next*

Hey everyone, Ernie here - among other duties, I'm one of the good folks who help set up Next*.

This is just a quick post to let you know that we currently have a small bug in our system where if your blog comment has an apostrophe, your comment goes straight into our spam folders. As apostrophes are used commonly - especially in blog comments - we'll get this fixed as soon as we're able to.

Unless you're the commenter writing about home loans and viagra. In which case, we are actively censoring your content. You know who you are. (As a footnote, this might be the first time ever that the word "viagra" has ever been mentioned on a Yahoo! blog, albeit ironically.)

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience!

Good News, Everyone!
Looks like I've got the comment bug fixed. I'm not particularly happy about what was happening or the fix that had to be made, but things should be working fine now. As an added bonus, looks like your quote bearing comments weren't lost, they were merely buried behind the shed, so I've recovered them. (Well, most. There were a few spammer comments in there.)

Needless to say, if you still have problems, leave a (obviously quote free) comment and I'll try to fix it without swearing as much as I did this time.

jr conlin
(back-end monkey)

Popularity: 7% [?]

Since 2000, Joel Spolsky has been writing intelligently about how to do software development. That was also the year he founded Fog Creek Software in a Brooklyn brownstone (the NYC equivalent of a Silicon Valley garage) with his co-founder and partner, Michael Pryor.

Fog Creek Software is an interesting anomaly -- a New York City-based artisan software shop in a world of global technology players and collaborative networks of open source development. By all accounts, Fog Creek builds elegant products that are useful and responsive to the needs of software development teams.

Spolsky is highly regarded in the software industry, and his posts are circulated among developers I know, not just because his insights are valuable, and delivered in a palatable, entertaining style, but also because he walks his talk.

Fog Creek makes a strong commitment to quality of service. Shunning buzzwords, they opt for straightforwardness and humor. Lacking the mega-perks of a large corporate environment, Fog Creek treats programmers like rock stars, providing Aeron chairs and free lunches.

You could say that Joel is a poster child for software marketing 2.0: his style is quintessentially conversational, personal, and distributed. He shares his wisdom and experience widely. He stays focused, without cultishness or clutter. One is confident he still remembers how to write quality code. And he values good writing and clear documentation – he says as much.

The philosophy of customer service at Fog Creek is exemplary. Personally, I love Joel's post about the origins of his loyalty to Land's End – an archetypal customer satisfaction teaching story, in which Land's End exceeds expectations by fixing a time-sensitive problem that wasn't even their fault. At their own expense. As Joel says:

"When customers have a problem and you fix it, they’re actually going to be even more satisfied than if they never had a problem in the first place."

Seriously.

If you can't buy attention, sometimes you can earn attention by sharing what you know, and meeting people's need for knowledge. Which is why I signed up to attend the FogBugz World Tour presentation when it passed through town a month or so ago – in an unexceptional corporate hotel meeting room, on a sunny fall morning in Silicon Valley. Spolsky's online work engaged my attention. That's why I wanted to see his demo.

There's much that big companies can learn from the little guys about building and maintaining relationships. Sharing knowledge openly. Giving good stuff away.

Stay tuned.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Like most large software and web development teams out there, Yahoo! has an internal bug tracking system. Once in a while, funny bugs get filed. For example, this "bug" about the Widget Badge Creator page reports that the page has "too much unused space."

The person who filed this bug was thoughtful enough to add a screenshot, indicating where the unused space was. A Widget engineer (and friend of mine) named Laurie responded promptly to close the bug. "The page looks as designed. This is not a bug," he wrote.

I've dubbed this the "Not Enough Clutter" bug because it's a prime example of the misconception that any available screen real estate on a should be filled – whether with content or advertising. This is particularly irksome to me as a designer because I use space to help a visitor focus and differentiate information.

In this regard, Yahoo!'s homepage and Yahoo's Google-inspired search.yahoo.com homepage are probably at the two opposite extremes of the white space spectrum. Although Google's homepage design was an accident, it highlights the effectiveness of choosing not to include something on a page for the sake of it. And, I suppose it's better than filing a "needs more dropshadow" bug.

Popularity: 6% [?]