A recurring pattern I encounter frequently when developing community oriented sites is whether to make certain user-contributed content public or private. Often the end-user has the option of making their content public or private and the system defaults to one or other.

The client almost always votes for private as the default, but Ari Paparo tells a cautionary tale in his post about why his bookmarking company Blink.com failed and del.icio.us succeeded.

Ari lists multiple reasons, but the one I identify with as a web developer is the issue of public versus private content. This comes up time and again, and as Ari states, it’s not just the ability to make something private or public, but which should be the default. In his case, making ‘private’ the default was a deciding factor in the failure of his site, whereas del.icio.us defaulted to ‘public’ for the very same content (bookmarks).
So the next time I’m wrestling discussing with a client whether or not user-generated content should be public or private I will refer them to Ari’s post.

[tags]Marketing, Patterns, Content, Content Management[/tags]

My wife’s Valentine’s day gift is a subversion repository. She’s a writer and like many of the writers I know, rarely backs anything up, preferring to believe that the Great God of Writers will protect her and her work from harm. While I live in fear that the next time she has an “oops” with her laptop, I won’t be able to rescue the files from her hard drive. (It’s been four times already).

So today I setup a subversion repository for her to store her manuscripts. I installed TortoiseSVN on her laptop so all she has to do is right-click on her Word file and select “commit”. She can even add comments about the her status if she wants.
I also setup WebSVN so she has the added bonus of being able to access her manuscript from any computer via the browser.

Happy Valentine’s Day honey…

[tags]subversion, svn, scm[/tags]