Twitter as a Stockbroker. With Webhooks.

Webhooks. User-defined callbacks on the web. Yes. YES! Wait, what does that even mean? That stupid website doesn’t seem to explain them at all!

Let’s explore this through an analogy. This analogy uses stockbrokers! Yay! (?)

Consider, before the web, before email, how people would interact with their stockbroker: the telephone. Whenever you wanted to manage your investments and find out what’s really going on in the market, you would call your stockbroker. It’s similar to how you might use your browser to visit Twitter to update your status and find out what’s going on with your friends, right? This is the basis of the analogy. Bear with me.

Imagine in this story your phone is a browser, a phone call is a web request, and the broker is a web application, like Twitter.

It’s 1989 and you like to think of yourself as a big time stock trader with an impressive portfolio. Good for you. You got to this point by staying in close touch with your stockbroker. You’d call her (!) to find out what was happening in the market, discuss whether buying certain stock was a good idea, and maybe put in an order. You were able to get information out of the system and put orders into the system by picking up your phone and calling your broker.

The problem is that you can only react to events in the market as quickly as you get the information. This means you’d have to call your broker quite a bit to stay on top of a fast moving, highly volatile market. A programmer might try to automate this with a script. You take a similar approach: you hire an assistant to deal with your stockbroker. Perhaps this is unheard of in reality, but stay with me.

Now an assistant is not unlike a computer program in theory. You can give them instructions and based on certain conditions and input, they’ll do as you say. For example, maybe you instruct your assistant to buy a certain type of stock after it behaves a certain way, and if there’s not enough money to buy the amount that you told them, they can transfer the money from your savings account after a quick confirmation phone call with you. In today’s world, that sort of thing is not terribly out of the question to automate with a script using the web APIs and programmatic infrastructure available to us now.

Again, in order to react to events in the market in a timely manner, it requires lots of phone calls to your stockbroker. Sure, your assistant can handle it, but it’s a lot of work and wastes a lot of time. In fact, it wastes you money because you pay for your assistant by the hour! If you were a programmer, your script would have to constantly poll the broker API requiring a touchy cron setup or a long running process that gets more inefficient the closer to real-time you want it to be. Not to mention it’s just more work than you should have to deal with. If only there was some way for your assistant or script to be notified when things happen so they could simply react.

One day, your stockbroker says they’re providing a new service they describe as callbacks. You give them a phone number, and they’ll call it whenever something interesting happens regarding stocks relevant to you. Wow! Well, you could give them your number, but there are two problems. First, it’s 1989 and you don’t happen to have a cell phone. You can’t always be reached. Second, even if you could, you’d still want your assistant to handle the events because they have been instructed with how to deal with them and will do a lot of the legwork for you. Luckily, your assistant has a cell phone and is always available, so you give the broker their number.

Now your assistant is working very efficiently making you lots of money. Their job is so much easier because they don’t have to do anything until they get a call from either you or, more importantly, the broker. They can finally react to events as they happen, without a lot of nonsense trying to stay on top of things. What’s more is they will automatically take care of whatever situations you’ve told them.

What a cool feature, this callbacks thing. Thanks, broker!

If you haven’t guessed, the callback feature in this story is the exact mechanics of webhooks. Webhooks would allow you to tell the web apps that you use to “callback” scripts you have online. These scripts will deal with whatever events that web app produces. These callbacks use the same protocol you use to talk to them and that you both know how to use: web requests. Putting your script online at a URL is analogous to your assistant that has a cell phone: it’s always available for direct connection at a persistent “phone number,” unlike you, with dynamic IPs and NATs and turning off your computer. And just like an assistant, the script can do a lot of interesting things for you that you wouldn’t necessarily want to do, most of which is a sort glue work of making different systems work together given some logic. For example, transferring money from your savings account to the broker account when there isn’t enough.

A concrete example of a story made possible from webhooks that might be a useful scenario for many of you involves Twitter. Let’s say Twitter supported webhook callbacks for when somebody follows you. Right now you get an email, and from there you can decide what to do manually: follow them back, block them, or do nothing. I used to go out of my way to block users that I knew were spam bots, but now there’s so many it’s not worth the time. And of course I also generally follow back people that I actually know. If Twitter would simply call a script of mine whenever somebody followed me passing along the user ID, I could very easily run this logic in a PHP script or a simple App Engine app. Or perhaps I’d use Scriptlets (ahem, which was made exactly for these kinds of web scripts). It would work like this:

First, use the Twitter API to look up the user from the ID, and grab their name. Then use the Facebook API to check if that name shows up in my list of friends on Facebook. If so, use the Twitter API to follow them back. Otherwise, if they’re following over 1000 users and that number is more than twice the number that’s following them (which is roughly the heuristic I use manually), use the Twitter API to block them. All automatic.

