Today 37signals dropped our domain http://webwork.clientsection.com. Instead they have replaced it with http://webwork.basecamphq.com.

There is a thread on their forums covering the issue. As one customer writes:

BasecampHQ is a stupid domain for one. What is its relevance to my clients? I am paying for a professional service – not for branding that sounds like a paint ball website.

I totally agree. Apparently this change is coming with additional footer branding and additional branding in the emails.

This is a case of breaking the contract with the original customer: us. We are the ones who bought into their white label extranet solution with attractive anonymous core domains like:

• grouphub.com
• clientsection.com
• projectpath.com
• seework.com
• updatelog.com

We pay a handsome yearly fee for the use of the software and the domain. Until recently, it's been $600/year. Now, it's $1200/year. For that fee, we expected 37signals to honour their part of the deal which was to allow us to continue to use the software and environment which we helped them get off the ground.

We actually upgraded our Basecamp account recently and consolidated our operations on the system. I was happy to do it, but now have deep regrets.

37signals at this point has gone Microsoft. They are not working for us anymore. I'm not sure they are working for them. They are working for the corporation and have become that corporation.

What is particularly disheartening is the supercilious tone and dissembling of Jason Fried has not abated. His excuse for sandbagging us on our domain name: 

In fact, it reminds us a lot of our transition away from IE 6 a few years ago. That transition was also met with similar dissatisfaction by some of our customers.

Fried was immediately called on his absurd analogy by Andrew Myers:

There is no reason for this move from any perspective other than that of marketing for your products. What will this bring to us the customer (Who are paying your bills) that we simply can not live without?

I also do not like the fact that branding for Basecamp is now on all pages and in emails generated by the software. Why? 37signals, you’re dropping the ball on this one. How about spending more development time improving Basecamp, your core product, instead of wasting so much time on stuff that doesn’t really matter to your customers.

and Dougal:

it’s filled with pretzel logic. By the third sentence you’re talking about IE6 as a comparison – with the only correlation being that people didn’t like that either? And third, you never address the crux of the matter – that you sold it for years as white label and now you are branding it and linking from our extranet pages to your selling pages.

I also suggest you take a look at your About page and see if you still Believe in those things… especially the one about your customers being your investors.

Dougal hit the nail on the head.

We aren't that important anymore, the core customers. 37signals want to be the Microsoft of project management and online collaboration. They don't need or want us any more.

ep agrees and highlights another issue well known to alert 37signals customers. You can't get your data out:

You can not leave with your data period. 37s is abusing this situation which has lasted for years now. When you have been using Basecamp for years, you depend on it, your customers depend on it and you’re tied because you can not leave with your data, just a stupid xml file or a ridiculous set of html files.

37signals used to be a small company like lots of us are (or not?). When you are a small company your customers are human beings; when you have passed a certain point of growth (and greed), the same customers become numbers.

I’m afraid we have become numbers.

The only way out is via the API which is a bit shaky. Somebody should write a migration tool. In fact someone already has done so. The problem is that it doesn't work (I tried it).

We are currently working on a serious enhancement to Basecamp, which we are beta-testing internally. Now that we have over 50 live projects, Basecamp is creaking at the seams and so we've decided to enhance it.

Once this enhancement is out the door, we will be working on a self-hosted open source version of Basecamp. Our code base will be WordPress (check out our Foliopress WYSIWYG and Thoughtful Comments to see what we are up to on the WordPress). We've built insurance apps, real estate apps, SEO apps, all on the WordPress codebase, so we know this can be done.

The first extra tool will be an import tool from Basecamp. The API work for our Basecamp based tool will come in very handy.

Anyone who is interested in updates on our enhancement to Basecamp and in being able to host a Basecamp-like solution on their own domain and on their own server should sign up below. People form this list will be first in line to beta-test.

If I have any strong thoughts about Basecamp alternatives in the meantime, I will share them with this list as well.

