Informed Networker Blog

Informed Networker is proud to announce that we have received a “great” rating (8.0 out 10.0) for our site. We expect this rating to only improve with time as Blogged continues to see the quality of our content and the diversity of our user base increases.

In other news, we squashed a small editorial bug that was hampering our editors efforts to effectively destroy the spam stories that spammers are increasingly throwing at us.

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I doubt many people will notice or miss The Linkup aka. MediaMax aka. Streamload. But I was surprised (somewhat) when I received the email from The Linkup informing me that they were closing down. Not so surprised because of the quality of their service - but because they had been struggling for so long. Why stop now?

Streamload was a fascinating company that allowed individuals to upload files through a web-based interface. It differentiated itself from the competition with high limits - 25 GB - and no file size caps. It rebranded itself as MediaMax and released a software application that had potential. It allowed for uploading/downloading and backups. Unfortunately, the software stagnated for month after month and then the big crash came. A developer wrote code that began chewing through not just unneeded files but also active needed ones. MediaMax never recovered.

At first there was very little communication from MediaMax, then they began blogging but blog entry after blog entry stated only, “We are having difficulties…We are working on them…Bear with us.” Then, finally, MediaMax decided to rebrand yet again - this time to The Linkup. This was when I abandoned all hope for utilizing the service in any useful way. The Linkup abandoned many of MediaMax’s old principles and the distinctives that had made MediaMax so useful - instead choosing to become another run of the mill online storage platform with 2 GB file limits and expensive(r) prices. Whereas MediaMax had offered massive storage accounts to companies for reasonable prices, Linkup was clearly focused on consumers only.

What made the entire scenario more interesting was the relation between these three companies that were actually one and another company - Nirvanix. Nirvanix is currently blossoming and challenging incumbent Amazon in the cloud storage arena, but the relationship between MediaMax and Nirvanix will forever haunt it. With essential original brainpower coming from MediaMax to Nirvanix and the close relationship the two appeared to have (even though Nirvanix refutes any close relationship between the two and suggests that the downturn of the business came after the intellectual powers moved from MediaMax to Nirvanix) - people can’t help but wonder…

Still, I personally would utilize Nirvanix. In fact I’ve spent some time testing out various aspects of their service. Its a pretty nifty service and offers some significant advantages over Amazon AWS S3 - for example no file size limits (this is huge!) and a CIFS NAS application that creates a virtual NAS server that actually utilizes Nirvanix storage. Granted, the CIFS NAS is still in early beta - but its a killer feature if Nirvanix can make it work.

Would I put all my most valuable files up on Nirvanix? Sure, but I’d probably want a copy somewhere else, just in case…maybe even over at Amazon. Of course this is cost prohibitive for any business with significant amounts of file storage. What will really be a killer application is when someone uses an advanced parity algorithm to distribute files across multiple cloud based storage providers allowing any given provider to fail while maintaining data integrity and yet reducing total costs due to storage size on any given storage provider to be minimal over placing all storage on one provider.

Nirvanix has some dark shadows around it. No, its not their fault. But its sort of like when you have a friend who is a little crazy - the reputation rubs off. Maybe thats one reason The Linkup closed their doors? Their continued presence was causing that shadow to reflect on Nirvanix.

Finally, its worth noting that MediaMax suffered from a catastrophic mistake, but the majority of our businesses are not that far from a similar mistake. Just watch the tech. news and the daily catastrophes - whether from without or within. Our architecture is still so frail - just like our own mortality.

Informed Networker is proud of the back-end systems we have created to allow our editors to quickly and efficiently help add quality content while also discarding spam. David Mackey has created a screencast which presents an overview of the various editorial controls currently available. A few of the highlighted technology features include:

• AJAX controls for changing the status of a story.
• AJAX editor for changing the title, tags, category, and description of a story.
• Special editorial queue where stories pulled from an RSS Importer are held until an editor can review and edit as needed.

So we were having an issue with comments and new link submissions taking a few seconds. It was frustrating. Ended up it was caused by an issue between the Akismet PHP class we were using and the Akismet servers. Essentially, the Akismet servers don’t seem to like HTTP1.1 so we’ve reverted to 1.0. This works much better. You should see a significant speed improvement immediately when adding comments or stories.

We are also planning to move to utilizing the Akismet PHP library available at PEAR in the near future. This will give us further Akismet functionality and hoepfully pull out a few more ekes in performance.

We continue development on some new features as well…Hoping to have them out to you all real soon! Also have a demo video of what our back-end editorial interface looks like, working on uploading it to YouTube as I type, should be able to post a link within twenty-four hours (yes, we are uploading via a high-speed connection, its a big file!).

