Cool, Solr is finally released. It’s a great idea that’s well implemented.
Yearly Archives: 2006
Announcing S3CDNFilter, possibly a cute little idea
We recently had a little bit of success with StyleFeeder which resulted in a truckload of extra traffic coming from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s website ever since they started using StyleFeeder (yes, really… yes, pretty amazing). The sudden burst of extra traffic made me wonder what my next step would be in terms of capacity enhancements.
Traditionally, you’d call up Akamai, get dragged through their OMG-this-is-painful sales process before someone would give you a quote for way more than basic content delivery should cost. But Akamai has great products, so it’s usually worthwhile. But it begs the question: why is the lowest price that I’ve ever seen coming out of Akamai around USD $1500 for 1Mbit worth of content? Why is there not a simple pay-as-you-go service available for anyone with a credit card who is willing to pay $50/month?
I took a look around and the closest thing that I saw was CacheFly. I tried to sign up with them at 8:30PM on a Sunday. Signup failed. I called their tech support number. I was surprised that someone answered, but less surprised that this person knew as much about content delivery networks, DNS and caching as I expect my mother does. It turns out that their service basically gives you an FTP login. You upload content and they push it out on their network, which just seemed really clunky.
Akamai’s basic service involves is simple if you serve your static content from a dedicated hostname like static.whatever.com. If you do that, it’s just a simple DNS change to make static.whatever.com a CNAME for something.g.akamai.com. You tell Akamai where the real location of the content is and the rest is transparent to you. Pretty cool, pretty easy to set up, pretty awful that you are forced to talk to a slow salesperson and pretty annoying that you can’t sign up by yourself and turn it on at 8:30PM on a Sunday.
Step back a few days to a short conversation that I had with Matt MacDonald of PRX about how they’re starting to use Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) to serve up their 800Gb of audio content to the Web. This prompted me to look into S3, at which point I was happy to discover a rather simple and well designed service with some basic support for HTTP 1.1 virtual hosting built right in. So this got me thinking: it’s so close to what I need in a content delivery system.
It’s a good point to establish some differences between S3 and Akamai and other CDNs. Amazon S3 is housed on presumably some kind of high-availability distributed filesystem (which has become unavailable at least once since launch) across several Amazon datacenters. Akamai, by contrast, has thousands of servers located at key points on the Web. They play some fancy tricks with DNS and intelligent routing to give you content from the servers that are closest to your network location. S3 gives you no such guarantee. However, for many needs, serving from S3 will give you the ability to burst pretty well up to levels that most sites can’t. It’s so close to a CDN.
So then I wrote some code and now the process of using Amazon S3 as a source for serving your static content is a lot easier. I’ve posted a java servlet filter called S3CDNFilter that automatically uploads static files to S3 and gives you a application a hook for rewriting your local URLs on a per-asset basis to indicate their new home on S3. It seems to work fine, although it’s in an early stage and certainly will have buglets to work out.
Here’s the code, available for download and fun. It’s licensed with an Apache license.
I have two objectives with this little project: the first is to get Amazon to give me a reverse caching proxy server that hosts content on S3. The second is to get Akamai to give me a pay-as-you-go option for $50/month that I can sign up for myself. May the best company win.
Now, that's fairly funny….
Noelle movie download I was reviewing my daily Technorati feed for StyleFeeder mentions out there in the blogosphere when I found an interesting one that in turn let me to Nabbr.com, specifically their page for adding their bookmarklet.
Here’s the code that Nabbr distributes for adding their bookmarklet.
Um… what’s StyleFeeder doing in Nabbr code? Well, I wrote that code! And it also looks like they’re using the Javascript bookmarklet code that I wrote for StyleFeeder as well. I mean, it’s GPL’d javascript, so they’re not doing anything wrong, but it’s just… an odd start to the day.
KOKOGIAK – Book Search Mashup
Alan Taylor, you rock. Check out Alan’s Book Search Mashup.
Food Blog Awards
If you have a second, nominate Bea for the 2006 Food Blog Awards?
Adventures in Hiring for a Startup
Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent time trying to fill various positions at StyleFeeder. This process has been fairly interesting, so I thought that it would be helpful to others if I wrote about it. First of all, hiring in Boston in 2006 is (a) harder than it was in boomtime in 1999 and (b) easier than it was in 2002, for various reasons. For reference, in 1999, I had to actually change my cell phone number because I was getting around 30 calls per day from recruiters (yes, really). By 2002, I was receiving perhaps one call per month. In 1999, it was normal for candidates to receive 3 offers from various companies. They had choice, they had leverage to negotiate, they could take their time and think the offers over. Contrasted with 2002… well, nobody who had a job was looking for a new one.