Once we get the very first iteration done, we will be seeking collaborators. If you'd like to participate in development and have great WordPress, PHP or server-admin skills, we want to hear from you. Please sign up here:

What this won't be is a slow product like ActiveCollab (server crippling loads) with a lot of features. We build fast and lean. The first iterations will actually have less features than Basecamp but the ones which we really need. We believe in the GPL and we believe in free software and won't pull a license change either. Don't believe us?

Our codebase is WordPress: we couldn't leave the GPL even if we wanted to.

By Alec

37Signals, Basecamp URL change and not giving a damn about your customers

Post from: Foliovision

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Ken Evoy Pumping Site Sell

Evoy's been at it since the bad old days when the internet was a mess and Site Built It! did have the advantage of actually getting a website up in some form - easier than coding html from scratch for the neophyte.

Throughout SBI's history, Evoy has shrieked about his process and his proprietary tools. On the surface, a clear process and proprietary tools are a good idea. Probably worth the price of admission (or so I thought at the time). The issue with the proprietary tools (which otherwise might be a good deal) is that you can only use them a little bit. Come and play for one hour per week, see you next week. Not exactly inviting brainstorming or creativity.

In contrast, the indepdendent expensive (many of which are free) tools Evoy condemns let you use them as much as you like once you find them.

Over the years, I've learned not to expect much from Evoy's newsletters (sometimes for six months at a time, they get relegated to the read later bin). Still it's worth sometimes checking in on somebody who's multiyear obsession has been selling ecommerce sites. Another perspective.

In the last couple of years the internet has changed and it's actually quite easy to put a website up. Just buy a hosting account (a single domain account is $3 to $7 Ken, not the $10 to $15 you cite), click the one step install button and you have vanilla WordPress (or Mambo or Joomla or whatever else catches your fancy). Or pay nothing and sign up at WordPress.com and have a better than vanilla WordPress install with lots of attractive themes ready and waiting for you and an active forum.

The ease of putting up a high quality website - almost all of which look better than Site Build It websites and are easier to post to - is naturally a huge threat to the SBI business. Why pay Ken Evoy $300 per year per website for hosting which should cost $50?

Evoy's latest missive starts yet another hysterical title "Why blogging is a massive mistake!" Exclamation mark is his.

Writing a weblog is not a massive mistake. Handled properly, a weblog does wonders for your website traffic and search engine standing. But taking away the hype, this time Evoy does have a worthwhile point about weblog type sites (WordPress in particular) - i.e. they date like stale newspaper. I can confirm the tendency from my own sites.

By publishing a weblog, you are effectively creating just a daily news source.

What happens if you publish a very good article which has value as a permanent reference? It stands alone in your weblog. People come, read the single article and leave. There may be other interesting content on your weblog for them to read but the visitor can't be bothered to ferrret it out. If your writing or content is extremely compelling, perhaps some visitors will read a certain amount of your content. But then they will leave. Which quite frankly for an online journal is fine. You're not selling anything.

But for a business, this isn't so good. What you want is to create an information resource for people in your business, which will bring them back again and again. An information structure which invites them to find immediately the other relevant areas of interest.

And Evoy quite correctly points out that this is the built-in model for Site Build It:

Blog posts are created and stored in chronological order. A good blogger will produce a post that is useful today, but who will read it in three months? Even when bloggers go to the extra effort of archiving their posts by "keyword categories," the articles are dated and not rewritten into coherent definitive articles. Usefulness plummets with time.

How does a Theme-Based Content Site differ? Instead of a stack of old newspapers, each resembles a good resource book about its theme, composed of useful, original articles ("Web pages") that cover related topics in some depth. Written in each small-business owners's unique voice, and based upon that person's experience in the field, they are useful resources that visitors return to over and over.

Evoy correctly points out that a photography weblog would just be one in a million, posting the nattering about the latest cameras and software:

How would a blog be presented? A stream of disjointed photography tips would be organized by "date of post." And posts on any given topic (ex., "portrait lighting") would be separated by time (weeks or months apart), each covering only a certain aspect of the topic. On the other hand...

