The project involved doing a complete rewrite of the code, which was originally written in PHP, and rewriting it in Ruby on Rails. The functionality of the application is more or less the same as it was before, except for a few added features that are primarily in the back-end to give Darren an easier way of administering the whole thing. We also updated the design from the old look to adapt the new look of the new ProBlogger design.

One of the primary reasons for doing this project is to give the back-end code a lot more extensibility, which is key in projects where you want to one day expand and improve on. Now that the thing’s written in Rails, there are a ton of possibilities which can be followed for the Job Board, some of which will be explored. So stay tuned for cool, new features to come!

It’s no secret that many will feel a twinge of anger to know that millionaires, meaning people with, oh, $2.5 million in the bank, for instance, are still continuously worried about their financial well-being. Part of this stems from jealousy, which is natural, and part of it comes from the fact that you can’t help but feel sorry for these people who continue to work 70-80 hour work weeks even when they can retire to a life of relative comfort.

On the other hand, after reading several posts talking about how they basically “can’t possibly imagine how one could continue to work so much when they have millions of dollars in the bank”, I was reading a paragraph in a particular post, which says:

It is disappointing that the NYT article is so one-sided in its decision to portray rich SV folks in such a shallow light. Not that what they wrote isn’t true, and not that I feel any differently. I just have a hunch there are at least a few people reading that piece, feeling frustrated that their charitable efforts, good work ethics, family values, etc are being ignored. Unfortunately, I think the article was all-too-easy to write and the story they tell was all-too-easy to substantiate.

I would have to agree with this, in that I’m sure there are an equal number of Valley millionaires who have since retired after getting their fair share of wealth.

It seems to me that the people who were profiled in the NY Times article are the type of people who simply enjoy working (i.e. workaholics). People with these characteristics exist everywhere, and it’s not surprising that the elite group of millionaires would have its fair share of them.

If put in very simple terms, I would say that there’s one group of wealthy Valley people who got their millions by being at the right place at the right time (i.e. Broadcast.com and Mark Cuban comes to mind, which sold to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion; the website is now defunct), and then there’s another group of people who would work as hard as possible no matter how much money they had, which I would say are the people who were profiled in this article.

It’s actually entertaining and annoying at the same time to see people from the Valley who continuously strive to make their first million (I’ve seen my fair share), maybe because their neighbor has reached the $10 million ‘milestone’. Up here in Toronto, at least in the neighborhood that I live in, people are very down-to-Earth. I keep my stress levels low by only talking ‘business’ when I’m at my computer and at certain times of the day; I wouldn’t know how to manage my life otherwise. (The next time I meet someone who is a workaholic and expects me to be one, I’m going to tell them to ‘chill the f**k down’.)

Anyways, I find it disturbing, and yet, refreshing, to find that at least these people are people who are deserving of their millions, and who (at least claim that they) enjoy working 70-80 work weeks. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t!

A large number of the applications that I’ve built from the ground up with a partner (who wishes to remain nameless) consists of one group, which are basically TV shows, and another group, which contain several sports.

Some of our television shows applications include gems such as Dane Cook, Family Guy, and Harry Potter, just to name a few, with the first two reaching nearly 200,000 users each.

Our sports offerings include major sports including baseball, football, and hockey, with each passing the 100,000 users mark just recently.

The great thing about having a network of applications instead of one or two big ones is that they all help each other out in increasing the number of users for each one because of the heavy inter-linking going on between all of them.

We’ve been pushing out major updates every few days since we first launched these applications, and it’s been a wild ride so far. As long as we continue to please our users, I have no doubt that our growth rate will stay steady for quite some time.

With every new feature that we add to our applications, the stickiness gets better and better, which results in users returning to our applications, looking for more things to do.

So, that’s that. It’s what I’ve been working on recently. And hopefully some good will come out of it.

(A full list of all of our applications are listed at the top of every one of our applications, so if you feel like checking them out, then install one of our Sports applications for our sports apps, and one of our TV Shows applications for our TV Show apps.)

I’d like to thank Tony for giving me the opportunity to write there - it’s been a great experience the whole time!

Every person there will have equal equity in the company that they build. This is absolutely insane - 70 equal founders of this one company where they just decided on the company’s first product in one meeting? This is going to be one heck of an interesting experiment to keep an eye on!Personally, I don’t think that anything great will come out of this group. No matter how great every one of them are as developers, it is near impossible to co-ordinate well with that many people.

I predict that people in the group will end up befriending only a handful of people - maybe 3-4 - and then code a small module of the final product together. If they do work like this, then they have a chance of building something that’s more useful than what a thousand monkeys could produce if they jammed out on keyboards!

One thing that I can picture, though, is that many of them will build startups of their own with new people that they meet from the experience, which I would imagine will be the most valuable thing to come out of the whole event.