If you could do this, not only would you have glued together Facebook and Twitter in an interesting and useful way, but you’ve sort of extended the net functionality Twitter provides you. You could imagine perhaps someday Twitter releasing features that would do exactly what you just did. But they won’t. In fact, they’ll never release features that are so specific to you (who says my spam algorithm is the algorithm everybody should use?). This is how webhooks make the web more about you. You can start extending web applications and gluing them together just the way you want.

This is a win-win for web application users and developers. Users get more functionality. Developers can implement less.

Coming back to the stockbroker analogy, there is a type of order called a limit order where you say to buy or sell when it’s at a certain price. With webhooks (or the broker “callback” service), this is merely a convenience because you could easily set that up outside of their system. Speaking of that example, when I mentioned your assistant transferring money between accounts, that reminds me, you know that feature banks have called overdraft protection? If banks had webhooks, all banks could have overdraft protection. Wow, right? That would have been nice for me when I had Washington Mutual, a bank known for its lack of overdraft protection.

What else could you do in a world with webhooks? Basically everything would have a common event-driven infrastructure, allowing you, with just a little bit of scripting glue, to accomplish so much more and make the systems you use better, and more personal.

Natural language time parsing and more with TimeAPI.org

In my post about stdicon.com, I hinted at something else I built in collaboration with a few people that started from a Twitter update. I’m just now writing about it, but I’ve actually built a lot of things I haven’t blogged about yet. Granted, they’re all an artifact of my strange world, but I figure if I need them more than once, there’s a decent chance somebody else on this planet will need them someday. Anyway…

I present to you: TimeAPI.org

It started from wanting Chronic as a Service—a natural language datetime parser written in Ruby. You know, “in five hours” or “noon next tuesday.” Sure, there are good JS libraries, but actually, it’s a backend thing for me (webhooks). Unfortunately, I don’t use or have Ruby available all the time, so as part of my effort to make lots of tiny useful web services, I decided to make it a web service. Or rather, I decided somebody should.

Half an hour after I tweeted it, somebody had a prototype deployed. Then I worked with a friend to functionally polish it up. I’ve been meaning to use it for a simple Tweet-later service, but my first use of it was in Remindify, which was fairly recent (and is something I still need to blog about). In the process, I fixed a few bugs regarding timezones and became thoroughly frustrated with datetime programming. Haven’t we all.

However, the last thing I added was support for format strings. Why? Well, it crossed my mind before, since it would help in environments that have a hard time parsing ISO 8601 formatted datetimes (GLARES FURIOUSLY AT PYTHON). What finally made me implement it was so that I could use TimeAPI with the date command as a sort of cheap ntpdate replacement. Yes, this works:

date -s "$(curl "http://www.timeapi.org/utc/now?\a \b \d \I:\M:\S \Z \Y")"

For convenience, you could use this shortened URL:

date -s "$(curl -L http://j.mp/now-utc)"

Anyway, that’s kind of neat. Obviously, it’s more useful for parsing natural language. It’s a bit dumb when it doesn’t understand your natural language queries (throws up 500), but if you know how to use it and constrain it properly in your app, you’ll be fine.

Somebody else suggested adding the reverse functionality, sort of a time_ago as a service. Not a priority for me, but if anybody wants to add it, this is a completely open source service and I do deploy patches.

Hacker Dojo: place of the way of the hacker

Two weeks ago it was being taped for a story on Fox News. One month ago it received a congratulatory visit from the mayor of Mountain View. Two months ago it was featured on the front page of the Mercury News. And four months ago was when we signed the lease for it. Hacker Dojo is officially on its way to something big.

Hacker Dojo, aspiring to be a global hub of innovation, is based on a simple idea: to provide a community center for hackers, thinkers and technologists to meet, discuss, learn and create.