Definitely not the right one to pull someone into your website. Evoy contrasts the above weblog site with this siloed sitemap for a static site:

site build it silo site

This time Evoy's absolutely right. Someone looking for information on photography lighting would gradually be led through the whole of your website, would bookmark it and come back as a reference. All of this assumes of course that your content is top-notch (and Ken, let's be frank, there's not too many people capable of creating top-notch content, on or off the SBI rolls). But with a static site structure at least you stand a fighting chance of retaining your visitor and becoming a reference.

In any case this is a huge insight. Pages instead of posts something I've been playing around with in the static pages section in Foliovision. Our client sites are also largely hierarchical with the weblog performing weblog functions (added value).

What I've been doing is making a static page instead of a post and then publishing a small announcement on the weblog section.

Unfortunately some of the news outlets which republish my content will not link to static pages or to articles which are more than 24 hours old (a pain in the neck, as after publishing a major article I like to come back to it 12 hours later to proof it and add or correct illustrations).

Going forward, I am going to build up the static pages sections very actively. When I first publish a post, it will go into the weblog, but within a few days. There is one small issue which is comments. We enable comments on pages so visitors will still be able to comment on the static page. But often some of the comments come in right away (on the weblog version).

1. Do I leave the comments on the weblog post or move them to the static page?
2. If I choose to move the comments to the static page, there is no mechanism to do so inside WordPress. We'd have to build a plugin.

BTW, this sort of question is what you are paying Evoy to solve for you with either no solution (in this case) or his solution. For an inside the box thinker (or someone with very little design sensibility and/or minimal interest in technology), SBI solves a lot of problems. For an existing six-figure business, there are better ways to bring your business online than SBI DIYism. I do agree with Ken that business owners should have better things to do with their time than spend it troubleshooting websites or optimising their sites for Google.

If you're interested in having a closer look at the Site Build It system and way of thinking, Ken Evoy offers a number of free ebooks on writing for the web, selling services and montization. SBI's claim ithat the free ebooks are better than a lot of the pay ebooks out on internet marketing is more or less true. Given the rubbish sold as ebooks that's not necessarily saying a whole lot. The link above bundles several of them into a single zip file for your convenience.

Personally, Ken's writing style drives me up the wall (he's been described as rah-rah), but the bulk of the information is good. I just can't read past his marketing speech. The formatting is bizarre as well. I wish the guy would hire a graphic designer at some point. Why does he write Sidebar and then not make the sidebar a sidebar but whack it right into the middle of the text?

Some other references

• Are theme based site better than blogs?
• WordPress vs SiteBuildIt
• Ken Evoy attacks blogging and WordPress

By Alec

SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website

Post from: Foliovision

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Even a single day with internet down for a whole day would cost the company three times more in lost productivity than the cost of the second high speed connection for the year.

So we've done what every modern business should do. We now have redundant high speed internet from T-Com.

Which is a good thing as our cable internet is down today. But no big deal, I just swapped the router over to the DSL connection and we were all ready to get back to work. Well, almost.

With Mac OS X, switching over from one network connection is as easy as renewing your DHCP lease in the Network preference pane - the OS will usually do so automatically.

mac os x switching network

With Windows, it's a little more difficult as the computer will not want to switch over automatically, even if you open up the Local Area Connection Status and press repair.

That's not enough. After some positive messages, you will get an error saying that Windows is unable to repair DNS.

The simple but tiresome solution is to restart your computer. No big deal for one computer but for seven, a real pain in the neck.

There is a faster way. Open up Start -> Run and type:

ipconfig /flushdns

Your connection should be immediately live.

So now we have redundant internet for the whole office with just swapping over a single cable.

In terms of a longer term solution, we are thinking buying a load balancing router.

Unfortunately  the reviews of all of them from the

D-Link DI-LB604

whether the D-Link DI-LB604 4-Port Load Balancing Router or the Linksys RV082 have been so rotten that there doesn't seem to be any point in buying one for less than a thousand dollars. That's a lot of money for about $50 worth of hardware. Especially hardware which doesn't work very well.

At that price, it makes more sense to build your own load balancing Linux server. At least that way, one is future proofed. Load balancing routers are in their infancy and have to get better and cheaper over the next two years. I have no interest in paying the early adopter tax and then struggling with a shoddy solution.

