March, 30, 2005 archives

andy baio, of upcoming.org fame, writes about “wordpress website’s search engine spam”. it certainly adds a new flavor to this entry about how many sites link to wordpress.org.

this isn’t entirely without precedent. they’re not there now, but for a while there were small text-links at the bottom of the phorum website that were obviously capitalizing on their pagerank. i don’t know how the phorum developers may have disclosed that.

the intersection of open source and business is always pretty messy, and i believe even more so when you’re starting with a community project. (as opposed to something entirely or mostly developed by those trying to start a business around it.)

so i’ve hit the end game in selling blo.gs.

this is the part where i get to break out the magical measuring scale and weigh issues like the value of stock in startups vs. the value of selling to companies that are less likely to disappear (or at least change hands) in a year or two. (look, my dotcom scars are showing!)

this is a good problem to have, of course. multiple companies interested in buying the service that i am comfortable having own it.

part of me wishes one of them would manage to distinguish themselves with an offer that was clearly better than the others. but the other part of me is glad that none have, because i think i would be immediately suspicious of any such offer.

on an unrelated note, i found and fixed an ugly bug in libmysqld. it’s one of those bugs i found just by simple code inspection, and it was writing the test case that was the hard part.