I had the opposite experience as well -- I tried Page.ly first but could not import any of my sites (which all use a variety of custom post types). Their import process seemed more attuned to vanilla installs. Closing out my billing with them was also somewhat arduous.
WPE has been great so far -- very responsive support -- and their caching handles about 8 million pageviews a month with 600-800 simultaneous visitors and very little downtime.
car2go? I moved down in October and was lucky enough to borrow a friend's car for awhile. It feels generally necessary, but I don't have one yet either. Are you downtown/soco?
I think our respective metaphors for the situation show we're coming from different places -- I'm definitely biased towards the design because I think it solves a functional problem rather than just adding a dash of zest. Appreciate your thoughts and perspective, ynniv. Now to buy some lemonade...
I think with code, there are a million ways to clone something (...especially when you haven't seen the source) so it's harder for developers to understand what it feels like when you see someone copy your designs (to clarify, I'm speaking generally here.) Best allusion I can think of is joke stealing. A lot of work can go into a one liner. Does it matter if it took 5 seconds (or 11 hours in this case) to copy it?
Fact is, if Dustin hadn't done anything innovative (ie, worth cloning), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Didn't see this and brought up the Samwers as well. I think we're still in a transition around here in terms of how "design" is valued but overall it seems like things are improving.
It's pretty clear that the innovation in Dustin's work wasn't the code -- it was the interface. Pointing out that Nate built Obtvse in a day from scratch is pretty meaningless and the fact that he bothered to recreate it makes it pretty clear that Dustin built something cool. As a designer... it just feels like this wasn't Nate's to open source and hopefully this will transition further from the original.
On the flipside, if the Samwer brothers launched a version of Svbtle next week in 15 markets, would the reaction be the same?
This is basically a rite of passage for all freelancers/lawyers/service workers unfortunately. My rule of thumb: If someone doesn't want to give you at least 20% upfront for a project, you don't want to work with them. Always give yourself checkpoints in the project for partial payments instead of a lump sum at the end.
I seem to remember a lot of media coverage in the early 90s when I was younger about how almost all software engineering would be outsourced. Definitely played into my thought process years later when I majored in architecture ;-)
I was an architecture undergrad myself and immediately moved to the web upon graduating a few years ago. Thing is, I would still highly recommend it is as a major (...at least, the program I was in -- definitely varies school to school). My experience was of four years of mixed media problem solving through models, mylar, computer animation (Flash/Actionscript/Maya), etc. Definitely shaped how I think/approach everything I work on.
If I had a startup that was looking to hire innovative UX/design people right now, ex-Archs would be towards the top of my list.
3 bedrooms are definitely rare but there are pockets of them around town. I had a 3.5 - 4 bedroom near Columbia off Central Park & 109th and it was huge and affordable ($3300 I believe and one block from the subway). If you're hunting for one, I'd start up there if having the Park as your front yard floats your boat.
Good stuff! May I ask what your open-rate is? The trend I've seen at a few places I've worked at is that Facebook has become the dominant traffic driver (Twitter in 2nd) for bringing people back to the site. Lot of factors behind this (demographics, ad teams abusing email lists over the years, etc), but I'd pretty much written off email since I know so many of our addresses are people's middle school Hotmail accounts (which I'd remove, but the ad team wants to claim they're sending to X-thousand people). Glad to hear it's working for you. Subscribing now!
WPE has been great so far -- very responsive support -- and their caching handles about 8 million pageviews a month with 600-800 simultaneous visitors and very little downtime.