Category: Web

Tweetrush Is Here

A project I would love to have been more involved with, hopefully I’ll be forgiven for opting out to get married…

Well done to AJ, Grzegorz, James, Slawomir and Walter for getting  their  Tweetrush proof of concept Techcrunched today. I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours with the lads in their lair last week, and there’s been very little doubt in my mind since that this demo of their upcoming Rush Hour engine was going to get slashdotted today. (Although I notice that it is still up!) I only hope I’ll be allowed in the door again to work on future projects with them!

(Special mention to Damien and Pat for helping hands too, I reckon.)

The Planet Bad, StatCounter Good

I was affected by this outage at The Planet last week. Outage is understatement of the month, the server disappeared on Saturday, came back up on Tuesday night, was gone again on Monday morning, and stayed that way until Wednesday. The line of problems was horrendous, and although DR procedures were way off the mark, in truth The Planet had a very unlucky succession of failures the like of which we haven’t seen since… well, since a somewhat similar event in the mocky-ah capital above there on the east coast.

There was an outpouring of screaming and shouting by customers, and you can understand why: two big data floors were offline, which took down dedicated racks, dedicated servers, reseller accounts, businesses and end users. A whole vertical was shouting at them, including people that weren’t even their customers. Me, I didn’t bother, I’ve dealt with them before and I know what they’re like: I moved the last two users I had on a box in H! to a machine in CIX, wiped the box and handed it back to them. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Meanwhile StatCounter was feeling the burn. At least internally. Did they get shouted at? Not really, in fact for the most part they were heaped with praise for their actions and communications. Know why? Because they give a crap about their customers, they talk to them, and it’s obvious in everything they do. The Planet is their diametric opposite — customers come way, way below the bottom line, they’re simply an annoyance that only deserve scripted responses.

If you want to learn about the web business, come away from the YUI docs and put down the Symfony manual, and read the comments on StatCounter’s blog. Then go explore the rest of their site, and their forums, and learn why they got that reaction. That’s how you’ll create a successful web business. If you build it they might come, but they won’t stay unless you run it like Aodhan and his team.

WordPress 2.3.3 Security Update

Get it upgraded folks, particularly if you’re on one of my servers!

WordPress: WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs. If you are interested only in the security fix, download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php. Otherwise, you can get the entire release here.

Also, there is a vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that is being actively exploited right now. If you are using this plugin, please remove it until an update is available.

Since we are talking security, remember to use strong passwords and change them regularly. While you’re updating WP and your plugins, consider refreshing your passwords.

MMM: driverTV

Yes yes yes, Monday is over. What-ever.

Time describes driverTV as a “car shopping site”, but a quick peruse didn’t turn up many shopping options. It would be a great first step for car research though – albeit US-centric – before you move onto the likes of the great Honest John, and dodgy forum threads and red book* valuations. Alternatively, you could simply browse luxobarges like me and think of it as simple car porn.

* It is red book, isn’t it? Blue book sounds familiar too.

AIM in Gmail

Hopefully they plan to add other networks rsn. Generally speaking I hate IM for the same reason I hate the phone, but it can come in handy sometimes and I’d much prefer to do it through Gmail than have to install a client or go to another site like Meebo.

Gmail chat now offers the option to sign in to your AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account to chat with your AIM buddies from Gmail. Your AIM buddies will populate your Contacts list, and are searchable just like your Google Talk contacts.

Details here.