It’s a non-profit, volunteer-run, member-supported operation that simply provides a space for hackers to do their thing 24/7, whether it’s working on side projects, organizing a meetup, building the next startup, giving a class, working remotely, or just hanging out with diverse yet like-minded people. The thing they have in common is the hacker spirit, a force that drives ordinary but curious people to create what can end up being extraordinary, such as the personal computer, the first video game system, or the technology powering the Internet.

A dojo is considered a place to do and train one’s craft with others. It’s most commonly used in the context of Japanese martial arts or other physical training. But the word “dojo” is simply defined as “place of the way.” In the case of Hacker Dojo, that way is the way of the hacker.

The hacker is not what most people think. Although 99% of the 100+ members of Hacker Dojo are capable of doing the things most people think “hackers” do, I’m 100% positive none of us have the intention of doing those things maliciously if at all. In fact, security has almost nothing to do with the way of the hacker. We define a hacker something like this:

A hacker is expert in their field, whether hobby or professional, that pushes the envelope of what’s possible through hands-on exploration, driven by relentless curiosity and a desire to challenge the status quo.

Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes computer hackers as people that “regard computing as the most important thing in the world.” It’s about passion. It’s about something most of us can’t even describe. It inexplicably compels us to explore technology. To build things. To learn things. To be like the heroes in our field and achieve the remarkable, which is something I think everybody can relate to.

In fact, there is no reason why anybody shouldn’t aspire to be like a hacker, an innovator. This is what Hacker Dojo is about. We want to foster hacker culture so it can grow, develop and spread. We want to make its values explicit, and be the “place of the way” of the hacker.

If you still don’t understand the hacker, or want to learn more, take a look at the Hacker ethic article on Wikipedia. There’s also an excellent, short documentary available to watch online that shows you the energy and excitement of true hackers called Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age.

If you want to get involved in Hacker Dojo, come stop by or visit the website! We hold many events at the Dojo, but it’s also generally open for anybody to come and hack. If you’re too far to come to us, you may find another hackerspace nearby. For example, in SF there is the excellent Noisebridge hackerspace.

When you’re this obsessed with technology, so much that most “normal” people have no idea what you’re talking about, it helps to have a place where people don’t think you’re crazy. People have moved to Mountain View to be closer to Hacker Dojo. If you already live nearby, you should definitely take advantage of this place of the way of the hacker.

Solving Comet to the browser with CometCatchr

I’ve been playing a lot with Comet lately. It started with Notify.io, in which I decided to prove that HTTP streaming was a simpler alternative to XMPP in getting messages to the desktop. That went quite well, but it was easy because it wasn’t all that different from a socket connection. Then I built a yet-to-be-announced site that uses real-time updates, and I was forced to deal with Comet to the browser. That’s a bit more complicated.

Actually, I’m arguably a veteran of Comet in the browser. I was doing it before it had a name, all the way back in 2005. A friend and I were using it (without knowing that it was terribly novel) to build a real-time strategy game in the browser called AjaxWar. I haven’t really done a lot with it since, but I was hoping after almost 5 years there would be all kinds of advances in libraries and tricks that would make it super easy.

That was not really the case.

There are things, but not easy things. The Bayeux protocol? I guess all that would be easy to do if there were a lightweight Javascript library for it. But there isn’t really. There’s a jQuery one, but it’s completely undocumented. Plus I was just sitting there thinking, do I need all this? Handshaking? Message envelopes?

I was also hoping for actual persistent connections (that’s what we did in AjaxWar), but it turns out the standard today is long-polling. This is a semi-persistent connection that drops after every message and then reconnects and waits for the next message. I also wanted JSONP and cross-domain support. So I ended up using the dynamic script tag technique:

<script type="text/javascript">
	$(document).ready(function(){ waitForMsg(); });

	function waitForMsg() {
		$('body').append('\<script type="text/javascript" src="http://mycometserver.com/channel?callback=gotMsg">\<\/script>');
	}

	function gotMsg(msg) {
		// Do something with it
		waitForMsg();
	}
</script>

It’s fairly elegant in its simplicity and cross-browser support. But it has some weird side-effects that I’m not sure if any of the fancier systems got around. For one, it keeps the browser loading. While it’s waiting for messages, the browser says that page is still loading. I also ran into some issues where if I included, say, a Google Calendar widget on the page, it might not decide to keep the connection open (or even start it). I ended up putting a delay on the first call to waitForMsg() until after the calendar widget was likely loaded.

