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Our Ads Move Out to the Wild

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Those of you browsing the html version of this site will probably have already noticed that the new Performancing Partners ad format has moved out of testing to the right hand side of our regular pages. They actually make quite nice navigational tools for the various products and services this site offers…

The next step, as i mentioned to our beta group in email, is to get the generic house ad out onto participating sites — that’s not happening today, but it shouldn’t be long, so if you’re interested in helping us build the Partners network, and getting in at the beginning of a great project, drop your email into the slot on the link above.

Feedback welcome…

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Metrics Signup Bug Fixed

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Just to let you know, that the bug reported by several users that was causing a blank page to appear instead of content after a Metrics account was activated should now be fixed.

I have tried the following,and all appears well:

  • Sign up as new user
  • Go to the /metrics page and hit “Activate Performancing Metrics”
  • Get the “add a blog” page directly after.

If anyone has any further trouble, please report it here, and please include as much detail as possible — really, go to town on the details, “it doesnt work” just isnt that helpful 🙂

Apologies for the inconvenience folks, and thanks to those members that reported and described the issue.

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The Web2.0 Mafia

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I rarely find myself in agreement with AOL’s Jason Calacanis.It’s not that he’s a bad bloke, he just gets on my nerves. He does occasionally have some interesting things to say though, and this post about the “Web2.0 Mafia”, and how the “Web2.0 elite” want to control what we, the masses do, and how we, the masses, get paid, is brilliant. Absolutely spot on.

Despite the fact that Netscape stinks, (and Jason’s offer to pay bookmarkers wont make it any less stinky) his points about the web2.0 elite ring a strong bell with me. I’ve always viewed Mike Arrington’s Techcrunch as a kind of Lord of the Flies meets 1984, where some are most definately more web2.0 than others, and sucking up seems to be the order of the day if you want to BE web2.0

That sucks. Clearly.

I don’t think Jason entirely get’s the reason for many people being against his offer to pay top bookmarkers though. It’s not really about the prospect of being paid (which i strongly suspect he knows damn well), it’s about the slimey way he’s trying to lure away assets (albeit unpaid ones, which is a good point) from something we all love: Digg

There’s a tremendous amount of goodwill aimed at Digg right now, and when someone does something to intentionally hurt it, people will react strongly.

So, in conclusion:

  • Yay for Jason! (just this once hehe..)
  • Boo for Web2.0
  • Yay for the prospect of a less cliquey tech community

Somebody really needs to step up to the plate and produce another great Web2.0 hub — CNet for example…

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Performancing.com Upgraded to Drupal 4.7.2

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At the time of writing, you’ll notice that the author pictures in posts have gone AWOL, and i’ve no idea why, but am working on it. If that’s the only thing that went screwey when transitioning from 4.6.8 to 4.7.2 though, it’s pretty damn good.

The move to Drupal 4.7.2 has taken about a week of coding, and really i’d rather have been doing other things, but if we don’t upgrade, we’ll not be able to use some of the fancy new features in 4.7 — and besides, the dev list are already discussing 4.8, so it’s high time we got it together before we did much more work on Partners.

Forms API — the Biggest Nightmare

By far the worst thing with this upgrade was painstakingly going through all of the Metrics code and updating to the new Drupal forms api. It’s so much easier to do this stuff if you wrote the original code yourself!

It all seems to be working well though, but of course if you spot oddness in anything, do let me know.

Odd Characters?

I had a hell of a time updating the DB. For some reason it just did not want to update nicely on our staging server, despite a flawless execution on an almost identical server here at home. So I had a bunch of fun trying to “beat the clock”, see the sanity checklist for the gory details…

One thing you may notice right away, is that the encoding on the DB is now UTF-8, and we may have a few issues to work out with odd characters showing up in old posts — really we wont know till we’ve all had a chance to use the site for a while whether this is a big issue or a small one, but im aware of it, and am looking out for it.

New Look for Forums

Also, the Forums got a new look. They look much nicer now. In fact, to be precise, it’s more of an old look, as i discovered some long lost CSS that got bungled when we moved to the current server setup. They really are quite pretty now though, and should be more usable too.

Modules and Functionality

If you’re interested in Drupal, and would like to see Performancing.com implement any of the newer functionality or modules, let me know, im open to suggestion.

Feedback

Lastly, please do take the time to report any weirdness, bugs or problem here in this thread, or in the forums

Thanks everyone,

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Netscape Stinks

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Really, it does. It stank when they first relaunched it, and its not getting any better. In fact, as Netscape starts to get desperate, the tech crowd hammer on it and heavyweights call foul, it’s beginning to look like one hell of a wreck.

Theres a lesson here, and it’s a simple one: Clones rarely go down well.

As AOL’s Calacanis continues to Digg a grave for the noisome Netscape, the only real value is entertainment.

Time to call this one a day i think Jason.

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