You can see them working, live, at Ustream.

I won’t mention any specific Application names right now, but hopefully we’ll hit the half-million-users point soon in terms of the total number of users that we have across all of our Applications. A few of our applications are even in the top 100 most popular application list.

You may also have noticed that my Facebook profile has recently been having a major make-over. No, it’s not turning into a MySpace profile! I’ve just been testing out so many Facebook Applications that I end up just leaving them there

I’m also building a few Applications for other people as well; a few are in the education world, helping students with their notes, and others are more oriented towards the business-minded people.

Hopefully I’ll have fancy graphs and statistics to show in the near future

First of all, I’d like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to work there. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I take away with me experiences and relationships that I will use for the rest of my life.

In a way, this event is perfect for me. Now that I have more time available to myself, I’ve invested it into my own projects that I have planned for quite some time (most of which are still under wraps!) I also have several projects that I have been working on but had to put on hold because of my work at b5media, so now I can spend more time to focus on them.

Anyways, thanks, muchos gracias, to everyone who has been involved with my experience over at b5media. It’s been fun, but I can only work at the same place for so long!

Plus, I get bored easily, so I try to spice things up by changing the platforms that I work on and such (I primarily used WordPress over at b5media). Which, leads me to my next point… I’m building Facebook Applications now. Read on by clicking here!

This is unfortunate. I have had similar-but-not-as-bad issues with the Facebook platform and with Applications that I have on there, which I will post about hopefully sometime in the near future.

I think that it’s important to take advantage of the news feeds of your application’s users that are available to you because these are published to the friends of all of your users. This will have to be the next big goal for Facebook Application developers because Facebook has now add a limitation to only allow up to 10 invitations per application to be sent out by each user, per day.

This is very disappointing indeed.

TechCrunch mentions that being a member of a social network is thought to be mutually exclusive, meaning that there can only be one major growth leader in the world of social networks. With Facebook booming as much as it has been lately, one would assume that other networks such as MySpace and Friendster would slow down in growth, but that is not the case. I somewhat agree on this.

The one thing that I do completely agree on with VentureBeat is that social networks are finding new markets in places where there previously were no real reigning social network to begin with. Places like the Philippines and Malaysia have people that are attracted to Friendster, which is probably partially fueled by the fact that Friendster is already one of the social networks of choice in China, whereas Facebook is not nearly as popular as it is in the United States.

This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

People have been saying that this is in response to Facebook, but in my opinion, if done properly, an application could be developed that would merge the best of both worlds from Facebook and LinkedIn to create a hybrid of sorts. Now THAT could be potentially a very useful application to many people, including myself!

When you’ve got the audience that Facebook has (20 million unique users each and every month, and counting) and you give them all access to your application, which is hosted on your own servers, then something has got to give if your application becomes even mildly popular.

An excellent case of this is the Facebook Application, “Where I’ve Been“, which allows you to create a map of the world and highlight what countries you’ve visited. The creator, Craig Ulliott, says that his application has been installed by nearly half a million users, and the bandwidth costs are nearing $500 a month. That’s a lot of money, considering that he doesn’t make a cent from the application (besides the fact that he solicits PayPal donations in the application).

One blogger believes that Facebook should start a revenue sharing program to help cover costs incurred by the application developer, to make it more fair. This sounds like an acceptable solution; I’d like to see independent developers be able to develop Facebook applications, let them become successful, and not run into issues paying for hosting when the application actually becomes popular.

Kevin Rose of Digg and Revision3/Diggnation fame is leading the pack in terms of number of votes by an extremely large margin, with 293,422 (the runner-up is Mel Karmazin, the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio, with 90,229 votes.) Even with the large number of votes, Kevin is only in 9th place in terms of his rating, whereas Mel is 5th.

In the ratings department, Justin Kan from Justin.tv is leading the pack with a 88/100 rating, with the always egoistic Jason Calacanis formerly of Weblogs Inc. at 80/100.

The thing that I’m most surprised about is the massively disproportionately number of votes that Kevin has received, considering that there are other people in the list that are much more well known than him, including Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc., Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

I guess this goes to show just how far the power of the Digg effect can come into play?

There’s already been quite a bit of criticism about this, most recently from Mathew Ingram, who’s post is entitled “Kawasaki: How I wasted $12,107 on Truemors“. In my opinion, he’s pretty much gotten it spot on; I agree that Truemors is a pretty pointless endeavor, once you look past the fact that it’s founded by Guy. (The multiple TechCrunch posts increased the site’s exposure to me, more than anything else. Those gave it way more hype than it deserved.)

To most people, this sounds like a glowing success story of a web startup, but to be honest, there are certain levels of web startups. There’s the kind where you need to launch it with several partnerships with major corporations before you can even get off the ground (a la Joost) and then there’s the kind where all you really need is a credit card in order to get something up and going. In the case of Truemors, we’re in the latter category.

