We had more downtime than expected yesterday and today as we moved to a new host. But we’re up now. We’ll post more about the move to Joyent after a few days of experience with it.

A venture capital firm called today. It turns out that we’re not quite hot enough for VC investment yet.

VC: “So we typically invest in companies with at least $500,000 in quarterly revenues…”

Me: “HA!”

Though I won’t be buying a Porche and an eight ball tonight, the call was productive. The partner I talked to was friendly and informative. He said that we should get seed or angel rounds of funding then talk to VCs.

It was nice of them to call though. We must be doing something right if we look expensive enough for a reasonably well known VC to call us up unsolicited.

I do feel like it might be time for us to seek investment to take us to the next level. Having to worry about consulting and day jobs is like driving around with your parking brake on.

9 out of 10 doctors agree, the Newshutch ad placement sucks.

Clearly the main problem is that it takes up a lot of real estate that can’t be reclaimed by scrolling. After using Newshutch today I started to feel the same pain as everyone else. Your eyes scan the bottom of what you’re scrolling, but that static chunk stops you like a brick wall. The result is tension and awkwardness with how your eyes flow over the page.

We did test this before rolling it out, but we fell into the gap between testing a feature and really living with it. Newshutch’s strength is readability; anything that hinders readability must go.

That being said, we’d like to offset our hosting costs. Having two dedicated boxes isn’t cheap. Here are some questions we’d like you the users to help us with:

• Does anybody have experience running an app like Newshutch on a shared grid host like Media Temple grid server or Joyent Accelerator? Our bandwidth and storage needs are small. Newshutch’s overhead is in CPU cycles for parsing feeds and reading/writing them to the database.
• What about charging for an ad free version? What fee structure would be appropriate?
• What if we licensed customized versions of Newshutch?
• Doug and Nathan are always for hire. With more contract work we wouldn’t feel the pinch of hosting costs as much.
• Assuming that ads are a must, where should they go? Here are some options others have come up with:
  • In between every nth post, and at the end of a post with fewer unread items. Does anyone think it’s weird to drop our own ads in between the posts of a publisher’s feed?
  • Under the feed list on the left. The problem with this is that any “skyscraper” style ad wouldn’t work in “scroll panes independently” mode.
  • Only on the “welcome” page. The problem with this is that advertisers won’t pay as much for this kind of placement.
  • At the top of the page. I’d rather not, any opinions?

In the short term we’ll kill the big banner to free up some space so everyone can breathe again. Longer term we’ll take your ideas on how we can make ads not suck or do without them.

Two weeks ago Micah and I went to Palo Alto for StartupSchool (Flickr photos). I’ll spare you a detailed recap of the event since you can get links to notes, transcripts, and audio at the StartupSchool Wiki, but here are some personal observations:

• Mitch Kapor is the world’s coolest and perhaps most virtuous tech entrepreneur. He talked as cheerfully about his failures as he did his successes. The short list of his achievements: Lotus 1-2-3, co-founded the EFF, founded the Open Source Applications Foundation, chairs the Mozilla Foundation. The main point of his talk is that startups tend to believe that they are meritocracies (“we only hire smart people”) when in fact they are “mirrortocracies” (“we only hire young techies that think exactly like us”).
• Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is like a Bizarro Kapor. Zuckerberg’s message was that everyone in a startup must be young, technical, and unattached to family or friends. Tellingly, he was reluctant to talk about Facebook’s shortcomings or difficulties.
• For the first time I wanted a GPS navigator. We got lost twice: once when we took the 99 instead of the 5 north, and once on the way to SuperHappyDevHouse when I missed Sand Hill Road on El Camino. This was embarrassing since Sand Hill Road is both noteworthy and the major cross street of our hotel.
• Wikis are a great way to organize the peripheral ecosystem of a conference. This year the YCombinator Friday night meet and greet with free beer and Trevor Blackwell’s robots was invite only, so people met up by posting stuff to do on the official and non-official wikis.

After StartupSchool we rolled to SuperHappyDevHouse (Flickr photos) which was an informal gathering of many techies in a big house north of Palo Alto. People were demoing projects, coding, talking shop, and having beers. This event was so good that Micah and I resolved to start an Los Angeles sister HappyDevHouse, so if you’re interested, say so in the comments.

