Robot Loves Kitten

Currently developing an online green community for launch in late April 2008.

One of the most important aspects of SMITH is how low the barrier to signup is. I felt that it was critical not to cruft up the signup process with unnecessary info.

Usually, all the department heads get together and have a meeting about the signup process, and it turns into a brainstorming session about how best to pimp out your prospective user. Ironically, this process is made all the easier since, most times, you don’t have any users yet, and abstract constructs receive this kind of abuse quite well.

Signup is a very delicate time. You are trying to cajole passers-by into entering your little world. They don’t know your world or fully understand its benefits. The best way to show them is to let them in as quickly and as easily as possible.

We also make a grave mistake in our terms. This new person is not a “member.” Filling out a form doesn’t make you a member of a community. Your actions and contributions make you a member. So, maybe we call this person a rookie. And rookies need to be handled carefully and watched. Most good communities integrate concepts of user-levels, where more experienced members are granted more access and control. This is completely appropriate if your goal is to build a vibrant community.

These experienced members dominate your community and should be the ones you focus your attentions on. They are the ones you want to know about. Not the rookies. They haven’t proven themselves yet, and might not even stay around for very long.

As SMITH grows, we have plans to build out the profiles & community spaces, so we can integrate newsletters, geographic functions, etc. But that’s all stuff that will benefit our active members, not the rookies, so we took it out of the sign-up process. Adding extra fields for marketing would only muddy our core message (“share your story with us”).

If it doesn’t apply to the core selling proposition, then it doesn’t belong in the sign-up. There’s lots of ways to hint, prod, remind people to fill in their profiles as they continue to return to your site. And frankly, it’s going to take some time for new members to really understand the benefits that additional information might provide.

So we are taking it slow, and I think the approach is really working well. Our sign-ups have really exploded since we launched the new site.

• twittering while cbs tapes a segment about our book with larry and rachel. they look so cute

SMITH is an online magazine and community devoted to storytelling I co-founded with Larry Smith back in 2004. We went online in January of 2006, and have since produced two graphic novels, Shooting War and A.D.: After the Deluge.

In November of 2006, we ran a six-word memoir contest with messaging startup Twitter. The more than 12,000 entries we received led to the book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, published in February 2008 by HarperPerennial.

In advance of the book, we created a promotional video that actually helped a great deal in selling a product that didn’t fully exist yet.

Then we embarked on a complete rebuild of the Web site. We really worked hard to deliver on SMITH’s core mission: everyone has a story, and SMITH is the place to tell it. It was a difficult task, blending editor-driven and community-driven content, but I think we’ve gotten pretty far. Part of the difficulty is in activating a formerly passive audience: they came to SMITH to read great stories, not add their own.

XOXO.com, a company run by our friend Ben Brown, developed the simple community tools we use on SMITH. One of the most important things we are able to do now is to integrate story submissions and member signups. It’s all one simple step now, and that’s really helping spur the growth of the site.

Our book finally goes on sale today. The site is humming with new signups and the book ranking has jumped up above #600 at Amazon. Yes, Amazon computes its rankings hourly, but so what? It’s still cool.

If you are so inclined,

Friday night, I screwed up a project’s subversion repository (note: I don’t think subversion really works on your local client, too tempting to overwrite files via the OS, which I’ve done countless times. D’oh.). In the process of trying to recover those files, I noticed my backup hadn’t run in two weeks. Yikes. I reset the backup scheduler, fixed my project, and decided to quit for the day.

Later that night, a bit after 10pm, I went to check something on my computer, and it froze up. I restarted and got a blank screen. I fiddled a bit, got it booted off the install CD, and tried Disk Utility. It said I had a b-tree error, but it couldn’t fix it. The next morning, I couldn’t find the drive at all. It was 100% and totally dead.

Did I mention that I have a book coming out and will be traveling next week?

So, I was freaking out, even though the Macbook is still under warranty (4 months old). But I got a lot calmer after realizing that my backup had successfully run Friday night, before the hard drive went belly up.

The funny thing is, most backup solutions are built around the limitations inherent in copying a lot of files. But that’s exactly the wrong approach. What people care about is the “restore.” Nobody cares about a backup until something goes wrong, at which point that backup should be as easy to use as possible. No weird archive formats, no software to install. Just my files please.

Thanks to a tip from my friend Ted, I invested in a $28 copy of SuperDuper and a 500 GB external firewire drive ($200). I partitioned the external into two drives, one which was the same size as my Macbook’s hard drive. Then I scheduled SuperDuper to run every night during the week.

What that meant, is that when my hard drive died, I had a perfect clone that I could boot from (because of the firewire). So, I could do everything normally, just by holding down the option key on startup, and selecting the firewire drive as the startup disk.

After Apple installed my new hard drive, I came home, restared off the clone disk, and ran SuperDuper to backup the clone to my new drive. With SuperDuper, backing up IS restoring. Pretty sweet. One click, same process, no muss, no fuss.

It took a while to finish copying all those gigs, and I was a little drained emotionally, but SuperDuper saved my bacon. Thank you.