terryjsmith

I'm getting IMAP logins rejected as well.

Stripe so far has been really developer focused and so they've really targeted themselves towards that audience (home page, docs, marketing, etc.), unlike PayPal which is more consumer friendly. I think there's a lot of baggage that comes with being a consumer facing brand that Stripe doesn't have to deal with, at least not yet. That said, there isn't anything preventing them from doing so; it's definitely a risk for Stripe-based businesses like this, but Stripe could always just acquire or acqui-hire whoever does the best job.

While this seems like a good solution, I'm not sure the problem is real: to me, a v1 API and a v2 API are two separate APIs, so the URLs for that API aren't really changing during it's lifetime (ie. the v1 stuff will stay the same for those continuing to use it). I think this is just a mis-interpretation of a core REST/web principle that the URIs for a specific resource in the API shouldn't change (hence creating a v2 or other sub-directory if you're going to change the output or functionality).

That's definitely why you want someone like WPEngine doing this for you; Jason and the team there is fantastic and they rival Automattic for their WP knowledge. Out of the box on WPEngine is astronomically better than out of the box on a regular hosting company.

We were building a system like this back in 2009 or so as a competitor to Dropbox (we called it P2P storage cloud). We had a competitor you might want to check out: http://www.wuala.com/

Yup, that's fair. And there are actually ways to scale WP beautifully with a small amount of servers (we're using less than 5 servers to handle our 10M visitors a month and content archive). Again, I keep meaning to blog about it, I just need to find the time.

Anyways, I'm all for articles like this that help optimize WP sites and get rid of the stigma that WP doesn't scale without cost. Thanks for writing it.

As someone who worked as lead dev for a blog network that does 10M+ visitors a month, here's the thing: if you've gotten your blog to 10M hits a day, you likely have a massive amount of content (we had about 1M posts over 5 or 6 years and about as many comments); that is, far too much to get into cache on a $15 server. Every page gets cached, every gallery page gets cached (if you've got photo galleries), every comment page gets cached and all of those have objects/actual DB rows that get cached as well. With that much content, the GoogleBot alone will kill you if you're not careful.

These are all great tips to help you scale, but unless you've got a very small site WP site that is also doing 10M hits a day, there are many more complications. Once I have a little more spare time, I'll have to blog about some other solutions we've come up with.

Definitely easy to use, but once I was on the preview page for my image, I didn't see an easy link to share right now. Is the link I'm on shareable? I think there should be a few default sharing options (other than Twitter/Facebook) right on the page: link, e-mail, maybe SMS?

Edit: I see the Sociable buttons that include e-mail, this should be much more obvious. Still don't see an obvious "Copy this link".

There is quite a bit of flexibility that the author seems to have missed. But speaking as someone who has just recently tried Disqus on a major blog for work where a number of the comments are anonymous, the simple fact that the button is ambiguous ("Login as...") did dramatically drop the number of comments. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that most visitors are one-time visitors, not regular users of our blog, but I don't have any data to back up that assumption yet.

It might not even be login, but the ominous "Login As" button which does not suggest the ability to post anonymously.

We recently tested Disqus on one of the major blogs I work on and our comments dropped by about 60% month over month (where a lot of our users choose to comment anonymously).

User akfcypkYsCGqzG4P, thanks!

This is great. I work for a blog network that got hit similarly hard by both Panda updates, and we've done a lot of the same stuff (removing and/or de-indexing short/no page view content, improving our site map and linking system), but scrapers continue to be our biggest issue, especially the ones we don't syndicate to. These can rank higher than us in Google as well, and we continue to try to find a way to flag them or submit removal requests without having to do each one manually.

This is a great write up though, it's good to see that others are trying the same things as we are.

The UI of your start-up very rarely makes or breaks it if you iterate and keep it clean. This is a great article about increasing user retention from x% to x+y%, but like A/B testing and everything else, it will not make a bad product good or a good product bad. Just keep moving forward and listening to your users, they'll tell you what they want and then once you have a customer B, you can A/B test to your heart's content.

I think a database inconsistency is unlikely, though possible, I imagine they would be very on top of that. It is more likely a caching or replication issue (maybe to do with their new data center -- entirely speculation).

It is built on AWS, and we are using PHP and a custom framework for the actual site, and on the backend we're using CutyCapt[1] to generate the thumbnails, which is based on Qt and Webkit.

Yes, we automatically de-dup on the back-end. If the thumbnail you requested exists in the size you want, the information is just returned and you are not charged for the generation. You can tell this happens by looking at the 'created' timestamp in the returned object.

If you request the same thumbnail twice, you will get the same one back twice; however, there is a force_new parameter that can be passed to the generate method that will force it to fetch a new version each time.

We do not have explicit protection right now for DoS attacks, and I thank you for raising that point. In all honesty, the system right now is limited by our ability to handle traffic; you couldn't likely surpass a couple requests a second if you were trying, but it is something we will be thinking about moving forward.

I hope that answers everything for you; if you have any other questions, please let me know.

[1] http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/

Clickable: http://www.thumbomatic.com/

We noticed this when starting out company (which measures these stats for your blog), and it never struck me as odd. Sure it seems a little disingenuous at first, but the Like button has replaced the Share button as the preferred implementation. Moreover, every like, share, or comment gets posted to your wall for your friends to see (privacy settings depending) so you are in fact "recommending" it.

