Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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USA Today: WordPress creator Mullenweg is many bloggers’ best friend

Great Interview with Matt today in the USA Today:

WordPress has become so entrenched on the Web that many of the biggest names use it now — a roster that includes CNN, Fox News and The New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Coca-Cola and General Electric, along with millions of ordinary bloggers.

“People might start with LiveJournal or Blogger, but if they get serious, they’ll graduate to WordPress. We try to cater to the more powerful users,” says Mullenweg, 25.

I especially like the comment made by Dermot over at CNN.com:

CNN runs 30 blogs, and they’re all created the same way the general consumer does it: Programmers go to WordPress.com, sign up and create.

CNN programmers tweak the basic templates afterward to CNN’s needs, so that a CNN blog looks nothing like, say, a blog from Time magazine or Fox News. “It looks like a website that would have taken six to nine months to create, but it’s a blog we made in just a few hours,” says Dermot Waters, a senior producer for CNN.

Here is a short video interview as well:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The full article is here.

WordPress.tv

Exciting to see this go live as I’ve been watching the progress on this for a bit.  WordPress.tv is “a new addition to the WordPress family focused on making it easy for people to both learn how to use WordPress (in its dot-com and dot-org flavours), and check out the presentations at the WordCamps sprouting up all over the globe”

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Check it out on http://wordpress.tv and read the full details over on Michael Pick’s blog.

FreshBooks Open Sources iPhone App

“We learned first hand that it’s not easy to make an iPhone app. Taking some inspiration from the folks at Automattic (who open sourced their free WordPress iPhone application), we’ve decided to give back to our customers by sharing what we’ve learned.”

SVN: http://github.com/freshbooks-addons/freshbooks-iphone-project/tree/master

Very cool.

[ FreshBooks iPhone App ]

2008 Year-End Wrap-Up for My Blog & iTunes

Last year this time I posted some stats from 2007 about this blog, and I spent a couple of minutes today doing the same for 2008, plus looking at iTunes for similar types of “buzz” data:

Top Posts (based on pageviews):
Apple MacBook Air Commercial – Catchy Song
The Great Sync on OS X: Google
Switched to Google Apps for Personal Email
Garmin Nuvi 350 portable GPS navigator
Quick Tip For BlackBerry Users When Call

Top Referrers:
automattic.com/about
ma.tt
stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http%3A…>
google.com/reader/view
twitter.com/raanan

Top Search Terms:
apple air commercial song (or a slight variation of this )
comcast blast
garmin nuvi
viigo review
installing leopard

Top Clicked Links:
phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.w…
yaelweb.com
google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/sync
plaxo.com/downloads
photomatt.net/2007/06/20/raanan-joins

From iTunes – looked at top songs played. What was interesting is that since I almost always just click “shuffle” – the distribution is pretty much flat among 1000 or so albums, but the ones listed below had a slight edge:
Mosh Ben Ari: Live ( earlier post )
Daniel Salomon: Haifa 87
Hadag Nachash: Live
Habanot Nechama
The Idan Raichel’s Project: Within My Walls
Avishai Cohen: Shaot Regishot ( thanks Yoav )
Roy Adri: Until End

Here’s to a happy, safe, and quiet start to 2009 !

My 2009 Product Wish List

My short list of product/service improvements I’d love to see in 2009:
fireworks

1) The first is a simple one which I really thought was possible.  The ability to play music on my mac (iTunes or otherwise) and control the volume (and even mute) all system and apps sounds.  Tired of getting Skype pop-up sounds while blasting a good song and wearing headphones

2) All airlines need to copy JetBlue’s “little things”.  First, build a web site that is actually usable – I recommend eating the dog food, and make you airline customer service team actually use their own site to book and manage trips.  Second, dump the knee and elbow assault food cart and deliver food and drinks with a basket the way JetBlue does.  All of us 6’+ folks will be very thankful 🙂

3) Consumer Electronic firms need to start offering the ability to lease hardware.  I don’t want to own this stuff, deal with recycling, etc.  Instead of buying, would happily prefer to pay $150+/month and have a TV, laptop, secondary iMac, and iPod/iPhone that gets refreshed every 18 months.  The service would include picking up the hold hardware and transfering the content if need be.  I think there is a huge market for this.  And with a leasing model there would be a steady inflow of used machines, which the companies could certify and then lease back out at reduced rates.  I would personally love to have some extra PCs, for example, in the house for the kitchen and living room, and would be fine with it being one generation behind — just need it for web surfing and light music/video usage

4) From the I-can’t-believe-this-doesn’t-exist category: A google apps native iPhone app for email and calendar that syncs OTA

5) iPhoto Flickr sync.  I use iPhoto to sort and edit my photos, and then upload a small subset to Flickr.  Would love a way to take those Flickr sets and sync those back to iPhoto so that when I use iChat or my AppleTV I can load up the Flickr sets via iPhoto

6) Now that Dash Navigation is ditching their hardware, I’d like to see that service available on my iPhone and BlackBerry next year

7) Fix the “on behalf of” issue that plagues gmail and google apps. This issue causes emails sent from external accounts to show the gmail address in the “from” line to any recipient using Outlook

So any shot these will happen ?

Happy New Year !

The Argument *For* Software as a Service

Josh Catone of sitepoint.com wrote a really interesting post the other day titled  “The Argument Against Software as a Service“.  I left a comment, but I didn’t register and looks like my comment might be stuck in some moderation queue, so figured I’d blog my response here just in case.