We’ve added some new back-end updates that are pretty exciting. Yes, yes - I know you would rather see front-end updates, but the back-end allow our editors to work more effectively which means better quality stories and more of them!

So what have we been up to? So glad you asked. We’ve recently added new controls for administrators. Previously it was a multi-step process for an editor to change the status of a story - all of this code has been rewritten to utilize AJAX. Now when a story has its status changed it simply disappears from the current page and goes wherever it should (e.g. published, deleted, or discarded).

We also upgraded to the latest version of OpenX, our advertising management platform - but that isn’t all that exciting.

Stay tuned, we’ve got a lot more coming!

I’ve been on the internet for a long time…long enough to remember when, “Don’t open links in a new window” became a cardinal rule and a mortal sin of website design. That said, I was somewhat surprised when users began complaining when the links on Informed Networker took them outside of the site. They had to use the back button to get back, yada yada. Well, it makes sense. Informed Networker readers generally aren’t here just to read one story - they are here to read dozens of stories. They don’t want to have to navigate backwards using the built-in browser button, they just want to open a new window that demonstrates the outside link and when they are done reading close it up and be back at Informed Networker.

I knew that going primarily to a new window architecture would be bad for business, especially since we attempt to attract IT Professionals and many hold the “no new windows” rule as dear as I do. So what was the alternative? Thankfully Mark James had created a beautiful little two window icon in his free Silk Icon set that clearly communicates the idea of a new window/tab opening. We tossed this into the mix, poured a little alt text on top to get our tooltip text and broke all the rules by still utilizing target=”_blank” (yes, yes, we could have used javascript…no we aren’t going to) - and now there is satisfaction for all. If you want click on the text link to see the link opened in the same window, but if you are a power user who doesn’t like using keyboard or mouse shortcuts to open a link in a new window/tab - just click on the little two window icon and away you go.

What do ya think? We know its just another little change…and trust us, our developers are working on more major changes as well…but we want to make sure that while we work on the big stuff we also take time to refine the interface and functionality in the little ways that make your lives easier.

Thanks to Jon Hui and Andrew Vogel for their friendly complaints in this manner that spurred this development.

Its a simple addition, but one we think you will find useful. Previously we provided only a published stories rss feed. Now you can choose specific categories you want to follow. For example, if you are interested in development and the internet - you can subscribe to the rss feed for each, rather than receiving all the content from all the categories. We hope this makes your life a bit simpler!

Informed Networker has been growing…So much so that we’ve added another server to our setup. This allowed us to diversify the roles (web server, sql server, email server, etc.) amongst more machines. This provides us with better back-end management while providing you with faster performance. We look forward to offering even faster performance in the future as well as many additional new features currently in the works.

We are ramping up. Over the last few weeks we have been extremely hard at work. You may notice some minor visual changes since you last visited us…But the real work has been on the back-end. We’ve created automation and editorial controls that utilize advanced parsing and ajax technology to streamline story submission, editing, and general modifications for our editorial staff - and intend to expand the editorial staff significantly over the days to come.

Expect to see fresh stories arriving daily with better summaries and more interaction. Also - expect new features. We’ve still got a bundle in the wings. Many of these at this time are focusing on the back-end - but there are also significant enhancements coming for the front-end as well.

One enhancement just deployed yesterday is anonymous commenting. We are adding blog-like commenting capabilities. Right now you can leave your name and email instead of logging into an account. Within the next several days we’ll also allow you to leave your website. Write your comment, fill out a reCAPTCHA and away you go - no lengthy account registration process. Not that there aren’t advantages to registering - but we do want to make it as simple as possible for individuals to interact with our stories.

We also are continuing our development on a revolutionary new advertising concept that is unobtrusive, useful, and effective. Also note that we added a giving back page where we have begun posting our contributions to the open source community - including our annotated codebase wiki and most recently an ajax mod which allows for inline editing of stories by administrators.

From a systems administration standpoint, things are cooking along as well. With the ramp up in features, stories, and visitors we are starting to see some stress on our current infrastructure and intend to add an additional dedicated MySQL server within the upcoming week.

We continue to work at a fevered pace to bring you the best and greatest. Tonight I deployed a significant amount of new code to the servers. We are still performing testing and will be handling any issues that may arise as we bring this code live. We expect any issues to be minor and we expect major improvements to become visible over the next several days as this new code is put into use. Most of this code is backend only, thus there won’t be noticeable changes in the interface - just more and better stories.

Well, I’d love to stay and chat, but there is work to be done.