The way I see it, someone like Guy could spend $12,000 on a web startup such as this because he can afford it more than most other people who are still in their college dorms and want to birth a startup of their own soon (like me!). Also, he’s gotten more flak for making this post than other people would get obviously because of his popularity.

There are many more posts out there that are just like this, which make claims that seem amazing to the blog author but which are unspectacular to those who are more savvy, which is precisely why we need to continue spreading the word on the wonders of open source software!

The good thing was that whenever the blogroll was requested by a website, the same data would always be sent (in XML format - what else?). The reason that the blogroll may look different on several websites is because each website parses the XML file differently. This enabled us to cache the blogroll XML data that is returned, since it is not dynamic; it only changes if we add/modify/remove a channel or a blog.

Average load times

Before optimization

Before optimizing the blogroll, these were the average load times that it took to load the blogroll with the old code, when it ran 2500 times:

• 5.9277107715607 seconds
• 5.2258749008179 seconds
• 6.9043378829956 seconds
• 8.450049161911 seconds
• 6.729789018631 seconds
• 6.3227508068085 seconds
• 5.4357509613037 seconds
• 7.2524189949036 seconds
• 7.7171530723572 seconds
• 6.8039338588715 seconds

After optimization

After optimizing the blogroll, here are the average load times that it takes to load the blogroll with the new, optimized code, when it ran 2500 times:

• 1.349152803421 seconds
• 1.3284649848938 seconds
• 1.1611139774323 seconds
• 1.3144729137421 seconds
• 1.2075929641724 seconds
• 1.1899409294128 seconds
• 1.3266270160675 seconds
• 1.297404050827 seconds
• 1.2125298976898 seconds
• 1.1947700977325 seconds

Numbers speak louder than words (but actions come as a close second). Keep in mind that the times shown above represent the times that it takes for the blogroll to execute 2500 times (meaning, it takes roughly 1 second to load the blogroll 2500 times. That’s a lot of b5media-blogroll-lovin’!)

This is just yet another testament that caching and optimization can really do you some good, even if it may be a minor change that you’ve made to your code. I used to just write code without any considerations regarding caching and optimization of the code (this was quite a while ago). Eventually, I learned that by simply spending a few minutes to cache data, it can save all of your website’s visitors some time, and little by little, that time adds up.

Resources

Here are some great resources that you can use to cache some of your own data:

• for caching PHP in general, use Turck MMCache
• for caching on WordPress, download and install the WP-Cache plugin

Tutorials

• Caching Result Sets in PHP: Cost-efficient PHP acceleration
• Output Caching with PHP
• Use a mirror for hits from popular websites

(Oh, and there was no screwdriver involved. Doh!)

During this time, I’ve learned a few things about the guys (and girl) of b5. For instance, we discovered that Chad really loves Facebook (and made us all use it), that Darcie tells great stories even when she’s drunk, and that Darren has a photography blog! Who would’ve thunk?!

See also posts from other participants of these events:

• Technosailor
• Ensight

Like the CEO of b5media says, I am the newest addition to the b5media team! I really look forward to working with everyone there, and I intend to learn a lot during my employment.

Now, first off, here’s a bit of background information and other spiel on b5media, straight from its website:

b5media (www.b5media.com) is a global new media network featuring more than 150 blogs on a wide variety of subjects ranging from entertainment and news to technology and sports. With content written by passionate people from all over the world and visited by more than two million unique visitors a month, b5media is among the world’s largest online new media networks. b5media is based in Toronto.

Since I am making this post a few days after my first day of work, I’m going to also talk a little bit about my experience so far at the company - if it even deserves a label that’s colder than b5 really is. I’d call it more of a… family of people who… have never met… and love working with each other? Yeah, that sounds about right! There hasn’t been much work required in integrating me into this tight-knit group of people, and so, since Monday, it’s been a great ride thus far!

Waiting for my first day of work at b5media to arrive felt like waiting for New Year’s Day. It very much felt like it was going to be a big milestone in my life, and I still feel that it is. It’s basically MY New Year’s Day - a fresh start, a new mindset, and exciting, brand-new challenges await me! Of course, the weather apparently agrees with me, because I had the ‘privilege’ to walk, bus, and ride the subway (underneath) the blanket of snow that hit Toronto the very same Monday that I started work.

To be perfectly honest, out of all of the existing blog networks out there, I was much more familiar with Weblogs Inc. and Gawker than with b5media, so a little pitch was required from Jeremy in order to convince me - but only a little, because his vision for the company really clicked with me once he started talking. Of course, once I actually became a part of the company, I, then, REALLY began to start seeing where this company was heading. And now, I’m excited. VERY excited. I hope that this will be an awesome ride for me - in fact, I’m certain of it.