I have been a Planet GNOME blogger for almost three years now. Every post has been a pleasure. I learned some truly odd and interesting things, like how to strangely pass parameter in C and how the kernel reads shebangs.

For over two years PGO has put up with my oddities, like buying AskJeevesMom.com and writing poems about Mars, and discussing interplanetary CDNs. I never received warnings to stay on topic or to get my act together, but I can’t say I never feared it. All those fears were unfounded. The GNOME community is the most friendly and welcoming online community I know. #gnome-hackers was my home as a teenager and I don’t think I heard a dirty word once. The GNOME community simply rocks.

Knowing that my posts end up on PGO has always made blogging seem like a bold and glorious undertaking, though I felt a midget among giants. My posts end up on the same page where HP blogs and Mark Shuttleworth announces and incredible kernel hackers post all sorts of things I don’t understand, but maybe one day will.

Tonight I’m saying goodbye because in three weeks my blog will be removed from PGO and I support that decision.

You see, my blog was once about GNOME and Linux. When I was added to PGO in 2009, I was a new and passionate GNOME user who blogged about Zeitgeist. Today I use OS X and occasionally GNOME 2. I used to be passionate about FOSS, but nowadays I’m a student and I’m just happy if I eat two meals a day, preferably with a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice, assuming that isn’t over-budget, but of course it always is.

I’m not going to apply for GNOME membership because I don’t deserve it. There are great hackers who hold that badge and dedicate their time to making GNOME and the GNOME community as amazing as they are. I’m not one of them, but maybe I will be when I grow up, if I’m not too grown up already.

It has been a pleasure. If you want to follow me, subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed, or follow @aantn or nyellin on reddit, or plus me, or even just email me and ask me to send emails back occasionally (aantny at gmail). Do people still use RSS? I still use email. You can even send me an old fashioned letter with a cookie inside, but you’ll have to email me for my address and I can’t promise to eat the cookie. Okay, I wont eat it. But I’ll stay in touch and hopefully some of you will too.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

On Tuesday, I released Politician Market. I brought it online, posted to Hacker News, and went to take a shower. 15 minutes later, I’m wearing a towel when I notice that Politician Market is #1 on HN and the server is melting. 12 requests per second. Gosh. I spent the next hour coding in underpants only. My roommate walked in with family members in the middle. He just pointed, said something with the word “roommate”, and walked out.

I wanted Politician Market to be entirely static site, so I used JotForm for signups. There were so many sign-ups that I crashed JotForm’s servers after only 10 minutes and had to move the sign-up form to Google Docs.

Signups and Conversions

Conversion tip: If you want to optimize sign-ups, don’t use  an external service. Sign-ups stopped almost entirely after moving to Google Docs. (I received only 40 signups after the move.) If you want to gain feedback, do place a feedback form on the homepage and you’ll get plenty of feedback.

12,000 uniques and 4 hours later, Politician Market mysteriously disappeared from the homepage and traffic started to subside. Some time before then, I had to disable the contact form entirely because I was about to overrun my JotForm quota. Despite disabling the form, people kept submitting it, often blank. (A browser bug?) At that point, I changed the form’s action to “#” and added an overlay (see below), but people kept submitting the damn form. My brother told me that he wrote me a long message in the contact form, because he was convinced that it really did get sent after all. What must you do for people to believe you?

Another conversion tip: Adding social sharing buttons seems to matter. There were 12,000 hits while we were on HN for four hours. After pg killed the submission, the long tail brought (and is still bringing) another 2k. If you add sharing buttons, make sure to include Google Plus. The break down was 259 shares on Twitter, 40 on Google Plus, and a bunch on Facebook. (For an unknown reason, Facebook wont show me the stats anymore.)

I didn’t have time to A/B test, but conversion rates seemed to rocket when I placed annoying sharing links so far up that they pushed content below the fold. I hated that, so I soon reverted the changes. (Startup idea: I wish I could run automatic A/B tests by including a javascript file that would hash the page, check with a 3rd party server to see if it changed, and provide conversion data when I’m cowboy coding. Create that and I will pay a one time $10 fee for the service.)

For absolutely no reason, I asked for phone numbers in the signup form. About 30% of all sign-ups included them.

Avoid AppEngine Like the Plague

I originally wanted to host on S3, but it wouldn’t accept my credit card so I used AppEngine and static-app-engine-hoster. Don’t do that. There is no caching and you lose all the benefits of a static site. I wasn’t expecting so many hits, so I didn’t think this through.

More on AppEngine: Deployment is easy, but payment sucks. AppEngine makes you pay per-week, so if you want to use $10 a day, you have to deposite at least $70. (Slimeballs.) AppEngine has absolutely no support for paying customers. I sent two emails about urgent issues and never heard back. Avoid AppEngine like the plague.

Publicizing

I tried publicizing Politician Market on Reddit, Slashdot, and Digg. It almost took off on Reddit, but Slashdot ignored it despite votes on the Firehose submission and Digg was a laughable waste of time. (What they say about Digg is correct: If you aren’t part of the oligarchy you might as well submit the link to /dev/null.) I emailed a few tech and political bloggers. Most of them ignored me, but some had incredibly kind words and published a link. Do have the chutzpa to email bloggers.

This is the second launch I have done. Third time ice cream. Does anyone know where that weird Israeli saying comes from?

Happy holidays, everyone!

I’m off for Hanukah and I want to donate a few holiday hours to a charitable project. Do you know of a good cause that could use a C hacker or independent Python web developer? Let me know and I’ll donate four hours tomorrow night, with the goal of continuing to help out during the new year.

