Personal Growth and Personnel Changes

Daniel Spils on keyboards with Maktub

If you’ve been following the Robots for any amount of time, then surely you’ve met Daniel somewhere along the way. He was present at the creation, when the idea for 43 Things first emerged and he’s been our “Smooth Operating Officer” for nearly 5 years now.

If you are a real Daniel devotee you might also know that he’s a professional musician who over almost 10 years has released 5 albums with his band Maktub and toured the country a couple times over.

Meet Maktub

Well today is an auspicious day in that band’s history as they announce the release of their fifth album FIVE. They’ve made FIVE available as a free download, a CD you can buy from their own store, from Amazon or download mp3s from Amazon. iTunes will have it up shortly.

You should definitely check out the free downloads (really pay what you like downloads) and hear what Daniel’s been up to. Here at the Robot Co-op, we couldn’t be more proud of Daniel’s progress on his musical goals. But we are even happier about the personal news Daniel shared with us this week.

Daniel Spils is getting married!

Daniel & Brangien

And who is his bride? None other than Brangien Davis, the blogger behind the Robot Co-op’s now defunct Petri Project. The Co-op brought them together and we couldn’t be more proud. We think Daniel couldn’t have found a more witty, urbane, and beautiful woman to spend his life with. And Brangien couldn’t have found a more caring, loyal, and fun loving character with whom to spend each day. The both are two lucky souls and we hope you’ll join us in wishing them the best.

Teary eyed yet? Get ready to turn on the water works: Daniel Spils is taking all this change and taking leave of the Robot Co-op. He’s taking his five year anniversary with 43 Things as an opportunity to spend more time with Brangien, more time with music, more time camping, and more time to recharge for whatever comes next. We can’t say good bye to Daniel, because we count on him being around and cheering on the Co-op, but we have to let him go.

So what can we say Dan? We love you. It has been a blast. You made it up and you made it happen. You got us started and you’ll always be a Robot. Best wishes and we’ll see you at the wedding!

Site slow down

We are working out some kinks on the site that have been causing the site to slow down lately. In order to keep the site fast, we are looking at some unnecessarily complicated features that might be gunking up the works.

Over the next few weeks, you might see a few features get turned off while we work things out. One prime suspect is “external feeds”, the ability to add external feeds to folks you subscribe to, so those feeds will get stale while we figure out if we can keep them working at all. If you are looking for a similar service, try http://friendfeed.com/.

We are also bringing on a whole new fleet of machines to serve the sites. We hope we will see a nice bump there as well. Unfortunately, the slow downs and service changes are going to impact heavy users the most. You folks have simply used the site more intensely than the system was built to accommodate. Sorry for the bumps in the road, but we are adding the faster hardware and rewriting the features to keep the site fast and a pleasure for you to use.

Thanks

Giant Locavore

Big news day at the Robot Co-op. First, we want to introduce all of you to Locavore, a powerful yet simple application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to find the freshest, most sustainable fruits and vegetables no matter where they are in the United States. It was built by the Robot Co-op’s very own Buster McLeod. Here’s how Buster describes the app:

Locavore on the iPhone

“Utilizing built-in GPS and location awareness, Locavore finds a fresh food enthusiast’s location and then shows them what foods are currently in season locally, and what is coming in season soon. Getting this information quickly (especially while at the market and trying to decide what to buy) means that one can get the freshest, tastiest, and most healthy foods available any time of the year.

Locavore finds information about nearby farmers’ markets and food availability data from a collaboration of partners such as LocalHarvest.org, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and others to give users a real-time look at what’s available to them and where to get it. This data will continue to improve and be updated over time.

The application also connects users to recipes from Epicurious and links to Wikipedia through a simple to use and intuitive interface. It features 234 well-known and more obscure fruits and vegetables with beautiful full-color images of each, in case a user momentarily forgets what an aprium or a rambutan looks like.

Locavore is available now at the iTunes App store for $2.99 for the first thousand customers. Coming up in the next update: integration with Facebook Connect to turn the appreciation and knowledge of local food into more of a social, collaborative, effort.”

Questions, etc, you can email Buster at locavore@enjoymentland.com

So far, Locavore has been a smash success. Since it’s launch, Locavore has racked up some great press and Buster has sold more than 5,000 copies of the app. Locavore made it all the way to #65 on the top paid apps list in the iPhone store.

Now the big news, true to form, Buster’s decided to double down and focus full time on Locavore and similar iPhone apps. While this means Buster won’t be working on 43 Things and 43 Places, All Consuming or Lists of Bests, it does mean he’ll have more time to bring new greatness to the world like what he’s built with Locavore.

When we started The Robot Co-op, personal growth was always a goal. Buster’s departure will leave a hole at the Co-op we’ll never be able to fill, but we are all very proud of him and excited about his new venture. All of us Robots wish him the very best, and as he’s going to be staying in Seattle (maybe working next door?) we hope to slowly earn back all the upside he has won in 5 years of credit card roulette.

