rantfoil

Author lost total credibility at that point. Rails is quite elegant, and yes, it is just another tool. Totally unsubstantiated bashing. Surprised to see this on the homepage.

We're tracking this bug down now -- mind letting me know repro steps? We'll fix it asap -- [email protected]

Thanks Emmett!

A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation.

These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.

Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views.

Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views.

We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel.

If anything, our focus on email and creation tools spurs far more original content than other traditional blogging methods.

We do honor DMCA takedown requests -- they're fairly easy to do and we are very mindful of taking down infringing content.

This is an anonymous article on Quora -- if I could provide more attribution, I would. In fact, I have now added a ton more attribution and links back to the main quora page. I love Quora.

That blog is just my interesting snippets blog. It just so happened that this snippet was so interesting that the entirety made sense. I usually try to break it down into the smallest most interesting bit.

Imagine my surprise as to the reaction to this article. The blog is mainly for myself and my friends / twitter followers. There was no malice here, and I've altered the post to more prominently link to the source content.

The nature of the Internet is such: My blog drives some amount of attention. I don't monetize it and have no intention to. If Quora can make more money by the traffic I direct to it, all the better.

I did not post this to Hacker News. I had no intention of it receiving the attention that it did. All in all, I'm happy that some people got value out of the story. Whoever linked to my post should have linked to the original quora post. That's that.

Fixed

At Posterous we use MySQL as a main data store but MongoDB for simple analytics and Redis for set operations around contacts and subscriptions.

Redis is also great as a backing store for the Rails queuing system Resque.

If you're willing to hire a full time person, Google's AdWords team has hundreds of very talented optimizers and account specialists who are in general fairly unhappy with their jobs. They have very deep knowledge of PPC/Adwords from the inside, and have seen a variety of client accounts.

Google doesn't do a good job of nurturing since they tend to hire highly intelligent nontechnical people, train them all about Adwords, but then give them no real way to move up in the organization or challenge themselves.

Forced obsolescence.