfunding could be a way to "solve" the general issue of content only coming from a select few media outlets without it actually doing so. Without the popularity - gained by being part of those initial big-media enterprises - of some of the stars that are able to draw in that funding, there's no similarly easy way for a good grassroots project to get the level of funding they would need for a competitive project.
I equate popular people/companies using Kickstarter to promote and fund their next project to retailers selling products directly on eBay. Yeah, it's viable, has long since drowned out the small guy with something useful to sell, which seemed like the whole point of eBay to me.
One of the major problems with specifically web-based television and movies is that they just aren't delivering the revenue that conventional media can, by a huge margin. One of the reasons why such projects are possible at all today is that the creators call in a lot of favors from their friends (actors, editors, techs, etc.) and get them to work at minimal rates. But that's not a very sustainable model.
Perhaps with crowd funding projects that then release in more conventional ways (e.g. DVD, netflix, etc.) it'll be possible to solve both ends of this problem. It'll be interesting to see how everything works out.
Anyway, I've been surprised at the absence of anyone trying to either coopt the popularity of web video and such-like or to try to make money on it as a business partner. For example, why isn't there a production studio which concentrates on crowd funded movies? It took Zach Braff seeing the popularity of the Veronica Mars kickstarter to have the idea to do the same thing, imagine if there was a group out there catering to artists with projects they want to fund. Apply a little bit of polish, experience with how to formulate a good kickstarter campaign, select reward levels appropriately, help with fulfillment, help with legal issues, help with distribution, take a cut of the profits.
why isn't there a production studio which concentrates on crowd funded movies?
What you're describing is a movie producer, and as these appear in the Kickstarter space - as they are apparently doing now - I'd expect them to be essentially the same people that have been producing movies for the previous century.
The "conventional media", which is to say "the media", have the cameras and the lights. They have the theater-chain contracts and the distribution contracts. They have the agents' phone numbers and the union contracts and the favorite-son politicians and the sound stages within driving distance of your favorite actor's home. They know how to advertise and they have the lawyers and accountants.
And today's movie producers have connections to all of these things. Acquiring these connections is the hard part. Learning to put up a Kickstarter campaign is easy by comparison.
Kickstarter can change the shape of the "development" phase of movies, by giving producers (and writers or actors who want to self-produce) an alternative source of seed money and a way to cheaply drum up and demonstrate fan enthusiasm in advance of the product. But it will swiftly be incorporated into the existing media infrastructure, just as, say, the San Diego Comicon was.
I was disappointed by this headline. After resetting my Evernote password this morning, I was looking forward to reading about a new technique that would allow me to avoid password resets in the future. Oh, well.
Is anyone working on such a thing?
(While I'm thinking of it, wordpress.com's password reset should be shot. I get several emails a day because it allows resets by username instead of email or username+email. This whole password issue needs some better minds assigned to it.)
A more sensible rule: If I'm wearing headphones in/over both ears, it's possible I can't hear you, so you might want to make sure you have my attention before you talk to me from behind for ten minutes then get upset when I don't respond. Actually, forget the headphone part of that rule.
Properly indented code is like properly layered design graphics. It should be a habit such that you're unconsciously doing it all the time, regardless of whether you're otherwise doing things "right" or taking shortcuts to be "good enough for now".
Of course. There are differing levels of perfection, however. For example, something I despise is when, somehow, spaces are left at the end of a line by hasty colleagues, e.g:
"someFunction(); "
Their existence doesn't damage maintainability, performance or code readability - yet to me it feels wrong and I can't stand it.
Of course it damages maintainability when moving the cursor around becomes erratic. Your colleagues should probably configure their editors properly to remove trailing whitespace.
To be sure, it makes sense to ship over making everything perfect under the hood. But to many who would read this post, it's granting implicit permission to write code that is utter drek. They hear you offering consent to make code that "just works" over actually giving thought to how users will ultimately use the code or how future coders will maintain and augment the project's codebase. Most developers I've met can't evaluate what "good enough" code is, and shouldn't be given license to release merely working code.
As a person who has spent the bulk of his career now cleaning up other people's lousy code and fighting technical debt, I would ask you to please stop telling other people that it's ok to ship code that, in reality, does suck.
Thanks for response. I did't said that code should be awful, sure you should control code quality, to be maintainable. I mostly talked that premature optimizations and rewriting from scratch is bad.
First, let me say this: I love what you've done with the Ghost design. I think it's clean and useful. More on this below...
I am one of the early contributors to WordPress (you'll see my name on wp.org's About page near the bottom), and one of the founders of the Habari Project. We started the Habari Project for many explicit reasons, but in part because the curators of the project (Automattic) were not behaving in a way that we felt was beneficial to the community they had begat. So let me tell you a little about our project:
Not only is the Habari Project an entirely Open Source platform, but it recognizes participants in the project appropriately based on their contributions, something that I did not observe during my tenure working on WordPress.
Habari employs the Apache Software License, which is more permissive than WordPress' GPL. Want to develop a plugin or theme? Is the code tainted by the GPL? In WordPress, I don't really know for sure what parts can be redistributed, if any. In Habari, you can sell your themes and plugins for profit if you want to, or contribute them back to the community -- most themes and plugins so far have been.
The passion of the Habari community for producing good, documented code has (in my mind) been one of the driving forces behind WordPress' "recent" adoption of similar policies. The quality and friendly tone of assistance I get from people who know about Habari has been consistently orders of magnitude better than anything I've seen come out of WordPress, which is a characteristic that everyone working on Habari strives to maintain in the project. One of our guiding principles has been to be a project that is useful for web development education; We've seen a lot of people join our project and learn how to code well, both in the method they use and in the collaborative environment our development often lives in.
