Matt O’ Rama

Building huge websites

Inside Myspace.com

Wow, if you’re into reading about massively scalable websites, and I am, this is a great article. The numbers Myspace is running up against are just insane. I’m extremely surprised to learn they run everything off of Windows servers with MS SQL Server databases. Their Windows admins’ lives must just be hell. I’m biased though (having a vital Windows2000 server completely die for no reason after a reboot to install an important security patch will do that to you) so they could sleep like babies for all I know. I do wonder how much more they could do with the equivalent Linux servers running Mysql or Postgres. Based on my somewhat limited experience, a lot more. But I’m sure Windows fans would argue, they do that. :)

Zadie Smith on reading

More from Zadie Smith’s essay:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing – I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

I’m going to start a series of posts on reading Any Day Now. After listening to a bunch of literary courses on audiobook and thinking hard about reading in building Unreads, I want to say some things about reading that relate to this topic. More soon.

Unreads First Real User!

So I’m looking at the Unreads.com homepage the other day and what do I see? The site’s first actual user! Click to see Cinqo’s Unreads Stack. Awesome. I have no idea who this person is but from the look of the books on their list, I’m intrigued. They look like my kind of person. Whoohoo!

I’m going to start emailing people today to have them look at the site so hopefully more people will be giving me feedback before too long. I’ve been working on the text and the Help popups and man, it’s hard. I’m very wordy so boiling things down to their essence is tough stuff. It’s useful though, it helps me crystallize my thoughts on the site. You work with something and you have an idea but actually communicating that to people who don’t know anything about the site makes you figure out just exactly what the thing is supposed to do. Unreads can appeal to lots of different people with different uses but I can’t just list a bunch of ways to use the site, it has to pull people in. Hopefully I’ll make enough money off the site eventually to hire somebody to help me out in this area.

Onward and upward.

Tags: grommes, unreads, startup, web2.0, design