Quick entry, just to let everyone know what I’ve been doing. (Because clearly, you don’t get enough of that from my twittering.) June has been insufferably eventful, perhaps more so than previous months because I can’t seem to focus on any one thing and have been pirouetting ungracefully between Client Work, Company Work, Hobby Work and Beer for most of this period.

I brought back Highfiber.org two weeks ago, and earlier today I overhauled most of the layouts on Octales.com. Over the past two weeks, syndeo::media has bought a whole mess of new machines too – 2 Macbooks and 2 Macbook Pro’s – so there’s been a lot of installin’ and configurin’ going on. This is particularly impressive when you consider that I bought the 4 machines from 3 different dealers, each in a different city. We’ll probably be selling our old ones pretty soon, but at the moment the machines outnumber the humans two to one. Oh, and Tim joined us formally two weeks ago too, so we’re now 8 people total. Tim’s not a machine, btw. (I’ll resist the obvious introvert-programmer joke here.)

Earlier in the month, I spent some time learning how to deal with the effects of Tanduay Rhum, which is information that I hope to never use again. I also learned a little about Domain Keys, SPF, and ImageMagick, and captured and edited my very first videocast with ScreenFlow. None of those things had anything to do with rhum though. (The final screenflow video was posted on Youtube. I’m not linking to it formally because it was meant to be an Octales demo, and my recent layout changes have rendered it obsolete. Go, me.)

Saw The Incredible Hulk (good), The Happening (ugh) and Wanted (so-so), went to Mogwai twice (both times failing to do what we had set out to do there). Listened to the new Coldplay (great), the new Sigur Ros (really great) and the new Ladytron (good, but gay). Drove to Subic just to try out the new expressway, attended the first Philippine Pecha Kucha night, spent waaay too much money on comics at Fully Booked (3 weekends = over PhP8k worth of new reads), and spent way too many Saturday nights at the frickin’ Meatshop along Katipunan. June’s event highlight was last week’s visit to Fely J’s, GB5 though; good food and good company.

This is probably old news to many of you by now, but I got highfiber.org up and running again 5 days ago (version double-zero, for anyone keeping count), after receiving an unexpected number of comments about it on my previous entry. I made the decision to bring it back, appropriately, on Friday the 13th and proceeded to throw it together over the weekend. By Tuesday we were online, although issues with our hosting prevented me from stabilizing the app until mid-Wednesday.

I really missed these binges. Every version of highfiber was written in a literal fit of coding fury, and there’s nothing quite like the adrenaline high of building something you love. I used to lock myself up for days (sometimes weeks) at a time to design and build, confident in the fact that when I emerged I’d have a wicked new site that’d blow everyone’s mind. This new version is a little more humble I guess; I’ve gotten older and a lot more aware of my shortcomings. At the same time, I’ve come to appreciate certain truths about online community websites, which is what has been guiding most of the architectural decisions for this version.

Here’s a couple of them, for anyone interested in this sort of thing.

1. Graphic design isn’t important. Lots of social networks fall all over themselves to be really snazzy and flashy and noisy, and for the most part, they just completely miss the point. With social networks, the primary focus should be the user-interactions, and making sure they occur in the smoothest way possible. What it looks like basically matters fuck-all; if their friends are there, people will come. (If anything, the graphic design should be as understated and unassuming as possible, because you want people to concentrate on the content.)

2. Being unique is important. Although Highfiber is a forum at its core, it has a couple of flourishes that make the HF experience singular online. The patting/poking system has gone a long way towards embodying what this site is all about, and the rules of what a user can or cannot do based on his current score is almost like an ongoing experiment in micro-scale socio-economics.

3. Being stable isn’t important; communicating with your members is. To a certain extent, users will forgive downtime as long as you explain what’s going on. None of my sites have ever been known for their stability, so the broadcast bar is usually one of the first pieces of admin functionality I write.

4. You won’t get it right the first few times. One of the hardest things to accept for me back when I was just starting out was why some of my ideas worked and some didn’t. A lot of the time I would rationalize it by saying that people just “didn’t get it” — it was their loss, not mine. Now I know a little better. The truth is, your ideas are only as good as your audience’s acceptance of them. (The corollary to this rule is: “Choosing the right audience for the right idea is pretty frickin’ important too.”)

These days, my strategy is really simple. I release a build that represents my best guess at solving a particular problem, then pay lots of attention to how people react to it. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and people will be very vocal about their feelings; other times, you have to infer it from behavioral patterns. Either way, you need to be flexible enough to move on your learnings.

Case in point: my current experiment on double-zero involves adding a cost for every comment. Essentially, a user is charged one point (or more) every time they post a comment, which decreases their overall score. I won’t expound on the reasons for this particular solution just yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how people maneuver with the new rule in place.

Lastly: thanks to everyone who left comments on my last blog entry. I’m amazed, impressed, humbled and a little scared of your fervent devotion to this community, and I hope double-zero eventually meets all of your expectations. Here’s to another 7 years of highfiber!