What distribution or software to use. Reliable sources (Jonathan Slivko) suggested doing it the Untangle Gateway Platform - which is free for DIY or $25/month with full support. Another well-known free alternative is pfSense (Wikipedia info). For background, read this good IBM article on setting up a network router on Linux.

The issue with any of this setup is the hours it will take to get it working properly. Later this month, I'll probably have our new IT guy Alexander sit down and figure out Untangle on an old server from Vienna. If any of it works, I'll let you know.

In the meantime, just remember cable swap and ipconfig /flushdns.

By Alec

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Add nofollow on all of the links that point to other sites, unless you have agreed to a direct link for some reason.

This is the most narrow-minded tripe I've ever heard. Google will rank websites higher who don't link to anyone else? Such a strategy makes a mockery of the whole essence of hypertext and the WWW (world wide web).

This school of thought has its origins with Leslie Rohde from his Optilink/Optispider cult days (circa 2002-2003). The clunky and overpriced Optilink has since been superceded by Brad Callen's Link Proctor, later renamed SEO Elite. Aaron Wall has some free tools (alas some of them broken now - SEO Elite is more reliably updated) and there are lots of other pay tools out there now which track your backlinks.

What is valuable advice is not hoarding PR, but channeling Page Rank. I mean really - you don't increase your wealth by putting your money under your mattress. You increase your wealth by reinvesting your money wisely. And the same thing applies to Page Rank on the internet.

What is channeling PR? Channeling would be not linking internally to one's own privacy policy or TOS. Unless you are running a weblog about privacy issues - those page are off-topic and are only likely to confuse Google about the nature of your own site. If you have other off-topic/irrelevant pages it might be wise to do as much as possible to reduce their part of your site's footprint in Google.

But overall I disagree strongly with these Page Rank hoarders. The more (quality) outbound links on a site the better. It shows the site is serious, is participating in the web and that it knows what sites are worth linking to. In short, a hub.

PR hoarding is a very short sighted strategy. Strange that Leslie Rohde is still pumping these five year old ideas (pre rel="no-follow" he was advocating putting all of the links on your website in javascript except those which you wanted to highlight - he used to call it Dynamic Linking). Both of these guys (Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde) have joined StomperNet faculty so whatever disinterested credibility they might have had as experts is out the window. This kind of occultish trick is so WMW doorway page 2001 (think javascript redirects as well). Much of it is obstructionist technobabble to hinder people from making worthwhile websites while making the vendors rich peddling black magic software. Ultimately, websites live and thrive by their content and your social networking - and not by these kinds of cheap tricks.

Aaron is also against PR hoarding but for different reasons:

• If something is worth mentioning then I think it is worth mentioning to both people and search bots.
• I think excessive use of nofollow carves up the web, leaving scars in it and making it more wounded for those who use it.
• What was once white hat became gray then black. There is nothing saying that search engines won't eventually penalize sites for excessive or manipulative use of no follow. Just how nofollow magically made paid links evil one day, so might excessive use of nofollow the day Google realizes how damaging it is to the web.

All valid arguments. Many people like to pollute, except in their own home. Just drive down any highway and look at the rubbish at the side of the road which people have thrown out of their car windows (Austria is a very pleasant exception to this rule, America is the worst offender I've seen). So I'll advance my argument again - I think link hoarding damages your own website, right here right now. It's in your own interest to link widely and link wisely.

There is a certain irony to Aaron's post. He has disabled both trackbacks and links to commenters' own websites on his own weblog. Ostensibly this is to protect himself from "noisy off topic comments to get a link to a spammy site". Aaron, I tell you, if you don't have the time yourself, hire yourself someone to edit incoming comments. Train that person to throw out noisy off topic comments. Otherwise you are putting yourself at risk of hypocrisy - at this point you are almost the pot calling the kettle black.

I think we need a name for this new kind of person who wants links but doesn't want to give them. To me they are all linkocrites. I strongly disagree with all kinds of Linkocrisy.

The accent goes on on the o.

By Alec

PR Hoarding | Linkocrisy

Post from: Foliovision

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