So it’s a bit brittle. You don’t know if it stops working. Therefore you can’t do retries. And you never know if you happen to miss a message between connections (unlikely, but something to worry about). Plus I think if you hit Escape it also kills it.

But this worked well enough for my projects. I knew that if I found a better way, I’d switch over to it, but it was good enough.

…heh…

Then today I decided to solve the problem right once and for all with a project called CometCatchr.

CometCatchr a lightweight Flash component to be used by Javascript that gives you a persistent connection for Comet streams.

I know a very small number of people won’t agree with my approach using Flash, but I tend to be pragmatic. I trust Flash is generally available and the benefits completely outweigh everything else to me. It’s also not new. Even the Bayeux protocol includes Flash as supported connection type. Still, I couldn’t find any simple Flash component that gave me what I wanted.

CometCatchr gives me Javascript callbacks on messages, maintains a persistent connection across messages, retries on lost connections, works in all browsers, supports (participating) cross-domain message sources, and just freaking works.

It was a drop-in replacement to my previous technique that worked right out of the box:

<script type="text/javascript">
	function gotMsg(msg) {
		// Do something with it
	}
</script>
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="0" height="0" src="CometCatchr.swf?url=http://mycometserver.com/channel&callback=gotMsg"></embed>

It simplified my code, not just client-side, but now I don’t have to support JSONP callbacks on the server. CometCatchr also parses the JSON messages before passing the callback, so that’s taken care of too. I realize it seems less than ideal to couple this with JSON payloads, but I didn’t say it wasn’t an opinionated component.

In fact, it’s very opinionated. It likes single-line JSON messages sent via HTTP using chunked transfer encoding. That’s because that’s how I do Comet streams. Actually, that’s how Twitter does them, too. I’m quite alright with such constraints, but if you want to make changes, it’s MIT licensed and super simple to hack on.

So for the time being, I’ve more or less solved simple Comet to the browser, particularly for me. It also might be worth knowing that another motivation for building this component is that I intend to solve Comet and real-time stuff in the browser entirely… but uhh, yeah. Stay tuned.

Web notifications just got real with Notify.io

The “real-time web” is a popular topic right now. My WebHooks initiative is both riding on this success and helping make it a reality. One sector of this trend is about notifications. Real-time notifications to you about events you care about.

For a long time we’ve had helper apps like the Google Notifier and more recently the Facebook Desktop Notifications app that bring events from the web to your desktop. Twitter has created a whole ecosystem of clients that not only let you actively check Twitter, but passively get updates from Twitter.

Simultaneously, we’ve had a bunch of systems like Growl emerge that give you a consistent, well-designed and customizable system for local applications to give you notifications. While your IM client is in the background, it can tell you somebody IM’d you and what they said in an unobtrusive way. It integrates with email applications to tell you of new emails. It gives any application developer a nice way to present notifications to the user in a way that’s in their control.

Some of the apps that bring web applications to your desktop like Tweetie, Google Notifier, etc will integrate with Growl (which has a counterpart on pretty much every platform, including the iPhone). The problem is that you only get these notifications when the desktop apps are running, despite the fact web apps are always running. And yes, you have to have an app running for each web application you use.

And that’s only if they built a desktop app and you were convinced to download it. Most web applications are never be able to notify you with any means other than email. But as I’ve argued before, notifications don’t belong in your inbox!

Another minor point is that all these apps use polling to get updates. In some cases this doesn’t matter, but as data starts moving in real-time, this batches your notifications into bursts that you may not be able to parse all at once. I use Tweetie to get Growl notifications from Twitter at the moment, and if a lot of people are updating, I get a huge screen of updates that I don’t have time to read before they disappear. It becomes useless.

A while back I attempted to make an app called Yapper that lets anybody send real-time notifications to your desktop via XMPP. It was an experiment, and ultimately not the answer. It was only part of the solution.

But today I’m announcing the full solution: a free, public, open-source web service called Notify.io (Notify-I-O).

Notify.io integrates with Growl and other local notifiers (as well as email, Jabber, Twitter, and webhooks) and provides a dead-simple API for any web developer to send real-time notifications to their users.

You can think of Notify.io as a web-level Growl system. It empowers users with a consistent, controllable way to get notifications, and it provides developers with a simple, consistent way for sending those notifications.

Notify.io is an open platform for notifications. It’s still in a pre-alpha state, but it already has several useful notification sources. Last Thursday I built Feed Notifier, which uses PubSubHubbub to give you real-time desktop notifications of Atom and RSS feed updates.

