Beautiful Pixel

This is turning out to be one hell of a vacation.

I usually don’t blog about stuff that everyone else is obviously blogging about already. But I am making an exception, just this once, because I am excited about GitHub.

GitHub is a social source control platform based on Git. Git is a whole different animal than SVN. Git has no concept of source and checked out copy. You can commit locally, you can easily branch and merge, you can push some branches to some central repos, and keep other to yourself for now, its amazingly dynamic. But I’m not here to talk about Git so much.

The first part that makes GitHub cool is the social thing. It’s been really hard for me to get into social networks. I try every once and a while and find it hard to convince my peers to join me on said network. I can upload a widget, or have a friends list, but I never seem to find any functionality that keeps me using the network for any length of time. GitHub is finally a social network I can get into. You don’t have “friends”, you have contibutors, watchers and forkers. You can add people to your project as contributors, people can simply keep an eye on your project by watching it, or they can fork your code to make their own modifications in their own sandbox. It’s completely addicting to see how many “Watchers” I have today. As of this writing the Fleximage watcher page lists 9 watchers. Not bad for less than 1 week in the wild.

Now, lets say someone wants to add some useful functionality to Fleximage. They can fork my code, without my permission, and work on their useful feature. They then let me know saying “I did some cool stuff, check it out”. I can clone their working repo, test it out, and integrate the diff with my code with just a few commands. Even if someone forks my code in order to overlay a monkey watermark on every image, that’s still fine. They can keep their forked little sandbox for themselves or whoever else wants to use it and I never have to pull in their changes at all.

The second part that is awesome is what this does for open source. The pricing model really encourages open source. Open source hosting is free. Private repositories cost money. Let that sink in a minute. This means that its easier and cheaper to release your project open source than not to. Previously, to open source a project you needed server side repository hosting, need a website for your project, in order to get those free you needed the convoluted rubyforge interface or ad laden source forge. This made it more time consuming and costly than a private codebase. So the “default” mode for most apps was private, because it was easier.

What GitHub did, was to make open source easier and cheaper than closed source. So going forward my apps will be, by default, open source. Thats a big deal. Now the little nuggets that I write every now and again will be opensourced on GitHub. Some of them may turn out to be nothing. But other may get forked by someone far smarter than me, enhanced, and eventually turned into something totally cool. Such scenarios never would be possible if there wasn’t an easy and free open source hosting platform like GitHub.

GitHub, you guys rock. The worldwide open source community has been greatly enhanced by the presence of GitHub. Give it some time and I think GitHub will be the defacto open source standard.

Hey look, I’m a Ruby expert

Not sure how I stack up with people that wrote Ruby books… Had I realized that I was going to be quoted in such a manner, perhaps I would have answered with slightly more verbosity. Live and learn.

Well my time has come. On Friday the 26th of October, I get married to the love of my life. So for the next few weeks I will be saying “Ruby who?” as I spend my honeymoon in Thailand.

We have setup a thailand blog that will will post photos and things to as the adventure unfolds.

Then, hopefully, I will be able to get back to some more regular helpful ruby posts.

Happy times, indeed.

Time to shake up the usual here. What follows is a rant about the wrong way to handle online subscription cancellations.

Recently I have had the dis-pleasure of canceling two online subscription services one subscription to an XBOX Live game, and Rhapsody. The problem is that in both cases I was required to call up customer support and be on the phone for no less than 20 minutes, just to cancel.

Why is that necessary? I signed up for these services through a completely automated online process, yet I have to track down the support phone number and talk to a person in order to cancel it. It’s obviously not a technical limitation, since charging someone money is far more complicated than not charging them. This only leaves one logical conclusion.

What really annoys me about it is that it feels like I am dealing with a pickpocket, albeit a pickpocket I let into my wallet. They purposefully make the cancellation process hard, so that you are more likely to keep the subscription, even it you don’t use it. Or they try to convince you not to cancel or sell you something else.

The quietly taking money from me while I figure out how to cancel feels incredibly dishonest, and the sales pitch when I am trying to tell them to go the hell away is just highly annoying.

Additionally, while I was looking for the XBOX Live customer service phone number, I came across this page. Scroll to the bottom and click “contact Xbox Support”. Yeah the link doesn’t go anywhere. The HTML for that looks like this:

<a zref="">contact Xbox Support</a>

zref? What the hell? The zref doesn’t even have a value!

I am convinced that these companies are trying to keep me from canceling by means of confusion. As a result, I am far less likely to sign up for a future service, and I sure as hell will ever resubscribe to the same service.

They may make more money in the short term off of people that don’t have their online wits about them. But in the long run, they are left with a confused and frustrated customer base that has a sour taste in their mouth whenever they think about the company that made a simple thing so hard. Word of mouth suffers, repeat business suffers, and people stop liking you.

Basecamp is an example that has it right. They simply have a link on the account page that says “Please cancel my account (I understand this is irreversible)”. If you want to downgrade your account you simply click a link. If you have too many projects to downgrade your account, it tells you that you must delete some projects before you can downgrade. It’s all very easy and clear. There are other examples as well. They are not all evil.

Respect your customer. If they have to be an ex-customer, at least let them be a happy ex-customer.