Totally disagree. I don't think I've ever heard this phrase used when someone's primary intention is to make a better wheel. If you're building cars, do not try to reinvent the wheel. Leave it to someone who is all about wheels.

Which is my main beef with this article: when it comes to developers, you absolutely can reinvent a piece of technology, but if it's not the focus of your business, you need to be prepared to make it your focus if it's really that important or that big an opportunity. There are a ton of great examples of technology being reinvented or improved (see HipHop from FB and FlockDB from Twitter), but they tend to represent a marginal plus to the business and are still not their core focus. I hate it when developers want to create their own database for their app, their own game engine for their game, etc. Wheels, game engines, and most software is a full time business, not an adjunct. Just use what's available to you until you absolutely need to do it over or do it yourself.

There seems to be a rift here between what people are good at/what they want to do now and what they want to do later. I consider myself a good programmer, but it's not where I want to be forever. I have always wanted to branch out and learn multiple facets (management, service, sales, etc.) and this seems like it would be limiting in that regard. I guess I just wouldn't be the target of 37signals?

Without wanting to sound snide, do you look for people who want to stay in the same role forever? It surprises me that people's ambitions to branch out and take on more responsibility haven't caused this to come up before. A salary bump, more benefits, and more vacation time wouldn't help me placate my desire to learn about other skill sets.

One of the big contentions over the Colo[u]r debate wasn't necessarily the name but the domain name. I'm pretty used to seeing colourapp.com or mycolour.com, etc. at this point. The start-up name IS definitely important, but the domain name is less so imo.

Kind of. This is all good advice, but WordPress is still the major blogging platform, and it is awful at scaling out of the box. You can get Super Cache or Total Cache but most people don't do that up front because they're not expecting the traffic, and even those won't do S3/Cloudfront for the static content in your site's themes.

If you're stuck with traffic to your blog, you should look at an existing caching solution and maybe scale your VPS a little. It's not likely to be a permanent thing.

I second this. We've been sending out daily e-mail reports with PDF attachments to our customers and their API is easy to setup, easy to use and even makes attachments simple. To me, they've picked one thing and they're owning it.

I totally disagree, this tells me that they're not afraid to make/poke fun at their own expense and would make me want to work there. It may be polarizing, but it can also be worthwhile. We recently released an Awesomesauce edition of a WordPress plug-in I've been working on and our entire website is ridiculous. And yet it generates sales, we have great and fun customers (who are joyous we're solving an issue or in this case that they're getting a deal) and today I even got an e-mail saying that this guy has been pitching our website as the way Awesomesauce business should be done. It's self selecting, and if done properly, it helps brand and build the culture they want.

It's clear that the popular thing to do is rag on the first launched concept, and yet everyone still seems to be ignoring the team. I doubt Sequoia, bubble times or not, is likely to back a buzzword friendly concept if they didn't believe the team could make it into something worth a multiple or the $41M investment. I'd say it's a little early to judge whether the concept or the product will take off, but I think the team will build and iterate Color into something valuable.

We're working on this: http://www.jaxified.com/. Right now we're focused on blogs since it's easy to see new content, but we're working on adding support for static sites as well.

If you want a second set of eyes or want to talk about optimizing, plugins, etc. shoot me an e-mail. I know enough WordPress to have a solid love/hate/don't ever want to have to dig into the way certain things work ever again relationship: terry@icedteapowered.com

We're definitely hopeful that will be a big part of it. We look to be a value-add to services like Sysomos or Radian6 who offer much more comprehensive brand management solutions at $500+/month. We're also targeting bloggers who want to aggregate their social metrics, learn a little bit more about their audience, and check out the same data for their competitors. While I don't have an exact visitor or social metric cutoff, we are actively targeting what I would call professional bloggers or would-be professionals.

Wow, thanks for the full review! Since we do offer the 14-day free trial on all plans, I could probably delay choosing a plan until you want to upgrade. Then it would just be a one-step sign-up.

We do only track new data; unfortunately there's no easy way to go back and links to your site from Twitter historically so we decided to be consistent with Facebook data. As a result you'll only see social interactions from the time you sign up going forward. Twitter data is real-time, and Facebook is polled on the hour. I will see if I can make that more clear.

We're definitely working hard to find what our biggest value prop will be. I think the features are there and we can iterate on them, but I definitely agree that we might not have nailed it yet.

I'll take a look at the Chrome calendar issue; on the other hand I'm glad that the sign-up was painless and that you like the design (blue on black aside).

Thanks again for the very thorough review!

Thanks for your input! I'm loving what you're doing with The Startup Foundry and have had your profile page open in Firefox for a week so I would remember to reach out. I was planning to send you an e-mail on Monday; I'll fill out the form so we can chat! Thanks again.

Sure; while we haven't launched them yet, our Firm accounts won't actually billed by the blog, they will be billed by campaign. So a campaign might include a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a landing page and a group of blogs who you have hired to promote your content. That combination is billed at $100 per month, so the pricing structure is a little different. I will look at finding a different way of wording it, but there will be more information on the page when that plan is ready to go.

Working on the hover states now! Thanks for checking it out.