jbyers

Pi Day (Wikispaces for Teachers)

jbyers — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:28:07 +0000

Early this morning we gave away our 314159th free Plus wiki for education at Wikispaces. Unfortunately I missed it, so my screenshot estimates pi at a value that would make even Archimedes sad.

As we mentioned back when the counter crossed 300,000, we’re tremendously proud of our free wikis for teachers program. It’s just one of the things over at Wikispaces that’s kept me from blogging here in the last two years, not to mention the huge growth of the site since our third birthday:

http://blog.wikispaces.com/2009/03/wikispaces-birthday-site-statistics.html
http://blog.wikispaces.com/2010/03/birthday-week-a-little-something-for-the-number-crunchers.html

tl;dr? 9 million unique visitors a month, 1.7 million wikis, 10K edits an hour. Did I mention we’re hiring?

Wikispaces Birthday

jbyers — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:22:21 +0000

Wikispaces is three this month, and we’ve shared some statistics about growth and traffic over on our blog:

http://blog.wikispaces.com/2008/03/wikispaces-turns-three.html

The short version: 920K users, 390K wikis. 26M pageviews last month, 200M last year. Woo!

It’s exciting times at our little company: we’re growing like crazy, hiring, and generally having a great time. Know a great developer or two? Send them our way!

Super Tuesday Visualization

jbyers — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:15:04 +0000

There are lots of ways to see the outcome of today’s primaries, but I think the New York Times has done the best – far more compact and easier to read than CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post.

No Flash, no ajax, no hard-to-read maps or graphics. Just text, good highlighting, and a compact horizontal layout.

Back from Africa

jbyers — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 01:19:18 +0000

Last week, Amanda and I got back from an amazing trip to Southern Africa. We spent two weeks camping out in Bostwana, a few nights in the Luangwa River valley, stopped in Johannesburg, Victoria Falls, and Lusaka, and spent days on airplanes. Along the way we took nearly 4000 photos — lucky for you, about 3000 of them were terrible.

We’ll be posting more about our trip here over the next week, with a little background on each place we visited. But first, we’ve put together an album of our favorite photos from the whole trip. Enjoy!

Our Favorite Africa Photos

Wikispaces is Hiring

jbyers — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:31:29 +0000

As regular readers of this irregularly-updated blog will note, I’ve been hard at work the last two and a half years on Wikispaces alongside Adam and Dom. We set out to start a company that builds useful products for real people, and we wanted to grow the company on our terms. We found a small office with lots of character south-of-Market in San Francisco, scavenged a few desks from Craigslist, and got to work bringing easy-to-use wikis to hundreds of thousands of individuals, K-12 teachers, clubs, non-profits, universities, and businesses. Along the way, we didn’t take millions of dollars of venture funding or chase ephemeral web 2.0 trends — instead we tried hard to keep our eye on the ball: running a great service, listening to our members, and building a real business.

We’re now fortunate to be in a position where we’re profitable, growing fast, and hiring. We’ve got a big opportunity ahead of us and a lot of work to do, especially in developing our service and getting the word out.

If you’re a sharp software engineer or savvy marketer – or know someone who is – we want to talk to you. Read more about the positions here:

http://tangient.com/jobs.html

Want to know more? Drop me an email or give me a call anytime.

PHP Feed Parsing: Hello, SimplePie

jbyers — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 05:37:31 +0000

For years, I’ve been using Magpie for parsing RSS and Atom feeds in various PHP projects. As of today, no more – it’s SimplePie from here on out. Magpie’s done well thus far, but it’s slipped into disrepair and lacks some key features that SimplePie does right out of the box:

Full normalization between RSS and Atom
Complete Atom 1.0 support
Enclosure support (MP3s and videos found in feeds)
Straightforward caching plugins
Active development, lots of unit tests, BSD licensing

SimplePie’s not perfect — we’ll likely be logging issues about error logging and feed URL scrubbing – but I think it’s well on the way to becoming the go-to PHP feed parser.