At SHDH 35 last Saturday, Abi Raja built a Facebook notification adapter for Notify.io that’s yet to be released. And there a couple more in the pipeline (by me and others) to show the power of Notify.io.

Again, it’s pre-alpha, so before I talk much more about it, I should probably finish more of it. I just wanted to make sure I blogged about it in somewhat of a timely fashion. I seem to have a backlog of blog posts about apps I’ve built recently. However, Notify.io is a pretty significant one. Feel free to check it out, just remember that despite its looks, it’s nowhere near finished — but it does work.

Why efficiency is not as important as you think

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” –Peter Drucker

When people, usually analytical people, want to improve a situation, they tend to optimize efficiency: achieve maximum output for input. “Let’s reduce waste! Let’s simplify! Let’s make things smoother! Let’s try and get more out of the system!” I suppose the obsession with efficiency is explained in the Drucker quote: that efficiency is “doing things right.” Who wouldn’t want to do things right?

The problem with efficiency is that it has nothing to do with whether or not what you are currently doing is the right thing to do. Whereas effectiveness is about achieving the right result, or being on the right path.

Too many people assume a system is on the right path. If there is a problem, they address it by smoothing things out and making the process more efficient without questioning the larger system they were produced in. But if the system is going in the wrong direction, that’s only going to make the real problem worse. The push for more standardized testing in public education comes to mind.

What’s really important is effectiveness. In the end, it doesn’t matter if your business is spending the least amount possible or your computer program running as fast as possible or your lifestyle entirely streamlined. If it’s effective, it achieves the desired goal. Your business is producing value, your program is functionally useful, your lifestyle is making you happy. Effectiveness is qualitative. Efficiency is quantitative, which is why I think it’s so big with analytical people. In fact, intelligent people in general.

If you think about it, intelligence, especially knowledge, is mostly concerned with efficiency. It’s more about how to solve problems, less so with what problems to solve. Knowledge is a tool. It’s neutral. To what ends do you actually use it for? That requires values and intention–the realm of wisdom. A wise person tends to be an effective person.

When approaching a problem, wisdom and pragmatism must frame intelligence. Before you start thinking about efficiency, you should step back and think about effectiveness. In computer engineering this idea spread with Donald Knuth’s quote “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” His argument being that 97% of efficiency optimizations are unnecessary to achieve functionality, at which point you can determine which optimizations will be the most effective improvements of efficiency.

In a way, it’s a look before you leap argument. Don’t get me wrong with all this. Efficiency is terribly valuable and can improve a situation, but only if you’re on the right path. Just because a system is currently working or was previously working doesn’t mean it should be, or will in the future. You should always consider effectiveness before efficiency, even in “working” systems. Here’s why:

Effectiveness opens the door for efficiency, but efficiency can change the requirements for effectiveness.

Quantitative improvements can qualitatively change the situation if taken far enough. The game can change. For example, you can become so efficient at producing cars that production isn’t the problem anymore. Then it’s a question of variety, like choice of color. “You can have any color as long as that color is black,” Ford said, and soon after lost the lead in car manufacturing. Perhaps when business slowed, they tried to make their sales and marketing or administrative organization more efficient. They didn’t re-asses whether the thing they were doing so right (building cars so efficiently)… was the right thing. The effective thing.

Efficiency is important, but powerless without effectiveness. Always keep an eye on effectiveness.

Public Open Source Services

Last night I went off and put up a wiki about an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while: public open source services or POSS. Think: public services or utilities on the web run as open source.

Unlike open source software, web services aren’t just source code. They’re source code that runs. They have to be maintained in order to keep running, and the resources they consume have to be paid for. This is why most web services are built using a business as the vehicle. This effectively constrains what you can build by framing it as something that needs to turn a profit or support you to work on it. But does it need to be that way? Can web services be built in a way that make it self-sufficient? Not needing some ambivalent leader to take responsibility for it?

I originally blogged about it in February 2007, 6 months after I first wrote about webhooks. Unfortunately my old blog isn’t online right now. Back then, I was trying to solve the administrative problem. How do you maintain the servers in an open source way? My idea then, was to build a self-managing system using something like cfengine or Puppet, where the recipes and configurations are kept with the publicly available source code. As new configurations are checked in, the server(s) adopt the new directives and continue to self-manage.

