Kernest as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

“We Make Shitty Software… With Bugs!…We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. ” – Dave Winer

Kernest, my web fonts service, has been publicly available for just under a month. In that time – it’s earned 400+ users, 200+ websites, and the became the first font service to sell a commercial web font license. An early success in my book.

This afternoon I had a fantastic hour-long phone conversation with a new user of Kernest. They had lots of questions about how it worked and we bumped into a number of bugs. Some I knew how to resolve easily, others require some more thought.

Yep.

There’s lots there.

Ben pointed me to Kent Beck’s recent ‘Approaching a Minimum Viable Product’ post.

“By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.” – Kent Beck

The current state of Kernest validates 3 of my potentially-fatal assumptions:

  1. a font service can resolve browser-compatibilities and provide basic asset protections with a simple, standards-compliant URL. (YES!, better than I hoped)
  2. There are enough liberally licensed fonts of reasonable-quality that a reasonably-sized directory could be boot-strapped. (YES, 300 and counting!)
  3. Some commercial type designers will be happy to test out a web use license. (YES!)

Now that I’ve got those answers, it’s easier to iterate atop them.

Elsewhere:

“Cut it down to the bare minimum for you to do something with it, and ship it. Dog food doesn’t have to be pretty. It’s going to be 75% wrong. That’s the point. Who cares if it’s shit. Eat that dog shit and make it better. The sooner you actually put it up live, eat it, and invite some friends to eat it, the faster you will improve it.” – Jason Goldberg

Dow 10K By Labor Day

Over on the Twitter I’ve been predicting the Dow will hit 10K by Labor Day, with the deadline approaching, I thought I’d show you where my prediction comes from.

10kbylaborday

The light blue is the DJIA from August 2008 – March 2009 (left to right).
The dark blue is March 2009 – Today (right to left).
The green is where I think we’re going over the next 4 weeks.

As you can see – the Dow has been steadily re-tracing its steps all summer. We are now as far away from the March low as when the Dow fell off a cliff in Oct 2008.

We’re not going to see a huge jump (reversing the fall), it’s going to be hard, steady work – notice how much less volatile the market is from last year.

The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators also hit bottom in March, then turned 90 degrees and have been steadily climbing [pdf]. 1% up in April, 1% up in May, .7% up in June. Next week, I expect the Conference Board to announce another .7% rise for July.

Plus, unlike last October – there’s much less uncertainty lurking in the zeitgeist.

No, I don’t think we’ll be approaching the overheated 14k for at least another year, but I think it’s undervalued at anything below 12k.

Good work everyone.

Talking Short URLs with Zack from Nieman Lab

Zack Seward from Harvard’s Neiman Journalism Lab and I talked about URL shorteners yesterday – and the responsibility of publishers to shorten themselves…

“The really, really big benefit in that case is that it’s no longer a redirect…”

…and the additional opportunity for a focused, curated, short URL service….

“he raised an idea that’s been bouncing around in my head since I hung up the phone: What if a short URL were static, but the page it pointed to wasn’t?

You could change the redirect to whatever is catching your interest at the moment or, say, randomly selected links from Andy Baio.

There’d be elements of mystery and serendipity, like flipping the pages of a great magazine, and devotion might center around the URL itself..”

Big thanks to Karl at MinnPost for connecting us.

Shortly Over

“No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.”

I appreciate tr.im’s honesty.

From what I understand, tr.im’s business model was similar to bit.ly’s and – what increasingly feels like – Twitter’s business model: aggregate and sell statistics on how information is being shared on real-time basis.

Measuring word-of-mouse if you will.

Given how fleeting and how nascent the real-time stream is, it feels like trying to measure string pushing.

Sure there’s a result, but if value = effect - effort then the real value (relevance, importance, and significance) – doesn’t unfold until the pushing stops.

To that end – I don’t see tr.im’s (or any other URL shortener’s) breaking the internet for more than 5 minutes.

If anything this shutdown is a reminder that URL shorteners are cheap hacks apologizing for poor content-management-systems, network security risks, and that publishers should be shortening themselves.

Elsewhere, related:

“And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all.” – Pico Iyer

The Rise of the Overextended Class

” I delegate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore politics, sports and pop culture, neglect my family too much and probably don’t do any of my jobs as well as I could. But these are exciting days, and if ever these was a time to be overextended this is it.” – Chris Anderson, Wired Editor

“Our parents and grandparents spent their Cognitive Surplus watching television. That’s a thing of the past… a historical accident of the old factory-worker age meeting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last forever. We humans as a species were designed to compete, not to sit around on our asses.”

“Welcome to the Overextended Class, People…” – Hugh McLeod

I did a quick project inventory and hit a baker’s dozen without missing a beat.
Sure helps explain my 18-hours a day for most of the summer – and unexpectedly – a new steadfast calm.

Kernest.com is Public

Wow.

It’s been an amazing couple of weeks.

