rvavruch

I wrote a piece exploring 37Signals' move off cloud. I tried to understand what it might mean for a company who wanted to do so.

Thanks! I'm glad someone read the T&Cs after all the effort I put into them. :)

Thanks for all the questions. It has really gotten me to thinking about how to navigate the future of the project.

I have a question for all of you. My approach is that we are all understand that there is no such thing as a free service, and that for something like this to be long term sustainable donations (or some source of revenue) is crucial. If people get value from the service then it only makes sense to give back to the service to sustain it.

With this in mind, I'm toying with an idea that I would like to get a temperature check from HN on.

How would you react if, when donations are too low, Haasie serves a single image that requests donations to sustain the service in place of the original anonymously uploaded content, until the required donation level is reached? Once there are enough donations normal service is resumed.

Agreed. I've played with IPFS before. Very interesting, definitely something to consider for the future of Haasie.

Your question honestly got me thinking. If everything goes completely sideways there are a number of shuttering options I can think of.

One is to turn off any new uploads, and just serve the existing content, presumably the bandwidth on old content would be much lower - until some sustainable plan can be devised.

Last resort is to approach the ArchiveTeam mentioned here to see if and we could to setup a maintenance service.

To your side note, yes, I want to promote it on Reddit, as soon as I've added a few more features - like donations.

Hi, your site came up in my research. Although it wasn't clear if it was an actual service or an art project? Keen to hear more about your experiences.

Fair question. I did read the TOCs, and studied the current TOCs of Imgur as well as my hosting company to make sure Haasie's covered the most important aspects.

Imgur atm still allows for NSFW, although presumably this will change. But as it stands the contents of these TOCs are not dissimilar from Imgur's or any other file hosts that allow for NSFW content.

To clarify Haasie is not intended to be a specifically NSFW host - like RedGIF someone here mentioned - but rather to host any legal content, which includes NSFW.

Emphasis here is on legal. The intention behind the TOCs is to specifically prohibit the use of the service for anything illegal or otherwise prohibited by the hosting company. And to state that Haasie will act on any content that is found to be in violation of the TOCs.

Thanks, agreed it will be a challenge.

Thanks, I will check them out.

My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.

Thank you! My thinking is to start with donations. There is no such thing as a free service. If people get value from using it to upload anonymously and they want to keep it going, makes sense to donate.

In the future I could also add a subscription account for additional features, access to an API, bigger upload limits, transformations, greater ability to organise, etc.

That's a fantastic idea, thanks!

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I second GraphicsMagick over ImageMagick. In PHP found it performed especially well when executing through exec() rather than the extension.

See Gifsicle [1] for easy animated GIF resizing, which I found buggy in both IM and GM.

[1] https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/

I certainly wouldn't suggest this method in place of a proper deployment strategy for serious development.

There are problems with this method, but, for a hobbyist who hand codes a small static or very simple site, I think it would be fun. Magic internet stuff.

The interesting idea for me was not just auto-syncing files onto a remote server, but onto a web server. It's obvious once you think of it, but I hadn't thought of it before.

Have a look at Docker (http://www.docker.com/), I was introduced to it recently and it looks like a powerful yet simple alternative to Chef or Puppet.

A commenter on my blog post suggested Syncthing (http://syncthing.net/) as an alternative.

Will give this a go next time. I have been using Lucidchart http://www.lucidchart.com/ which is one of the better diagramming tools I've tried.

This is what makes me question the colour blind theory. Although they are very strong in places, the colours all work together.

If he was colour blind surely there would be patches of green and patches of non-green instead of smooth colour. How could he possibly match the same colours over and over again each time he mixed his paints if he couldn't tell the difference?

I've been using PassPack for a few years. It allows you to generate random passwords with your choice of # of characters and type. My default setting is 14 chars of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and punctuation. Then if the site complains I scale back, no punctuation, less chars, etc.

This does mean that 90% of the time I need to go to PassPack before I can login anywhere. Recently I've also wondered if a public key solution could work in a browser. That would be fantastic.

Chicken and egg. Designers will not use a format not supported by the majority of browsers and browsers see no need to implement new formats unless people are asking for them.

It goes against the web design principle of making your site usable to all users regardless of what they are browsing with to use an image format that is not widely supported. This principle is backed by users who will simply leave your site in disgust if they are asked to jump through hoops to use it. Very few designers will be willing to maintain two versions of all their images just because one of the formats is a bit smaller.

Microsoft has it's own range of newish web image formats that never caught on. History suggests IE is unlikely to support anything "not made here" unless it is forced to. The competition to Microsoft's image formats, JPEG2000, never caught on either. Firefox has an infamous open bug about adding it in dating back to 2000: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36351 - over 11 years! Despite what it looks like in the last comment, my Firefox 8 still does not have support.

The last image format that managed to make it was PNG, and that was almost over a decade ago, although alpha support in PNG was added comparatively recently to IE. Last time I checked MNG (PNG's answer to animated GIFs) still wasn't widely supported.

Sorry to be such a downer, lack of support for JPEG2000 was a let down for me. As I see it Firefox, Opera and Safari will all need to support this first, before web designers in general will even consider using it. Only once a significant number of web designers are clamouring for it will IE slowly add support for it. Only then will it see wide use.

Tool support is vital too, most importantly Adobe PhotoShop. No web designer I know of is going to muck about in the commandline with imagemagick.

WWHD?

I second Sloppy. I've found it very useful for debugging Flash errors that only happen occasionally. By slowing the loading sometimes them become reproducible. It's also useful to see how a webpage loads on a slow connection - for example: is your copy legible before your background image has loaded?

That bugged me too. I like your solution, and I think it would look more interesting graphically.

I agree he's missing the point.

"Do what you love" might be better put: Make your money doing something related to what you're most passionate about.

So if you're into sex, coffee, reading, writing and travelling - write a hedonists travelling blog while you're doing it. Or move to Costa Rica and open an online boutique store where you sell only the finest local coffee to other aficionados. Or coffee and books about sex. Or create a community site (see Ravelry) where people who share your passions can mingle.

I think the idea is that doing something that feeds your passion is a reward in of itself. And because you're passionate about it you will enjoy to putting more effort in and thus have greater chance being successful.

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There are a few for free as well: http://www.gog.com/en/catalogue#all_genres/price/0/

I found "Designing Interfaces" disappointing. It is a list of interface widgets - for example an accordion menu - and some information about how to use it.

A far better book on usability is "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.