Are you a coder yourself? Can you pledge the same? Send me an email and we will code for good tomorrow.

Update: Join us in #holidayhack on Freenode!

I decided to learn Ruby, so I present my first experiment in a new language: Termbrot!

Feel free to fork.

I decided to learn Ruby, so I present my first experiment in a new language: Termbrot!

Termbrot iterates over points in the complex plane, animating the image as it discards points from the Mandelbrot set. Get it on GitHub.

I didn’t want to comment on SOPA. I didn’t think it was my place to comment on SOPA, considering that I have been abroad for the past 5 years. But my hand is forced. If I had posted a month ago, I would have included a stupid unmotivational poster about incompetency and ended the post there. After all, SOPA isn’t going to actually pass. That type of thing doesn’t happen in America…

From the Washington Post:

Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and the Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings were on.

It’s exactly as we feared. For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him.

“I’m not a nerd,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D- Calif.). “I aspire to be a nerd.”

“I’m a nerd,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”

This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like “server” and “service” when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.

… There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything. This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this.

Jimmy Wales, I dontated to the Wikipedia foundation last month. Please black-out Wikipedia in America and let visitors call their representatives. It’s not enough to make a statement. Wikipedia has chance of raising public awareness and fixing this.

I hate it when Google auto-corrects my searches without telling me.

I didn’t search for Magic or hotkeys. It’s okay to auto-correct, but give me an undo link.

Tonight something incredible happened: I asked Emacs to solve my physics homework and it couldn’t. If you think Emacs can do everything, think again: there is no (require ‘physics). Go solve assignments yourself.

You might be laughing, but this no joke. In the process of coding and writing fiction, I have canoodled Emacs into unzipping files, trailing log files, displaying inline latex previews in org-mode, disassembling java classes, and converting variable names between CamelCase and c_style. My Emacs also commits to git and ClearCase, displays a minimap, looks up synonyms online, browses local files, browses the web, reads my emails, plays typing games with me, and provides a more vimmy vim than vim itself. Hell, Emacs can even play chess.

I didn’t produce the above list from thin air. I looked in my .emacs and reviewed what Emacs has done for me lately. If Emacs can do all that – and I hear it can provide psychotherapy services over irc – then Emacs should be able to solve my physics assignments. Go figure.

(Now, supposing you aren’t an Emacs user, don’t you think it’s time you found out what Glorious Emacs can do for you?)

Update: Thank you. I wasn’t expecting so many comments, let alone so much excellent advice! I’m working out a better workflow and will reply to individual comments when I have the time.

It would seem that I have 133 tabs open in Firefox (Aurora), and that number was obtained after an intensive tab-closing session. There are no duplicates in the list, as I use Pentadactyl to switch tabs by searching titles.

I need your help.

The problem: Firefox is starting to slow, but I can’t just call a tabocalypse – most of the tabs contain unread information that I need now or will need in the next few days. Bookmarking has helped me avert similar crisises in the past, but it just isn’t fast enough. I have 2564 bookmarks in delicous and at least a hundred important bookmarks in org-mode, but tagging and sorting unread links takes way too long.

So: How do you deal with information overload? If you rely on Google to find all old information, is that sufficient? Are org-mode capture templates a fast solution? And, most importantly, are there Firefox extensions that transparently offload old tabs to disk, or do away altogether with the distinction between open tabs and recently visited sites?

Please help. Thanks, Natan.

Earlier, I ranted about the poor quality of answers on Yahoo Answers. In 2006, information on Yahoo Answers was of higher quality, and the site was hailed by TechCrunch as Yahoo’s long term strategy for overtaking Google:

Yahoo earlier this year oddly admitted that it’s not their goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. “We would be very happy to maintain our market share,” CFO Susan Decker told Bloomberg… I think that they decided to lose the algorithmic keyword search battle and focus their resources elsewhere in order to win the search “market share” war…

Yahoo! is sensibly looking change the battle ground by providing a different type of search, one not based on complex mathematical algorithms but one that could answer questions like “how will mankind save the planet?” Putting this question into Google resulted in no search results being returned and yet you could pose the very same question on Yahoo! Answers and would probably get a few hundred answers if you were not famous and several thousand if you were.

What went wrong?

If you read Forbes, you may remember a 2010 article, titled Stop Focusing on Your Core Business, which suggested that Yahoo had failed because they couldn’t move fast or enter new markets. I can’t understand how anyone can think that, considering that even this run-on sentence only covers 25% of the 72 businesses that Yahoo has ever been involved in. Rather, Yahoo’s mistake was utter incompetency and a chronic lack of focus. They focused on width over depth, and they lost everywhere as a result. (StackOverflow is the counter example: They focused on community and quality, and the resultant community is indisputably excellent.)

If you follow Hacker News, you surely know the most common advice given to startups: pivot. Pivoting is swell, but here is a more fundamental lemma that Yahoo would do well to study: Don’t make half-assed attempts.

A search for the word “pivot” on Hacker News returns 1,923 results, a search for “core business” only 594. That’s a shame. Google succeeded because they knew their core business was search, and they provided the best damn search results anywhere. If you’re creating a startup, or writing a piece of software, you should focus on competency in the narrow problem space you choose. There may eventually come a time to expand -  hell, if you’re there, you shouldn’t be reading this blog post – and note that most areas Google expanded to were related to selling ads (Gmail, Google Maps) or improving search results (Google Plus). They always focused on consumer problems and provided solutions that were better for consumers.

If you read until here, you should try Freeversation, my new take on online anonymity. With Freeversation, you can have private and anonymous conversations with friends and colleagues. You always know who you are speaking to, but not who said what. We have no plans to offer any unrelated services