March, 31, 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.

once i’ve finally found a new home for blo.gs (and i resisted the temptation to do some sort of april fools gag about that), i’ll once again have a dedicated server with some bandwidth to spare.

maybe i should dust off one of the domain names i have laying around, like microcommunity.net, and figure out what to do with it.

another domain i registered and actually started building the site for was battleforlosangeles.com. the idea was to do a site focused on los angeles politics and the mayoral race in particular. but then the mayoral primary election got underway, and i quickly realized that folks like kevin roderick of la observed and brian hay of the hertzberg daily digest were going to do a much better job of covering things than i had the time (or knowledge) to do.

and keymovies.com is the domain i registered to register for last year’s home entertainment expo, and to otherwise be able to do my video store research via something a little bit removed from this site.

but before i do anything new, i will probably tinker with this site some more. i need to make it possible to browse using the tags, and probably will restructure the archives while i’m at it. maybe i’ll think about packaging up the code for this site as yet another open source blogging tool.

or maybe i should do something that doesn’t involve programming. or computers.