We've accepted a policy of keeping up with as current a deployment of technology and standards as our core users can stand. We recently adopted a PHP 5.3 minimum version, and I'm pushing hard to take that to 5.4. Habari simply does not run on PHP 4, and never will because it's no longer secure. We code for HTML(5). We're using CSS3. Our roadmap (admittedly difficult to find online) includes PSR-0 and namespace adoption to more easily integrate with vendor libraries. The use of current technology and techniques is really good for developers, and a refreshing change from projects that insist on supporting every old (insecure) server architecture out there.
And I'm currently making a living (yes, paying the mortgage) deploying Habari as a CMS for clients. It is viable. It is open source.
I know first hand how long it takes to build a working product with a small community. We are admittedly behind in our implementations of some features that WordPress was able to steam ahead with due to their larger community. There are also non-dev areas like marketing where we could use some work. We've been trying (albeit weakly) to lure those kind of contributors to the project.
We had a talented designer help us with our current admin design, and one of the things people comment on most about it is how it's not as cluttered with st as WP's. I like the design you've used in Ghost because it's similar to ours, yet modernizes, and I think our community would like it, too. We've been talking heatedly about a new admin design for our next release...
Habari may not be the thing for you, but I do encourage you to take a look, visit our IRC channel on freenode, and take from it what you can. If you still want to try to bend a WordPress fork, I'm at least interested in the story of your effort and struggle. And if you want to chat about why we started over (though I think it's obvious, maybe it's not to everyone else) instead of forking, or why a new project with a handful of addons (compared to a competitor) can still be a contender, I'm happy to chat. Here we are: http://habariproject.org/
I looked at the code, installed a test site and read the Wiki. Is this project on a down low at the moment with only 19 commits and low activity since late last year ?
Also, when you mention that you manage to pay the bills with development of habari powered sites, do you draw from a community need for habari developers or are these clients that you persuade to use habari ? I'm curious about the overall community and where it's going.
In my work, clients mostly need a site built to perform a specific function, and if Habari fits that task, I use it. There isn't an explicit demand for Habari developers, but there is a high demand for sites that Habari is suited to produce, which overlaps a bit with WordPress' capabilities.
As others mentioned, the main habari/habari repo commit count is low because the main development doesn't happen there, but in a submodule'd repo, habari/system. The purpose of this is to allow you to easily fork the main repo to add your own plugins and themes to it, while the submodule continues to pull from the system repo. It's very beneficial from a maintenance standpoint.
I'm not sure how to explain the community. My involvement has been nothing but beneficial for me, and it has been a similar experience for the people I know the community has touched. Development has been reasonably continuous, as you can see here: http://www.ohloh.net/p/habari
Is there an explanation online about how a network that only has 11k users is worth $50 per year? I can almost see paying that much for the volume of users on Twitter. Almost. The value of a network that is aligned with users over advertisers is clear, but where is the value in such a small network? (This isn't a dig, but genuine curiosity.)
I would pay one thousand dollars a year to join a social network of only twenty people… if they were the right twenty people.
(And they actually used the network. That's always the trick. Renting the venue is easy, inviting the people is easy, but will they actually show up?)
As someone on App.net itself was pointing out yesterday, the current vibe is basically that of an industry conference: A bunch of people with vaguely-aligned interests hang around in a room swapping small talk. Such conferences are much more valuable in person than online, of course, but in person they're worth hundreds to thousands of dollars for a few days. $50 per year is a steal.
But, again, the people you want to talk with have to show up. We shall see how the conversation evolves.
But here's the thing -- will the twenty people you want on your perfect network be willing to pay $50/year to be on it and make your network perfect?
Bear in mind that each of them has 20 people they want on THEIR perfect network.
"The internet treats cost as damage and routes around it."
I think the key trick would be creating a "free" network that lets you pay (a very small amount) for key niceness, e.g. freedom from ads and spam. Even better, take an existing free service and piggyback a paid service on top of it that adds useful value. (I'm thinking here of email where you pay $0.01 to send a message per Bill Gates's excellent idea for eliminating most spam.)
Out of curiosity, what are the right 20 people for you? All the people I can think of are already on Twitter, Facebook or G+...and I don't see them talking to me more because I'm on App.net.
Personally I do not like the $50 price, I will not be backing app.net and I will never use one of the networks running on the app.net platform, because as ANYONE is able to build basically anything on top of the platform without actually having anyone forcing them to continue keeping their service alive, expect users and there exist ton of companies and people "Me included" who are ready to take advantage of users.
I did not back diaspora and I knew they will fail even though I knew their idea was awesome. I also think app.net or any of the networks running on the platform will never become the next Twitter or Facebook. Diaspora idea was nice, because it allowed you to control your own data by running your ow instance, but app.net wants to basically control everyone's data with the message stream interface.
I will stay slave of Facebook until someone can actually offer me better user experience or I will build my own. I also require that there is no chance of the company going under and fail. I do not accept the founders word for it, because he might have other secret plans like selling the company engineers to some big company after they get enough traction in the market.
I do not buy a product because of the company's words, even if they sound pleasing. I will buy a product if I need it.
Why does everyone here assume that it's a vast conspiracy when, if they returned everything they had on you, it would be a giant red flag to anyone who was denied that they were being explicitly monitored?
The only way to guarantee secrecy for records that should rightfully be secret (whether you agree with the collection methods or not) is to deny everyone's request.