Thoughts on Palo Alto and Silicon Valley:

• You need a car to get around. It’s suburbia, not San Francisco.
• The Stanford Park Hotel is fantastic. Come for the bathrobes, stay for the concerige service, late night complimentary coffe with cookies, free wifi, and eggs benedict.
• Scott’s Seafood: also fantastic.
• Silicon Valley contains a fantastic amount of wealth, but it’s not overt like it is in other cities. It’s more of a “still waters run deep” kind of thing.

How to have a great road trip:

• Bring a great copilot/iPod DJ like Micah.

I’m in Palo Alto with Micah for Startupschool this weekend. If you are in Startupschool or Palo Alto I’d love to meet a Newshutch user in person, so say hi or send me an email.

There are lots of developer gatherings this weekend. I’m really looking forward to meetings other tech heads. Being in the bay area makes the dearth of tech in LA pretty obvious, though I guess we make up for it in rock stars and underfed hipsters.

The warning:

I’m writing this post to warn everyone about the horrible experience I had with the domain name registrar Registerfly. If you have any domain names registered with them, stop reading this blog and transfer to a reputable registrar right now.

Top reasons Registerfly sucks:

• Nonexistent and/or incompetent support
• Unreliable DNS and MX administration
• UNBEARABLY bad administrative interface (slow, hangs, random logouts, terrible design)

The story:

Newshutch suffered some downtime this weekend due to a complete screwup by our registrar, Registerfly. I’ve used Registerfly for several years based on a good recommendation, and for most of that time they were fine. Unfortunately you don’t usually think about your registrar until something goes wrong.

On Friday afternoon I started getting notices from Uptime that Newshutch was down, then up, then down again. For me, www.newshutch.com was working just fine. Finally Doug emailed to tell me that newshutch.com was down and www.newshutch.com was working sporadically.

That’s when we realized that our registrar’s DNS records were broken. When we migrated to our new servers several weeks ago we had set “A” (for “Address”) records to resolve to our IP address like so: “*.newshutch.com A [ip]”. On Friday Registerfly decided to start interpreting the “*” as a literal asterisk instead of a wild card, even though it worked correctly in the past. The only thing I could do was create an “A” record for “www.newshutch.com”; there was no way to create a record for “newshutch.com”, so it remained dead.

“Ok fine, I’ll just get in touch with Registerfly support…” I thought. As of today, our support tickets from January 6th are STILL unanswered. I called support several times and got busy signals. Finally I did get through and had the pleasure of listening to dreadful hold music for 58 minutes. Finally some guy answered, but communication was difficult thanks to his heavy accent, the loud din of his bullpen, and what I assume was shoddy trans-global VOIP. I could not make the support guy understand my problem. He kept putting me on hold, presumably to talk to someone on his end with expertise, and then he’d ask me to try something that would fail. Finally I gave up and decided to transfer to a new registrar.

If you Google “Registerfly” many of the top results are sites about how incompetent and/or crooked Registerfly is. I prefer to assume total incompetence instead of malice, but that doesn’t mean they get a second chance.

We’ve been having some trouble with our DNS provider this weekend. We’ll let you know when it’s resolved.

We should be back up. It may take a while for DNS to propagate, so until then we’re redirecting from our old host to the ip address of our new host.

Tomorrow, December 16th, we will be down while migrating to a new host. Hopefully you will be outside getting fresh air instead of checking news feeds

We’ll be back up ASAP.

Sorry for the downtime today, the hard drive in our web server died. That server always was flaky, it would totally lock up every 2-3 weeks and require a hard reboot. An iffy hard drive could have been the reason for that flakiness, but it’s hard to say when you don’t physically have the machine in front of you.

Our hosting company took about 3 hours (grrr…) to get a new hard drive in. After that, Doug worked like mad to restore everything. Our database server was fine so we didn’t have to restore backups.

Thanks to Doug for a heroic Saturday afternoon save, and thanks to everyone for your patience.

A couple of days ago I posted about deleting my Yahoo account. I wasn’t able to delete it because the Yahoo delete account form is broken. Five days and many emails to customer service later it’s still broken, and I have yet to hear from customer service.

Thanks Yahoo.

A while back we accidentally broke our delete user form. However, when someone emailed to complain I was horrified and apologetic, and we addressed the issue right away. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you treat the customer right when something goes wrong they can actually end up with a better opinion of you.

