Crisis

Four days before the 6 month anniversary of the start of beta testing, I had to delete a user account for the first time ever. It was a user who frequently deleted accounts and returned a few weeks later on other sites, but she had refrained from total abandonment of my site. She was an early adopter who joined on the first day of launch and was the most active member throughout most the the nearly 6 month period.

The next day, a friend of hers saw the public dialog preceding the account deletion, which had been a non-confrontational discussion about deletion. This friend then became extremely upset about the fact that I had not yet implemented a system for automatic account deletion. Under the current system, I have to manually delete an account if a user requests a deletion. It made sense in term of prioritization to not develop code for this yet. There are far more important things to develop on this site than features for soon to be non-members. It wasn't as if I had been overwhelmed by requests for deletion. It was in fact the first one ever.

This disgruntled user has declared a boycott of my site until I implement a feature for deletion of accounts. This poses a number of potential problems.

1) This is currently the most active user, which means a boycott by her alone will significantly impact the site.
2) It is possible that her friends will join in the boycott or leave entirely, although they sided with me in the public debate on this issue. Despite agreeing with me in principle, they may lose interest in the site if she is absent, due to the social nature of the site.
3) Allowing any single user to hijack site development priorities sets a terrible precedent. Others may use similar tactics in the future. Nothing good will come out of allowing this.

The boycott strategy itself is somewhat flawed. There are members of the site who definitely would not join her in the boycott. Although site activity will be reduced, it wouldn't really be a punishment for me. In fact, it's somewhat opposite, because someone who would publicly malign the site would be absent. Furthermore, a boycott would compel me to accelerate development of other site features, ones that will more likely bring in new members, rather than the one that she seeks to compel me to create.

New Realization

Women who don't join my site are not truly interested in me. Regardless of what they say or do, they are definitely not serious about a relationship with me if they don't join my site. It's a matter of being interested in me as a person. My site is something that I created and have an interest in. If a woman doesn't have an interest in my site, that implies a lack of interest in me.

I should have been aware of this much earlier. When I like a woman, I want to know absolutely everything about her. I want to immerse myself completely in everything about her. I have recently had a few interactions with women who claimed to be in love with me, but they wouldn't join my site or even look at it regularly. One turned out to be only interested in sex while pretending to be interested in more. The other wasn't interested in me at all. She just wanted some attention.

ADHD

The current site that I am building is still not complete, but I am already planning my next one. I'm not writing out detailed plans. I just can't stop thinking about it and I probably won't be able to get it out of my mind until I start working on it. I'm hesitant to make the switch, because I will probably leave blog-stalk.com incomplete if I start anything else right now.

Yesterday's Google Failure

Official Google Blog: This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...

The problem affected my sites, although not catastrophically. I have code for Google Adsense and for Google Analytics on blog-stalk.com. This caused the browser to never finish loading the page. Because Google was reachable but extremely slow, the situation was actually worse. The browser did not terminate the attempt to connect and just kep loading forever.

Main content on my site loaded properly, but users may have been confused and thought my server was sluggish. Also, pages could not be printed without forcing the browser to stop loading the page.

Automatic Discounts

One of the advantages of owning a website is the ability to enroll in affiliate programs. If I have a lot of traffic on my site, then I can generate some revenue through banner ads, but there is a benefit even if I don't have a single visitor. Because I get a commission on every sale, I automatically get a discount if I buy things for myself through the affiliate link. I'm collecting a page of the ones that I consider to be useful and making it publicly accessible on my site. I doubt that anyone else will use it much, but I definitely will.

Reblogging

Creating the reblog function required some careful decision-making regarding the editability of the original blog text. The problem with allowing the reblogger to edit the original text is that this gives the reblogger the ability to insert false text and images. I don't expect this to be a regular occurrence on my site, but I don't want that to ever be possible. Another potential problem is the original blog could be edited after it is reblogged. This creates similar problems. For example, a reblog could be made stating agreement with the original blog, and the original text could be modified to something that the reblogger doesn't agree with.

The solution that I developed involves saving a full copy of the original blog that neither the original author nor the reblogger can edit. The only disadvantage is the extra storage space that I need to do this, but I think it's a necessary cost that I must accept to make this function work nicely.

Beta Testing

My new site is still incomplete, but it's ready for some beta testing. Since there is no real deadline, I could just wait longer, but I think it's beneficial for me to practice more on updating a live site. Not having any "real" users on the site allows me to make very substantial revisions without any problems, but that isn't realistic when millions of people are expecting the site to be working 24/7. I have to get into the habit of testing on a separate test server prior to deployment. Without real users, there is no incentive to do that or to be careful.

Anyone who is interested can check out my site at blog-stalk.com