27Jan / 2012

Startup Fever

It’s time for a new chapter.

I’ve been a terribly inconsistent writer on MyOwnPirateRadio over the years. I’ve written sporadically. I’ve written snotty rants, mind-numbing trivia, and esoteric technology crib notes. I’ve written about completely random and unrelated topics. In short, I’ve written so poorly that only my most patient, masochistic, and excitement-starved readers are still around. (Hi, mom! Oh, wait, she doesn’t have an internet connection.) So, dear reader(s), I’m sorry. I apologize. I’ve been a shit.

But I do want to write — it makes me happy — and so I’m going to start again.

I will write about one topic:

Life trying to get startups off the ground.

This will not be “How I succeeded at getting my startup off the ground”, or “My genius recipe for gobsmacking success in startup life”, or, ”How I built and sold my company for $10M in just 3 months with only 8 toothpicks, a pair of tweezers, and a tenth of my staggeringly massive brainpower, bitch”. This is not one of those blogs. Gloating will be kept to an absolute minimum. I intend to write more in the vein of “How I’ve worked like crazy on too many projects at once for 5+ years with little to show for it except a much smaller bank account, a bunch of hard-earned lessons, and a smug sense of satisfaction. Please send help.”.

I will write as openly and honestly as I can.

I will try really hard to write regularly, at least once a week.

I will spend no more than 30 minutes writing a post.

I will avoid the temptation to portray this lifestyle as glamorous. ‘Cuz it ain’t. Read me?

And I want to feel good about doing this. I have a lot of “priority guilt”… why write blog posts when I should be writing code, helping out at home, doing some exercise, or becoming a better husband and dad? I also fear the embarassment of screwing up in public. But I’ve come to grips with a few realities: I need to write; my privacy is largely an illusion anyway; and I’m much less interesting to everyone else than I like to think.

I’ve put off starting this for a very long time now, so I’d better post this before I manage to stop myself again.

So here goes: Startup Fever. Wish me luck.

P.S. How Canadian of me, to start off with an apology. Represent!

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01Jan / 2012

Getting Heroku Cedar and Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline to Play Nicely Together

I recently migrated a Ruby on Rails 3.1 app from the Heroku Bamboo stack to Heroku Cedar. If you’re doing the same, here are a few notes to help avoid snags on getting the Rails Asset Pipeline working efficiently.

Unlike Bamboo, Cedar does not offer Varnish as a reverse proxy cache, nor does it automatically gzip content. You need to do it yourself. Heroku recommends:

  1. Use memcached, with Dalli as the memcached client. Make sure to follow the Rails 3 section.
  2. Use Rack::Cache as a substitute for Varnish. Heroku links to this article which explains how to integrate Heroku with Rack::Cache. I couldn’t get it to work, so I hunted around and pieced together the folllowing riff.
In your runtime environment file (e.g. production.rb), add this:
require 'rack-cache'
My::Application.configure do
...
  # Enable Rack::Cache
  config.middleware.use Rack::Cache,
   :metastore => "memcached://#{ENV['MEMCACHE_SERVERS']}/meta",
   :entitystore => "memcached://#{ENV['MEMCACHE_SERVERS']}/body"

You can also set HTTP headers in production.rb as follows. (3600 is an example value, make this whatever you want.)

# Add HTTP headers to cache static assets for an hour
config.static_cache_control = "public, max-age=3600"

And you may want to add this to your config.ru to get gzip working:

use Rack::Deflater

References:

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13Sep / 2011

Pressly Makes Sense

Hey Jeff and Peter,

I just finished watching the videos of you launching Pressly at TechCrunch Disrupt. Well done. You and your team should be really proud of what you’ve achieved.

I wish you’d been given more opportunity to elaborate on your strategy to win. Instead you had to spend most of the Q&A time defending Pressly’s raison d’etre to Dustin Moskovitz et. al. That was unfortunate; deck stacked against you. But you did a nice job staying the high road and giving solid answers to the skeptical questions.

Jeff, I loved your comment about publishers being great at telling stories, and not so great at building technology innovations to deliver those stories (in compelling new ways, with compelling profitability). It’s true. And it’s good, I think, that Pressly is joining a cadre of other players in this same space. Existence of multiple players is proof that the market is ready. And publishers need lots of options right now, especially ones that let them do fast, cheap experiments. Pressly can help them do that.

I suppose controversy-seekers could frame this as “walled garden versus open web, round 2″. That was my very first thought after watching the video. But that isn’t really the case, is it? Neither the iPad/App Store ecosystem nor HTML is going away anytime soon. There will be multiple winners in this market, with multiple technology bets. Consumers will buy many different kinds of devices, and consume content in many different places and ways. It’s probably more accurate to compare Pressly’s space to the blogging services market back when it was just getting going: Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, and so on. Lots of experimentation and diversity, with consolidation down the road.

My biggest takeaway on all this is that Pressly makes a lot of sense from a publisher’s point of view. Publishers are losing sleep over how to follow their audiences to digital devices without abandoning all the assets they hold dear: their brand, destination websites, exclusive content, and UX. And with limited capital and time/runway remaining for technology investment (or investment of any kind) they have to be brutally frugal and thoughtful about what bets they make. Pressly has good answers on the economics (very little cash up front), the technology (more open), the user experience (niiice), and control issues. Clearly The Economist and Toronto Star think so, and I bet many others will reach the same conclusion.

I hope Pressly does really well.

Let me know when I can buy some shares.

osh

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