Wikispaces + SourceForge

jbyers — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:31:07 +0000

Yesterday, our team over at Wikispaces was thrilled to announce that every SourceForge.net project now comes with a Wikispaces wiki. We think every open source project can benefit from having a shared space to collaborate on documents – what better way than a wiki? Our work with SourceForge also shows off a lot of the integration and platform work that’s gone into Wikispaces under the hood. Some of this work has been available for a while, for example full HTML and CSS customization available through our theme system. Other features – mostly around the nitty gritty integration points of authentication, authorization, and custom application hooks – we’ll be talking about more in the near future. As always, keep an eye on the Wikispaces blog for the full scoop.

If you’re a SourceForge project admin, head over to your admin section now and enable your wiki!

Amazon’s Advantage

jbyers — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 06:42:32 +0000

I bought and next-day shipped my new MacBook Pro from Amazon on October 19.

On October 24, Apple announced a new line with Core 2 Duos and other upgrades.

This afternoon, by sheer chance, I noticed that Amazon had dropped the price of the model I bought by a few hundred dollars. I sent customer support a request to refund the difference – why not?

Six hours later, a friendly email arrives in my inbox. Refund granted.

Amazon does something amazing: they combine the purchasing power and logistical expertise of a massive retailer with the kind of customer support you can expect from a neighborhood store. I get my impulse purchases overnight for a few bucks (Amazon Prime), competitive pricing, a monster selection. Except for niche purchases, I’m finding it harder and harder to shop anywhere else online.

In the Water – Week One

jbyers — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 04:59:44 +0000

(Why am I in the water? See Jumping Ship.)

After week one, I’m still thrilled with the new MacBook Pro. Careful chronologers will note that just four days after UPS dropped off my laptop, Apple released its upgraded MacBook Pro line with Core 2 Duos and bigger disks – and FireWire 800, if I ever needed to plug in a big disk array? But no matter, I’m feeling good with my now just-barely-obsolete laptop.

And now to revisit a favorite topic for probably every PC-to-Mac-switching blogger: essential Mac applications, with a developer’s bias.

Quicksilver

– A mind-reading application launcher and so much more. Get it, seriously.

Firefox

– The new 2.0 theme looks great next to native OS X apps.

Mail.app

– Whaa?! No Thunderbird? Not for now. Mail.app is just smoother. We’ll see if it lasts.

Adium

– Great cross-service IM.

TextMate

– For single file editing or more involved projects, I’ve been very impressed with TextMate. We’ll see if I find the need for something heavier like Eclipse.

VirtueDesktops

– Smooth and pretty multiple desktop manager.

Parallels

– Keeps Debian and Windows XP running in the background. Watch out though, VMWare for Mac is coming.

iTerm

– The standard OS X terminal is good, but when you’ve got lots of shells open, tabs are a big help.

Jumping Ship

jbyers — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 06:53:52 +0000

On Friday, I said goodbye to my five-year-old IBM ThinkPad A22P and hello to a new MacBook Pro.

Yes, five years.

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, the ThinkPad was a good laptop – great, maybe – and it did everything I asked of it and more. I’d guess 15,000 to 20,000 hours of use, a number of trips around the globe, and more than two drop-kicks in the office parking lot. My daily routine centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, SecureCRT, VMWare (debian), and lately, FeedDemon under Windows XP. It was the only computer I used both at home and at work.

But time had taken its toll. A few days before the three year warrantee expired, the motherboard failed. IBM was happy to replace nearly everything in the system except the screen and hard drive, which I swapped out for a faster model. But after that, the speakers starting failing, suspending or hibernating XP became a gamble, and the built-in ethernet went south. In the end, though, Javascript was the laptop’s undoing. When the web was just a pile of HTML and images with a sprinking of code, my old laptop did great. When trying to parse and execute a few hundred KB of Javascript code every time I fired up GMail, my laptop ground to a halt.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell (“dude…”), but fell for the seductive simplicity, fast hardware, and BSD-backing of a MacBook Pro: 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM. Two days in, I think I’ve made the right choice. QuickSilver is waiting to read my mind, I’ve got Darwin Ports building the latest PHP5, Firefox is snappy, Parallels has a fresh install of debian, and everthing feels right, a feeling I’ve long missed in the land of Windows.