Well, now that it’s over, I can finally talk about it.
I got up Sunday morning, July 3rd, salivating over all the cholesterol-laden meats I was gonna burn…er…grill that day in celebration of the holiday. I was looking forward to my weekend breakfast of imported Nestle 2-in-1 coffee sachets (I prefer the Indonesian version) and peanut butter crackers (cheese-flavor orange crackers only).
But noooo…it wasn’t to be. An email alerted me to the fact that our corporate website, vuuch.com, was dead dead dead.
No problem, I thought. I’ll just reboot our EC2 instance and deal with it Tuesday.
No joy.
Panic sets in. The cracker crumbs mix with coffee drool and run down the side of my face. There’s no freakin’ website no matter how many times I restart the instance. It boots, it dies. It boots again, it dies harder.
“Calm down,” the inner voice says. “You’ll think of something.”
“Up yours, you optimistic fool. The damn thing is in rigor mortis. Start searching for the last database backup ’cause, baby, you are spending the day cooking up a new server, not burgers.”
“Just finish breakfast. Start defrosting the dogs. You’ll…wait a minute. What if…”
None of you really expect me to tell you exactly how I recovered the site do you? After all, if another bozo tries the same thing, I need something to give me an edge, don’t I?
Besides, the real purpose of writing this post is to try out the spankin’ new WordPress 3.2 before I upgrade all my other sites.
As the old saying goes, you can pwn some of the people some of the time, but you can’t help but love WordPress 3.2.
My good friend Chris Williams, CEO of Vuuch, emailed me the other day and said that I really had to talk with Josh Mings of solidsmack.com. I just got off the phone with Josh, and I can say is, “Thanks, Chris, for connecting us up.”
See, Chris is a “true believer” in community — when he ran Seemage, we went to the community with a better idea about product documentation. And even though Seemage was a small little company with a big idea, the fact that we used community to start a discussion about those ideas simply blew competitors away. Right Hemisphere is still trying to figure out what happened to them, long after Seemage went onto greater glory in DS’s 3DVIA world. It was a complete demonstration of the power of community to give a good idea its due in the marketplace.
So, when Chris said Josh was doing some cool things on his blog, I took notice.
Lately, I’ve been worrying that the same thing is going to happen with the idea of community that happened with email, search and PPC: as less talented corporate marketing types get their hands on it, they’ll muck it up for the rest of us. If you think this hasn’t happened, take a look at your junk mail folder. It’s full of webinar invites three weeks in advance (because those idiots can’t get an email closer to the actual event) and Twitter feeds that read like data sheets.
But then, after a short conversation with Josh (who’s got a cold and still made time to talk with me), my confidence was restored. There will always be room for truly authentic voices and communities to coalesce around those voices. The ‘Net is big — and getting bigger — but great blogs like SolidSmack will still rise to the top of the heap.
That’s why I am so pumped that my buddy Chris and Josh have connected in the real world. Josh has reviewed Vuuch. Chris is talking with Josh to learn more about how to present another new idea to a new community…and these two guys really know how to put it together in a way that works for people…no crap…no slickness…just the real, authentic thing, amplified by the Internet’s ability to make time and distance disappear.
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