In this day in age where every character counts (I’m looking at you, Twitter), short URLs are a critical part of helping you make the most of everything that isn’t the URL. Hence Pinolio is now available at pnl.io and any link you share on Pinolio via our third-party software will be shared using that short url.
Thanks for using Pinolio, and look forward to some gradual, awesome new features!
One of the most critical components of a successful web application is uptime, and particularly when the content that is being hosted is relied upon as much as bookmarks are. In order to make things as transparent as possible, I’ve decided to use Pingdom to monitor Pinolio.com’s uptime. If ever there’s a downtime I have set up a backup system that should be able to be brought up within a moment’s notice.
Monitor Pinolio’s uptime at status.pinolio.com
… because GoDaddy is here to screw you over. And over. And one last time for good measure.
Edit: As of this writing, 9:31PM EST on Tuesday September 6, 2011, pinolio.com remains down. I apologize for this inconvenience but hope it will be resolved shortly in a day when GoDaddy tell me.
Usually GoDaddy sob-stories are the ones you hear and you either react in two ways:
a) Been there, done that, moved on to better hosts.
b) Aww, poor you. It will never happen to me.
I happened to be in camp B. I’ve been hosting with them since I bought my first domain with them back in January 2005.
Accidents only happen to other people. Except when someone ties your hands behind you back and lets you drive into a tree at full speed and then tries to extricate you with a pair of bamboo chopsticks
Everything was fine and dandy. 39 domains hosted with a Linux Deluxe account and a unique IP address. I was whistling a nice tune paying $7 a domain a year and about $100 for two years of hosting.
One of the Pinolio users had asked for a SSL login, which seemed like a purely reasonable request. There’s nothing quite like seeing a nice little green padlock to reassure you that at least someone is looking out for your security.
Looks like I spoke too soon. It’s been four days and counting…
So I order a SSL certificate and apply it to my host, surmising that there will be some utility for me to apply it to the domain I want. It turns out GoDaddy only issues the certificate to the domain attached to the hosting (which is somewhat of a stupid association, really, because it shouldn’t matter what domain you use as long as you’re accessing your content via a correct route). That happened to be my keepsake domain (chronicled.org), so I proceeded to revoke the certificate and …
Well, it turns out revoking a certificate means losing it and the ability to issue another one. I call GoDaddy, and they tell me that it’ll cost $15 in administrative fees to reissue one. I complain somewhat, telling the service rep I had no idea that my revoking a certificate meant I would forfeit the purchase altogether, and so I restart the process of moving the main domain to pinolio.com, and applying the SSL once that’s done.
It’s a good thing I don’t drink, because the blur of Saturday and Sunday spent on the phone could have really been dealt with better with a couple of stiff drinks to ease the pain. The hosted sites remained inaccessible for all of Saturday, all of Sunday and a good part of Monday. Just when I thought things were resolved I noted that all of my domains were now resolving to a site called ThursdayChurch.org. In no time I was being hounded by clients whose businesses had nothing to do with churches (I do some pro-bono hosting) and were claiming impacted business.
The last two dots for the last two days.
The customer service mouthpieces of the devil kind folk at GoDaddy had the audacity to suggest that I should have kept a backup of everything and that I should have VPS - that is true, but then again I’d like to think that hosts are generally reliable in their uptime (that is what they sell, no?), and, too, that I do not have much in the way to afford VPS at $30 a month. Lesson learned, however- just don’t use GoDaddy. Ever. Unless you want a guaranteed crisis that you cannot get yourself out of.
9 The startup scene often discourages innovators from responding to feature requests, because things can become quickly overwhelming and detract from the original sentiment of the product. In some senses, though, being responsive is one of those nice things that startups can be proud of being able to accomplish- having an agile development process also encourages rapid deployment, rapid fixes, and rapid upgrades.
In that spirit I was pleased to be able to integrate a few key features today in order to streamline a few aspects of user experience.
1) SSL - give users the peace of mind by making it clear that the login to the page is encrypted using SSL
2) Registration - do away with traditional registration paradigms and let people use the product immediately after signing up, without requiring prior confirmation
3) Non-video based explanations - product demonstrations need to harness every form of media available. Hearing from one user saying he wouldn’t play the demonstration video because he as work prompted the development of a quick and easy slideshow that effectively shares the same content.
There are many things that are in the development pipeline, but I’m very much a fan of RERO - release early, release often. Stay tuned!
P.S. If you want to read Eric Raymond’s 1997 essay in the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar on RERO, click here.
Some people are still relatively unfamiliar with bookmarklets, so we made a video to describe how it can be done. We wanted it to be short, so we narrated a quick description as to how it could be done. After some feedback, though, we found out we didn’t even need to use words - that in fact, using words made it seem almost condescending. So we went without:
Do you remember seeing this from somewhere?
Every launch is a learning experience, and one becomes all the more knowledgeable about the right things to do and the pitfalls surrounding launch. It’s almost a requisite in the startup scene: how did you make it past the front gate?
I’m not going to hesitate to take advantage of the vast network of friends and colleagues to see to it that there’s some starting point. That, and making sure I have backups running all the time.
I think one of the most interesting web-based social hierarchies are that between professional and the humdrum everyday tools we use. I’ve always suggested that we are at a point in digital history where we have to face the decision of either completely letting our online information be controlled by some giant corporation or trying to wrest control back so that we can use that data as we see fit. They say that when the product is free, you are the product, but it seems altogether unfair when people are relinquishing their freedom to browse untracked in favor of something completely irrelevant, like search.
Regardless, Pinolio’s aims are to make it easier to carve out one’s own online identity in such a way that it makes it easy to share. All too often bookmarks end up looking like a pile of discarded papers all messily stored somewhere for future reference. But if those bookmarks, those sources, become part of who we are, part of what we’re interested in, part of what we talk about, then why not make it look nicer?
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