Kernest.com is public and is getting some nice uptake.

Thank you all.

I had fantastic weekend in Atlanta at TypeCon2009 talking with font technologists, type designers, and other people building the web fonts marketplace.

Unfortunately, Cullect is down.

Down for the count.

I’m planning a massive rebuild and I’m excited about it. As you might imagine – after a month of heads down development – I’m completely behind on my news and have no idea what’s important. 😉

How to Kill a Frozen Parallels Virtual Machine

Multiple projects have me using Windows more than I’m accustomed to, so I picked up a copy of Parallels and Windows Vista and loaded them up on the MacBook Pro.

My relationship with the MacBook Pro has been trying these past few weeks. Like an aged sitcom introducing a new character – this recent addition isn’t helping.

I found myself with a frozen Vista shutdown this afternoon, and for my own future reference here’s how to terminate a frozen Parallels Virtual Machine (from Parallels knowledgebase)


ps auxwww | grep prl

And grab the processes UUID of the process containing prl_vm_app and curly brackets (it’ll be obvious – especially if you’re only running one virtual machine)

Then

sudo kill [The VM's UUID]

Easy.

Kernest.com, @font-face Service – Now in Private Preview

As I mentioned over at the Kernest blog, I sent out the first batch of emails announcing a sneak preview of Kernest – the @font-face, type-as-a-service project I’ve been working on.

If you’d like to check it out and give your blog a font upgrade, drop me an email and I’ll reply with a password.

The preview will be running until July 16th when I give a public demo at The Foundation– you’re invite. It’s free.

See you there.

What’s Wrong with WordPress?

You know I’m a big fan of WordPress. For nearly 5 years, I’ve considered it the only online publishing platform worth considering.

I’ve built a number of plug-ins for it over the years(WP-iPodcatter, WP-iCal, WP-GotLucky, and WP-CaTT) of which I only use WP-iCal these days.

Since then, WordPress has taken off.

While they still have the 5-minute install, I feel much of the simplicity of the project has been lost.

While huge efforts have been made to make the admin side more usable and approachable, I’ve been having more and more technical issues with each successive upgrade.

Here’s a handful that come to mind immediately:

  • Auto-upgrading FirstCrackPodcast.com to WordPress 2.8 wiped out all 10 of my domains on that server (including my kids photoblog – the Grandparents are not pleased).
  • Even before then, auto-calculating the enclosure data on the podcast has been hit and miss for me (more miss when post is initially saved as a draft).
  • I’m not clear on the difference between Categories and Tags, and I prefer Categories. WordPress.org seems to prefer Tags.
  • No non-RSS/Atom outbound feeds (e.g. iCal, KML, JSON, etc) without use of plugins.
  • XML-RPC payload data is unreliable for me (again, Grandparents are not pleased).
  • Theme injection spam attacks regularly hiding links in my sites.
  • An increasing percentage of the WordPress community that seems just this side of spammers.
  • My WordPress URL Shortening Hack suddenly stopped working.

Now, I’ve no interest in migrating 5+ years of data – across countless installs – out of WordPress. Nor do I see another online publishing project as focused on simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility.

I also have no interest taking my chances on another destructive upgrade.

So, I’m experimenting with some ideas, and so far, I’m feeling optimistic.

RealTimeAds.com Launches at MinnPost.com

MinnPost RealTimeAds

I’m pleased to announce the launch of RealTimeAds.com – a advertising product now in beta testing at MinnPost.com

Karl and I have been building and testing the system for a couple of months now and I’m quite happy with it on three of fronts;

  • It feels like it makes advertising approachable to people and organizations that haven’t considered it within reach before. Especially, extremely small and locallly-focused people.
  • It re-frames publications that already exist (Twitter feeds, blog feeds, etc) as text advertisements, cuz, you know, that’s what they are anyway.
  • It extends the real-time nature of Twitter outside of the Twitter silo, helping those people and organizations to get more mileage out of their tweets.

“Real-Time Ads runs on RSS. So, you use what you are already using-Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, proprietary CMS, whatevs!” – Karl Pearson-Cater

Interested in trying it out? Give MinnPost a call: 612 455 6953.

Yes, the RealTimeAds.com system uses a version of Cullect’s engine tuned for ad serving (verses feed reading).

For those of you following along, RealTimeAds.com is Secret Project 09Q02A.

UPDATE:
Here’s the official RealTimeAds announcement from MinnPost’s Joel Kramer

“Imagine a restaurant that can post its daily lunch special in the morning and then its dinner special in the afternoon. Or a sports team that can keep you up-to-date on its games and other team news. Or a store that could offer a coupon good only for today. Or a performance venue that can let you know whether tickets are available for tonight. Or a publisher or blogger who gives you his or her latest headline. ” – Joel Kramer, MinnPost

UPDATE 2: More from Joel Kramer, this time talking to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

“We do believe Real-Time Ads will prove more valuable for advertising at a lower entry point.”