Josh makes the larger argument that hosted/SaaS services could potentially go out of business creating a crisis for those who use it:

The more you rely on third parties to get your work done, the more difficult it becomes to stay afloat if those you rely on run into trouble. SaaS applications have allowed business owners to gain access to high quality software at lower prices and with a high level of convenience, but at what potential risk?

If all your customer and sales lead information is in Salesforce.com, what happens if Salesforce.com goes under? That might create a mess that’s harder to clean up than if your CRM data was stored locally, for example. Using Google Docs might save you a bundle on site licenses for Office, but if all your internal documentation is online, what happens if Google decides Docs isn’t worth it and axes the product line? It’s something to consider, certainly.

I agree that this is a concern.  But I believe that the really important question people should ask when selecting hosted services / SaaS is “can I extract/sync with my own data  and can run my own Open Source version of this service ?”

If the answer is “yes” than the risk is entirely mitigated, and the upside is huge.

A few quick comments below on how we answer “yes” to these questions at WordPress.com, and why the hosted/SaaS model does make sense for many individuals and businesses.

On WordPress.com users can always:

1) Extract a complete set of their data via a full XML export.  We don’t do anything to lock-in our customers.  It’s their data period – and it should be a 1-click process to get a complete copy of all the posts, comments, pages, etc.
2) Sync their data. WordPress.com provides a full XMLRPC API to sync all data, and many users take advantage of 3rd party tools, especially on the desktop client side, to manage their WordPress from outside of WordPress, creating a complete duplicate set of data on their local machine.
3) Run their own self-hosted WordPress locally or on a 3rd party host and easily import all their content & themes from WordPress.com.  Users can simply head-over to WordPress.org to download the software, or select to install WordPress with nearly any hosting provider.  This works the other way too – self-hosted WordPress sites can easily be imported into WordPress.com .
4) Ensure link/SEO continuity by mapping their domain on WordPress.com (i.e. domain.com) so if they ever leave our service all the google indexing and links will continue to work.

And as importantly, since WordPress.com is built with WordPress, an Open Source project, there is security and comfort in knowing that a huge community,  numbering in the tens of thousands,  is involved with WordPress.  And even if our company and WordPress.com would somehow fails to live up to our users’ needs, the WordPress project will continue to thrive.

New WordPress.com Dashboard Live !

I’m writing this post from the all new WordPress.com dashboard.  If you are on WordPress.com, go check it out.  For those of you on self-hosted WordPress, the new UI will be part of the 2.7 release which is due out next week, and you can download 2.7 RC1 now and auto-update to the final version when it’s out ( auto-updating of the core is a new feature in 2.7 ).

I’m biased — but this new UI is simply breathtaking and clairvoyant in it’s intuitiveness — how you would expect to do things is now how things are done — a very zen-like experience !  And the feedback pouring in from bloggers on WordPress.com has been very positive.

And just a quick word on the pure launch logistics last night on WordPress.com – simply amazing.   When you take into consideration that we are completely virtual company and in multiple countries, a relatively small team, run a service in multiple data centers with nearly 5 million blogs, and you look at the sheer amount of work and coordination that it took – not to mention the technical skill – it was a thing of pure beauty to watch it all come together.   Everything happened in real-time, there was no down-time maintenance window, no launch and revert and postpone, and no 5am all-hands meeting.  Just a group of rockstar colleagues working in sync and getting things done – really impressive.

Leasing VS Buying a Car

Seems like a very popular topic these days – do you buy a car or lease one.

Having lived in NYC for a very long time until recently, I was happily and blissfully ignorant of the car culture — couldn’t even think past the cost of parking 🙂

But I went ahead and leased a car when we moved to San Francisco, and after being asked by a few people why I went with a lease, I figured I’d share some thoughts here:

Leasing Pros:

– I NEVER want to own a depreciating asset.  Buying a car is like owning an investment that loses money every day — similar to all of our 401K these days :).   Why tie-up lots of capital/cash in something that only goes down ?
– I like new tech.  I want a new car every 24/36 months with the latest safety advancements, bluetooth, iPod, GPS, etc systems.  The idea of an old car makes no sense to me.
– Green technology.  With biodiesels, hybrids, and plugins cars getting better, why do you want to own a “gas guzzler” for very long ?
– Your Needs change. You may start with a sedan and need a station wagon a few years later — why lock in for 10 yrs to a single car ?
– Auto companies change.  The car you bought might be part of a dead or bankrupt auto firm that will not produce parts to fix your car in the near future.
– Maintenance.   Most cars have a 5/10 yr or 50K or 100K miles coverage plans so everything is taken care of.  With a lease I never have to worry about rhe possibility of paying for large repairs since I’ll return the car well before the coverage expires.
– And the biggest item for me – leasing means you can afford a high-end car that would be prohibitively expensive to purchase.  A lease is the difference in value between the new car and the value when you turn it. High residuals make for low lease payments, and high-end cars retain their value.  So don’t lease a mid to lower tier car.

Leasing Cons:
– If you drive more than 15,000 miles per year, the lease can start to get expensive
– Some people hate monthly payments and prefer to own
– When you return the car on a lease they can hit you up for costly repairs.  There is actually decent inurance against this.  Make sure to pay this insurance up front, and not how most leasing companies recommend – which is to put it into your financing.  That only adds to the cost of a relatively low priced expense.

So there you have it.  Assuming car companies learn to adapt and get through this economic downturn ( or get a PC like biz model as Arrignton suggests ) I think you’ll see more and more people leasing and getting good deals.