Just for the record, I beat Oprah to it by at least a day.

I get the point already and I’m having fun.

You can find me here http://twitter.com/berkun

Posted in News, this site | 10 Comments »

I’m self aware enough to know that I’m fond of picking on things. Why X sucks, The myths about Y, etc. Lots of other people do this too and the thing I wonder about is why.

It’s much easier to critique and criticize than it is to make things. There’s no doubt about that.

For example, lets say we have two essays:

A) What makes managers great

B) Why managers make us miserable

Somehow the confession, by writer B, that there is something wrong and they’re going to talk about it strikes me as more honest than writer A. Writer A sounds like an idiot. A Pollyanna. He sounds like someone who thinks everything is great and wonderful and probably has no insight as to why. Whereas Writer B, although he might describe some horror stories, there is a chance she will turn the misery around and explain how you can avoid the misery, and become a good or great manager.

I’m from NYC, and people from NYC are prone to this sort of cynical bias. Simply put, if I don’t see you call bullshit on something, I fear you don’t know how. Or you don’t ever smell it anywhere.

I do realize this is kind of strange and can get in the way, so I do my best to prevent this.  But since you folks are here and read the things I write, I wonder what you think. So let me know.

Posted in On writing, this site | 8 Comments »

I was out and about today, and got home to find email from a friend telling me my site was down (Thx Livia). Hmmm. Ok. Checked it out, and they’re right.

So I check the dreamhost status site, and there’s nothing for today. Ok, so I contact dreamhost directly. I hear back quickly.

I’m told they suspect there is a script running on my site that used too much memory, shutting down the entire site. I’m sent a reference for how to investigate this myself to figure out what might be the cause.

Meanwhile. My site is still down.

I say WTF. I can’t fix this if I can’t get to my site. And moreso, why not charge me $50 or whatever you want for going over my memory limit, a fee I’d gladly pay, instead of HAVING MY SITE DOWN AN ENTIRE DAY.

I ask them to temporarily bump my memory to get the site up, which they thankfully do, and fix the likely cause of the problem (a plugin I didn’t update when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7).

Lessons:

1. Always inform customers if you are turning their service off, regardless of the reason. I should not need a friend to let me know, or be surprised on my own, even if I’m to blame for the reason the site is down. Always notify me when, and if possible before, you turn off what I’m paying for.
2. It’s better customer service to charge extra for doing the right thing, and keeping *my customers* out of it by loaning me more memory. It’s done for bandwidth, for overdraft charges at the bank, why not for memory usage? Charge me whatever you want - just don’t ever let my site go down.

Anyway, end of story is I’m sorry the site was down. And end of the line I’m to blame. Dreamhost has always been a mixed bag of good and bad. They suggested their PS service, which does allow for variable memory use at a price, which I’ll check out.

Posted in rant, this site | 8 Comments »

For a few hours today my nice little RSS Feed, with close to 20k subscribers, was replaced by a pile of ads for some record label called True Tiger Recordings.

As much as I often consider ditching the whole writing/speaking career to be a lead singer in a rock band, that’s not what happened today.

A few kind folks, Peter, Kirill, Dave, Adam, Neil, Greg, Meh (hey, that’s the name you left) - let me know almost immediately that something strange was up, and as I don’t check my own RSS Feed often, and they saw it well before I did. Thanks guys, I’m in your debt.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in this site | 4 Comments »

I’ve finally had enough of dealing with dreamhost. Love their features, but man, does stuff go down often. And today, not for the first time, all incoming email is bouncing. Just plain unacceptable.

I’m looking for a new webhost and could use recommendations. It doesn’t seem there is a decent source of web host reviews, and even the best i’ve found is thin - so I’ll hoping for advice from you folks, as you actually might care to see this site nice, stable and healthy.

My needs:

- I’m willing to pay more for reliability and decent support.
- Wordpress is my life. Prefer hosts that understand WP, or offers it by default.
- Need medium level bandwidth support.
- Easy non-geek management a plus. I’m smart, but want to spend as little time in shell/Unix as possible.

I’d also love to find a website transfer service that, for a fee, moves all of my domains and stuff from one host to another. Am I in fantasy land?

Suggestions much appreciated - Cheers.

Posted in this site | 30 Comments »

My webhost is having all sorts of problems today, and all of my email is down. Fun! If you’re email bounced, or you need to reach me, leave a comment. Should be resolved by the end of the day.

Posted in this site | No Comments »

A few weeks ago I posted about a comment lottery, an experiment in rewarding participation on the site - here are the randomly chosen winners:

Steve Myers
Kristi P
JKash
Elaine Nelson
James Shrenk
Keith Instone
Rob Grady

If you won, you should have an e-mail in your inbox asking for your address :)

Posted in Myths of Innovation, this site | 3 Comments »

I locked down the forums recently on the basic principle that if takes more time to maintain and de-spam something than to actually use it, something is very wrong.

So I’m looking to replace phpbb with something more HTML/CSS friendly, that has less-evil UI for maintenance, and post 1995 spam handling, let me know. I’m happy to pay for it if it does what I need.

Posted in this site | 14 Comments »