Two helpful Newshutch users emailed about this today. The only bug I see is that it breaks the “Go back to the original page” link on the subscribe confirmation page.

Alex Muntean sent me JavaScript that will automatically set up Newshutch as the default Firefox reader, so that when you click on the RSS icon in the URL bar Firefox will submit a subscription request to Newshutch.

The script in action: Click to automatically set up Newshutch in Firefox 2.0.

User Nogg3r5 posted the way to do it by hand on his blog.

Thanks Alex and Nogg3r5!

Today I killed my Yahoo and MySpace accounts. Ahhhhh… cleansing.

As a disciple of The David and Merlin, I did it mainly to reduce my number of “buckets”.

I didn’t use Yahoo mail anymore, especially since their old interface was aging badly and their new beta interface is just overbearing.

I quit MySpace because it’s slow, ad bloated, and ugly. The most annoying thing is that friends got lazy and started favoring MySpace as an email client. Another inbox, yuck.

Now, rather than closing my MySpace account, I deleted all my friends so they wouldn’t think I was still there, and I put a short large type message saying “I’m not here anymore, email me at nathan at some domain dot com”. That way if people from my past want to stalk me (the real reason for MySpace’s popularity), they still have the option.

I did need to close the Yahoo account because they don’t offer forwarding with the free account, and I want mails to bounce rather than collect dust. I did have to forward about 30 important archived emails one at a time to my other email account, which was painful. To add insult to injury, their “delete account” page is broken.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t force users to use the nuclear option of closing their account: Let them forward email, export their data, or set their account to “idle”. If Yahoo had let me forward mail they could have kept me as a customer. Instead I HAD to delete my account.
• Lock-in is a bitch: I had maybe 5 years of email in that Yahoo account. Luckily I keep my inbox pretty clean and I only had to forward about 30 archived emails (still sucked though).

  I feel for MySpace users who have spent a lot of time writing blogs, aquiring friends, and posting pictures. MySpace depends on lock-in, so they will never provide a way for people to export their data and jump ship.

  Going forward I plan never to use software or services that don’t allow me to freely export my data. If a company lives by lock-in, it means their product probably sucks anyway.

• I wish someone would develop an open source, peer to peer, social networking service. I don’t know what such a beast would look like, but it couldn’t be worse than MySpace.

Currently we use the ACCESSKEY attribute to create shortcut hotkeys on the “open next” and related buttons visible when you are viewing feeds. The problem is that the keys used to select an ACCESSKEY vary by platform and browser. This means that we have to sniff for different browsers and platforms to show you the correct key combinations.

Now that Firefox will be switching in 2.0 from Alt + key to Shift + Alt + key, ACCESSKEY is officially dead to me.

We’re switching to javascript shortcut keys that will be the same on all platforms. Some of the current keys we’re using like “z” will cause shortcut collisions on some platforms, so the keys will have to change.

Here’s what I’m thinking:
Open Next: CTRL + ,
Mark Read: CTRL + .
Mark Read and Open Next: CTRL + /
Add Feed: CTRL + \

Let me know if you think these combinations are comfortable and if they cause any collisions for you.

Unfortunately, the javascript shortcut keys won’t work in Opera (if anyone knows of a way let me know), though any Opera user that was actually pressing Shift + Esc then the accesskey probably died of fatal carpal tunnel long ago.

Here are some images and code snippets so you can put “add to Newshutch” buttons your site. Download the images to your own server or just link to the images on this page.

To create custom buttons, download this editable EPS file of our logo, or just roll your own. If you create your own buttons, we’d love to see what you come up with, so post links in the comments of this post.

Code for dark background button:

<a href="javascript:location.href='http://newshutch.com/external/add_feed?url='+encodeURIComponent('http://yoursite.com/yourfeed.rss')">
<img src=”http://www.newshutch.com/wp-content/assets/newshutch_add_dark.png” alt=”Add to Newshutch” />
</a>

Code for white background button:

<a href="javascript:location.href='http://newshutch.com/external/add_feed?url='+encodeURIComponent('http://yoursite.com/yourfeed.rss')"> <img src="http://www.newshutch.com/wp-content/assets/newshutch_add_white.png" alt="Add to Newshutch" /> </a>

(Remember to change yoursite.com/yourfeed.rss to the URL of your RSS or Atom feed.)