The practicality of such a setup is a little far fetched, but seemed pretty feasible for smaller projects. However, since the release of Google App Engine, this concern for simple web applications has disappeared. Google just automates the system administration, and scaling! This means to run the app, you just have to write the code and hit deploy. That’s a huge step! Administration concerns? Pretty much solved.

The next thing is the financial concern. How do you pay for it? Or rather, how does it pay for itself? This took longer to figure out, but here we are. From the wiki essay:

You use the same Google Merchant account that App Engine debits as the one that accepts donations. This way no bank account is involved. Then you track the money that goes into the account (using the Google Merchant IPN equivalent). Then you look at your usage stats from the App Engine panel and predicate future usage trends. Then calculate the cost per month. Then divide the cash in the account by that and you have how long the service will run. You make this visible on all pages (at the bottom, say) that this service will run for X months, “Pay now to keep it running.” You accept any amount, but you are completely clear about what the costs are. And this is all automated.

Take the humans out of the loop! (That’s a WarGames reference)

Then you rely on the same sort of community approach of open source to contribute to the application. Like a few members of the project community are given certain rights, some will be given permission to deploy the app from time to time for updating the running service.

If the service isn’t useful, nobody uses it, it’s not paid for, it disappears. If it is useful, people will pay for it to keep it running. They are assured they are paying operating costs, which are significantly lower than most because it doesn’t include paying for human resources! Volunteers might need to meddle with settings, but otherwise, the coders are in control and the community accepts or denies changes made by whoever wants them.

So if this is interesting, read the full essay I wrote up on the wiki. It’s been my intention to prototype and validate this model with many of my projects.

Prepare for posts; I’m speaking at SXSW

Last week I got an email that said my SXSW speaking proposal was accepted. Strangely, my joy was coupled with a bit of disappointed. After the PanelPicker closed, I felt like I didn’t market my talk well enough. That combined with my OSCON proposal being denied, I felt there was no chance I was going to speak at SXSW. However, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the sound of it. I’ve had such a busy year going to conferences, speaking, writing, and building stuff. You all realize this webhooks stuff doesn’t pay, right? I was actually looking forward to not having a huge stressful talk to worry about.

But now I do! Lucky for you, I’ve decided to make it a really great talk. I’ve started work on it immediately and will be developing it probably up until March.

What is the talk? It’s not another “WebHooks are the Future” talk. Well it is, but in disguise. I’ve decided to focus on context. Like I mentioned before, all that vision stuff usually at the end of my talks will come front and center. The talk is called: How WebHooks Will Make Us All Programmers.

In order to describe this, I’ll need to first explain webhooks to those that are unfamiliar. I feel this is getting easier and easier as I gain experience and more tangible examples pop up, like PubSubHubbub and TweetHook. However, I’ll have to take it up a notch further because I won’t have that much time to talk about them. Before I can explain how webhooks will make us all programmers, I also have to share why this is worth doing at all. I have to explain why we should all be programmers.

Yay! It’s a sort of philosophy of computer science. I mean, that’s the stuff I really love talking about, so why don’t I go all out? Well I will.

But I have a lot of work in front of me. I need to finish building more examples. I’ve finally gotten to a point and built enough infrastructure where I can really start showing the power of webhooks through examples. I need to develop a super concise explanation of webhooks, probably something visual and animated — a mini presentation within a presentation. I also need to start practicing speech again. The last time I went without practice it was a disaster, despite getting my point across.

Part of my preparation will involve lots of writing and sharing on this blog. I need to prototype and validate individual ideas before I bring them all together in an epic talk. That’s the only way to make it as awesome as it should be. It also means there will be lots of follow up material for attendees.

So at the very least, my goal is to post something relating to the ideas in this talk once a month. And your feedback will be much appreciated.

The domain experience is about to get upgraded

It’s near time for slutty domain registrars and confusing DNS hosts to die in a fire.

I’ve wanted to reinvent the domain registration and management experience for a while. Every time I use what’s out there now I die a little inside. I have over 100 domains and I register new ones fairly often. Here’s my current experience:

I start with Instant Domain Search when I think of a domain or need to come up with a domain. Real-time check-as-you-type really helps you in the brainstorming process. There’s actually nothing wrong with this. It’s the most fun part of the experience, but it ends here.