The Book Arrives

Busy week

We’ve been busy this week with our new blog at petripoject.com as well as doubling down on making 43 Things a community focused on personal improvement (rather than self harm). But we are also up to our elbows in our newest project: Should do this.

We quietly gave some folks a very early preview of the site for a few weeks but we’ve since pulled it back while we turn our Alpha product into a Beta.

What is Should do this? Put simply, it is an internet based suggestion box, and we think it works great for any person, product, company or non-profit that wants to be in closer touch with what your customers think. It’s also a fun, community filled site in the style of 43 Things. We’ll be using it ourselves to replace our old “ideas” sites.

You can head over now to shoulddothis.com and sign up to get early access to help us test out the new site. And if you run a business, website, school or nonprofit and think you might want to test out managing a suggestion box of your own, drop us a note at shoulddothis @robotcoop.com.

As good as it gets

A trio of the robots made it out to see The Wrens on Saturday night. The Wrens have pretty much been the soundtrack to the creation of 43 Things, so I’ll always think of The Meadowlands and 43 Things as related projects.

At one point during the show, the bass player Kevin stepped to the mic and said “We are in love with you Seattle. For us, it doesn’t get any better than this.” Actually, there was a bit more profanity to describe just how much he loved Seattle and to emphasize this really is as good as it gets.

Someone in the audience called back “We’re sorry”. The lady thought she was being funny, but really she was just showing that she didn’t understand what it is like to succeed at something on your own terms and define your own success.

Kevin stepped back to the mic and clarified: “We wouldn’t want anything more than this. We don’t want riders, or makeup . . . this is great.” And great it was.

We support John Edwards!

Well, maybe that puts it too strongly. It isn’t that we are ready to throw our influential endorsement behind John Edwards but we do fully support his campaign’s use of 43 Things. You can see the John Edwards profile page on our site with a list of goals that reads like a political platform (well, actually, that platform doesn’t say much about alternative energy, Iraq, or North Korea, but it is a start). Not only can you see his goals, his Flickr stream shows what he’s up to on the campaign trail.

We never considered how your goals on 43 Things could become a platform to campaign on, but it actually works great. Best of all, limiting any politician to 43 goals is almost certainly a good idea. Instead of letting a politician be for everything, we ought to ask “What are your 43 Things?”

On this day, with the Edwards family in the news, we wish them our best. We hope for a cure and that Mrs. Edwards beats this thing once and for all. We hope too that we’ll see more candidates, from all parties and all levels of government, join 43 Things and make their goals public.

Lose weight and search

I got the flu on Thursday and when I weighed myself I was down 5 lbs. Not bad! Though I don’t think I’m ready to adopt influenza as a lifestyle.

What, pray tell, could any of this have to do with search on 43 Things? Well for a long time, if you searched for “lose weight” on our site, you wouldn’t find the very popular goal until the second or third page of results. Thanks to something called ferret, Ivan was able to roll out a whole new search engine to 43 Things with very little effort. Now when you search for lose weight on 43 Things, guess what you get?

Hopefully you can meet your goal without succumbing to the flu virus. And thanks to the good folks behind ferret!

Right out of the gates!

We had a couple quick victories (we think) the last 2 days. We think we sorted a problem in subscriptions that was taking down the site about 2-3 times per hour. Nasty. We also tweaked some database configurations that seems to have sped up the site a noticeable amount. Yea for 43 Things!

Today we turned people’s feeds and subscriptions all back on, finished our work on images (which should all be loading now), and made a bit of headway on the 43Places problems tool. Hopefully we’ll add a new webserver this week as well. So much progress on Lickety Split.

Please go ahead and let us know about any problems you are seeing on the site. The more specific you can be the better. And of course, we love all the compliments and kind words. It is not as much fun to work on the backend of the site, but it makes it more gratifying when we hear how happy it makes you!

Was it Col. Mustard, in the subscriptions, with the candlestick?

We all had a list of suspects. Is the database only utilizing half its memory? Are aggressive spiders taking down the site? Is there a problem with the way Rails talks to FastCGI? But more than any other area of suspicion, we all knew there was something wrong going on with subscriptions.

So as a test, we turned off subscriptions around noon today. Guess what? The site perked up considerably. Errors dried up, the site stayed up, and “Oops” messages dropped down to a murmur (15 in the last 2 hours out of 105,000 page views).

We are going to monkey around with subscriptions a bit more, but it seems we may have found the greatest offender to site stability. If the site dies in the next few hours, it is probably us testing turning subscriptions back on. For now though, it looks like we got lucky right out of the gate.

What else is to come with Lickety Split? Fixing what ails the problems tool in 43 Places. Reworking the way we get rid of spammers and miscreants on the site. Getting subscriptions to be fast and painless. Lots of caching, some new hardware, some new site monitoring. We will keep going until the site is humming along reliably.