Nothing malicious going on, AFAIK. The latest version of the Thesis WordPress theme isn’t behaving.
Downgraded Thesis to the working prior version. Will be moving the site to a private virtual server to get more RAM.
Will finish loading the last 2 new price lists – IBM & Sun – after the move.
Sorry about the downtime. Thank you for reading StorageMojo.
Robin
PS: If someone knows HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress and smart web and UI designers, there is a crying need for a professional version of what the Thesis team is trying to do. It is a multi-million dollar market for someone who can deliver a product. Anyone up for getting moderately rich in the next 18 months?
I’ll be your first customer.
Update: StorageMojo is now running on its very own virtual machine. I’m noticing snappier performance – or maybe it is just a light weekend. End update.
You’re offering a multimillion dollar contract? Wow, the blog business is a lot more lucrative than I thought.
Market, Steve, market. But think about it: if 70 – or whatever the number is – million people have blogs. The top 1% care about their time. And a healthy percentage of those people make money blogging or want to.
If 50,000 people buy your professional theme for $250, that’s $12.5M plus $50 annually for maintenance, that’s a $2.5M annuity. Then you’d branch into the corporate blog market. Nice business for a 20 person company. But you’d have to be good – and I know Silicon Valley has the talent.
From the outside looking in, the Thesis people are overwhelmed by success. They didn’t think through their business model when they started and they’d never delivered a product before, but they are maturing. They just don’t have any competition.
Robin
well, this is the first time i’ve been forced out of hiding/lurking i think!
Surely what is meant is “addressable market” i.e the specific slice of spend one can attack and hope to gain, with a specific set of attributes for sale.
I have a long in experiment (i’ll not aggrandise to development) project which a handful of years ago might by default have been considered a “pure storage play”.
The economics of storage have beautifully changed that, at least from a CAPEX P.O.V.
I really don’t “get” the themes market. I see a perceived need, and i see mostly ugly themes and even worse UI.
Personally i find it extremely hard to navigate on some blogs (WordPress) included to entries i *know* are there but elude searches unless there’s a near – unique key i can remember.
So much of the effective UI is really abstract/”high – end” editing. Getting the dots connected *as you write*.
There’s a very popular photography blog out there, where in the first page of entries, remark is made of a connected article, the continuation of which is before the reader. Not a single backlink, for one thing, and i spent a fruitless 40 minutes trying combinations of search terms.
Now, *what is it* about TEN PAGE LONG (A4/Letter mental~ equivalence) first pages on blogs?
There has to be a better way. Not just emulation of press print. Actually having said that, most press print is so highly automated at layout. It’s not called this anymore, but 3B2 is virtually the go-to layout solution for big orgs, govvy, and big newprint. Originally a British company. I could never suss the $50K per seat licenses. Now product buried under all manner of incomprehensible (to my *publisher’s mind*) XML etc etc.
What the heck is so attractive about the “Thesis” theme????
And i know i’m hand – waving, but which CMS is actually easy to use, once you have even a handful of content “dimensions” (by which i mean, i’m borrowing this word privately for now!) just starting with topic, subject or market desmesne “threads” – threads borrowed to mean development of longer story lines such as A bought by B renames product X as Y. Why should a reader have to do the archaeology, or run a full text or even synopsis search when company ABC ought to be allocated it’s own timeline of stories. (hence you get the “dimensions” i’m musing about above, when you create a new shared surface between articles)
My contention is i really do not see attractive usable themes. My own view is i’m rather pleased to be reading StorageMojo today in the older theme. What did it add?
It gets even worse, when you look at photo hosting sites. When they’re not drive – by – compressing your pictures to save them storage space and making them appear uglier than they were, then they are pummeling users with Flash – only hotch-potch UIs (which protect the copyright holder not at all from a screengrab) with floaty bits and bobs and maybe a choice of shade of grey on grey.
You only need look at a blog like Drawn.ca to feel the depth of talent out there in all manners and styles, and one might presume, at all pricepoints. I learned the hard way that the crux of getting something usable is making sure you’re a better *technical designer* than you are either a “web programmer” [ugh!] or a graphic designer. Few people hire technical designers to mediate those skills.
Now, although i’m deliberately not going to guess a recent estimate, why the F is there not a third party market in themes for photo hosting? I think a very big deal of the reason is extremely poor content / markup isolation. Some quite big sites appear to be a homogenous flash front end presenting S3 calls.
Which is bloody useless when you, say as a advertising buyer (not major league, you’ve money and a clue as to licensing, but not money to intermediate with an agency or disintermediate with commissions) looking to draw up a “light table” across dozens or more *professional*, professionally for sale, image stock that’s on some website because “ooh, it’s password protected” “oooh, my clients can order (poorly color matched) prints direct” or oooh, but our art director or principal-client just thinks this mush of grey ion grey and samey expanding picture windows is so AOL in 1995 (cough, “cool”, cough, to the masses)
Robin, forgive my rant. This is a multi year personal bugaboo which i might just get something done about since RAID-Z, ever falling LTO-4 (yeah, why spin rust when low latency deliver necessitates a geo-proximate cloud mirror, and esp. when i believe none of these sites do proper tape backup even on expensive packages) and some not CS-novel, but neat-ish indexing management ideas came to mind.
Failing that, i have to do the same just to put up my own pic sometime soon. Sans the PB scale, naturally!
I think all these blogs and photo hosting sites are way too monolithic in design and integration. Care to save off your blog today as even a simplistic print layout to PDF? Is there a button for that, or do you have to dump the DB, run your own parser, and then run your own XML-FO or equivalent over the top?
I guess, *finally* i don’t want you as first customer. But if i ever get anywhere (and you’d understand why it is appropriate) please consider this my tentative pitch for you to be my CMO.
kind regards, and thanks seriously much for this blog over the years. My only editorial caveat, is, could you please try to report only companies who are capable of saying what they actually sell you, on their website. Or at least wait until you’ve fixed their message to something not 100% content avoidance, necessitiating a sales call cycle. I have a dear pal who’s govvy hatchet man by career, and my favorite salesman by accident. He’s so bloody good at (when he so wishes) saying nothing with the slightest hint of intellectual, idealogical or technical, commitment, a good %ge of the time, leads beat their way back to him just out of downright bloody insatiable curiosity. Then he says what the deal is 🙂
No such accolades for the presentational style of recently mentioned companies here on this blog.
But genuine thanks, all along. This may all be rather “meta” to the usual business of the blog, but it’s high quality self – referential remembrance of a key storage issue i try to factor, albeit in a print communications world: we only save/store what reads nicely AND is laid out readably.
very best from me,
– john