Then I register. If it’s not a fancy TLD like .io or something, I use the registrar that I have most my domains with: Cheap Domain Registration. This is perhaps the worst part. It’s basically a GoDaddy reseller that I stumbled across a long time ago and started registering domains with. Since I’d rather not have my domains across several crappy registrars, I’ve decided to stick with them. Plus, it’s such a frickin pain to transfer domains. I’ve done it a few times and I still don’t even know how it works.

Anyway, it’s effectively GoDaddy, which is the most popular registrar. I don’t exactly know why. It’s probably the sluttiest of them all. It’s so noisy, fake, and slow. Decent prices, but of course they’re going to try and upsell you in every way possible. They got me once because I was in a hurry and I clicked the wrong thing. It’s at least (yes, they give you the option for more) 3 pages of upsell offers.

However, it does have good support, which is important because DNS and domains are such a pain to novices. I sort of like the fact they call me sometimes after registering asking if I got everything set up. I told them never to call me again, but that I’m happy they’re doing that.

That good karma goes out the window when you try and manage your domains. This is the slowest part, and the second worst part of the experience next to avoiding all the upsell traps. Luckily I don’t need to use it ever except for DNS.

Now, it’s nice of them to provide free DNS, but it’s so hard to get to and so clunky once I’m there. I usually want to use EveryDNS just for that, but I still have to use their interface to point my domain to EveryDNS. I also tend to use their web redirect for making naked domains go to www, since each one of those would use up my limited number of records on EveryDNS. So I’m stuck with them for that usually.

Once I’ve got it pointed to EveryDNS, it’s pretty okay. The EveryDNS interface is not so pretty, but it’s quick and to the point. I remember getting a bit confused in the early days, partly due to the interface and partly due to DNS not being the most user friendly of technologies. Unfortunately my free account can only have 20 records, including web redirects. I should probably just donate and get that lifted, but I suppose I’m lazy. I usually just swap out domains I’m not using anymore, or end up using my registrar’s DNS for simple domains.

In the end I’m using up to three systems, DNS and registration both being quite a hassle, particularly in the setup. But if you register a lot of domains, make a lot of sites, you’re in setup mode quite a bit. There are a lot of things that could be better, from the UI to the sales process. It could all be one nice solution that’s just done right.

So I decided to start working on that. It’s called domdori, which is short for “domains done right.” The core experience looks like this:

You find a domain with real-time search. Then you use Amazon 1-click payment to buy the domain right there. You now have the domain. The default records don’t make your new domain point to some ugly, slutty landing page advertisement. The default landing page is whatever you make it. In fact, the DNS settings can default to whatever you want. You get not only an advanced DNS manager UI for power users, but a very straightforward DNS manager UI with smart defaults and complexity abstracted away for most users.

That alone would just completely make my day, but there’s more (in a “less” sort of way). Only, we’ll save that for later. Until then, a public alpha of domdori is approaching…

Need icons for filetypes? Hotlink from stdicon.com

This is about ten days old, but still worth mentioning. I was working on PostBin trying to support file uploads. I realized I really wanted to have icons for the files to help differentiate them from other POST params and make it feel more polished. Of course, this would mean I’d have to find icons for the popular file/mime types … and if I were going to do that, I might as well build a service … but I didn’t want to build a service.

I turned to Twitter. In that past, I’d mentioned wanting something and somebody actually built it (using my tools no less). I figured this was a bit more work than last time, but it couldn’t be that much more. So I gave it a shot and tweeted it. Next thing I know, Paul Tarjan is on it. Some hours later: stdicon.com

I’m credited at the bottom, but really, I just had the idea and came up with the domain. Paul wrote all the code and even collected all the icons (and manually uploaded them to the app). We discussed implementation details over IM, but that was it. Pretty rad!

The idea is that given a file extension (“txt”, “gif”, etc) or a mimetype (“text/plain”, “application/zip”, etc) you can get a resizable icon by putting together a simple URL, like http://www.stdicon.com/mp3?size=16 or from a particular icon set http://www.stdicon.com/neu/html?size=64. Here are some examples from various sets:

Nuvola set:
Apache set:
Crystal set:

And that’s it! Paul wrote a post about it. Somebody requested a simple API for just doing the mimetype to file extension conversion, so Paul added it. Strangely, the same day, MIME API was released. That’s fine. Just means stdicon can focus on icons.

Anyway, I pulled this same stunt just the other day, using Twitter to get more cool infrastructure built, but I’ll have to write about it later.