One thing that I will hypothesize is that a lot of people who took refuge in large companies during the nuclear winter economy of 2001-2002 may possibly still be stuck in those giants. Some of this may have to do with age. If you graduated from college in 1995 at the age of 22, that means that you’re 33 now. At 33, the chances that you have a spouse, mortgage and kids is a lot higher and that in turn may steer a person away from working at a startup (perceived as “unstable”). Another possible explanation is that the people who you want working in startups in Boston are already doing just that. There are so many startups in Boston these days – it’s really great to see that the energy level has picked up in this regard. VC money is flowing again, companies are hiring, real estate is easy to find and there is no shortage of ideas.
Oh, and Google is in town. Surprisingly, they don’t seem to be as big of a drain on the talent pool as I had originally feared. I’m not sure why that is the case. I thought they were going to suck in pretty much anybody worth hiring.
Anyway, the first position that I was hiring for was a freelance designer. I’d tapped pretty much every designer that I knew personally and none of them were going to work out. So I needed to place an ad. But where? I knew that a posting on Monster.com was going to yield a lot of low-quality applications. Boston.com? But who reads the job postings there?
In the end, I decided to try AuthenticJobs.com (specifically for a certain breed of Web designer) and 37signals’ job board. At the time, AuthenticJobs.com cost $99 and 37signals cost $250. Within hours of posting, I had received materials from a few designers that really stood out from the crowd. In terms of overal numbers, here’s the breakdown:
| Design Job | |||
| Source | Cost | Applicants | Cost / Applicant |
| Authentic Jobs | $100 | 32 | $3.13 |
| 37signals | $250 | 25 | $10 |
By this measure, AuthenticJobs was cheaper and more effective. Judging applicant quality is a hard task, but I would say that the quality of applicants coming from AuthenticJobs was higher than 37signals.
The next position that I posted was for a BizDev/Marketing Executive. This time, I posted on CraigsList, LinkedIn and, once again, 37signals. At the time, CraigsList was free, so that was an easy choice. LinkedIn cost me $95, but I assumed that it was going to be a decent social networking for tech-savvy marketing people and would therefore pay for itself. My logic in selecting 37signals as a posting spot for the marketing job was this: if any marketing people are monitoring 37signals, then they clearly must “get it” and would be, in a way, self qualifying. The breakdown:
| Marketing/BizDev Executive | |||
| Source | Cost | Applicants | Cost / Applicant |
| CraigsList | $0 | 3 | $0 |
| 37signals | $300 | 0 | - |
| $95 | 11 | $8.64 | |
Notice this time that 37signals had raised their price to $300 (it was $250 when I posted the designer job). The quality of the CraigsList respondees was actually pretty decent. I’m not sure what it is about CraigsList, but there’s a certain vibe there that attracts well-educated folks. LinkedIn candidates were also quite good.
The third position that I’m hiring for is a Senior Developer. For this job, I used CraigsList (it was free at the time, but the price has since jumped to $25), LinkedIn (for $95) and 37signals (for $300). For reasons that I cannot fully explain, we have not received a single applicant so far. Partially, I blame the fact that I didn’t change one of the “intelligent defaults” on 37signals’ job posting form, so my developer job has been stuck in the “design” category. They have conveniently ignored my two email requests asking for them to categorize the job into the right place. 37signals seems to have a completely sub-par customer service operation. A $300 job posting should come with some customer support or at least the ability to edit your job after you have posted it.
Based on my experience in spending $850 on 37signals jobs, I definitely won’t be advertising there again. LinkedIn and CraigsList both provide a much nicer overall experience at cheaper rates. AuthenticJobs has recently raised their price to $300, which is a little steep. I guess they’re thinking that they’re providing as good a service as 37signals and that they can get away with it. Perhaps.
Does anybody recommend other ways to find high-quality applicants? I’m eager to hear about your experiences.
Here are the spots that I’m currently looking to fill:
Marketing / Business Development Executive
If you know anybody who might be interested, please point them to the job postings. Thanks!
Google Analytics Blog: Raising your profile
How about you people over at Google Analytics stop adding new features and start fixing the multi-hour long periods in which your product appears to simply lose data?
Here’s a screenshot of traffic on La Tartine Gourmande, Bea’s blog. Flip your stats into an hourly view and you’ll see the same drop off.
So, Google, how about fixing this? It’s not the first time it’s happened.
An unintended consequence of Apple DRM
I use iTunes to manage my music collection which is stored on a Debian Linux file server and accessed via Samba. My entire collection is MP3 files because (a) I don’t like encumbered music and (b) Apple’s DRM files don’t play on my Squeezebox.
When I buy stuff from iTunes, I have to burn the songs to a blank CD and then re-import them to iTunes as MP3 files. I used to use JHymn to do this automatically without having to waste a blank CD, but Apple did something with iTunes, so this solution doesn’t work anymore.
What do I do with the CD after I’ve imported it? I give it to someone, usually a friend if they’re over for dinner or something.
Tell me who this DRM stuff is helping, eh? Because right now it seems like it’s causing me to waste time burning these stupid CDs and guaranteeing that one of my friends get a copy of my latest music.