Today's Bain of Existance: Site5.com's Byzantine Ruby Application

January 17, 2006 - 9:41pm

For you short attention span, impatient types, here is the bottom line link that this best god damn link -- ever.

Now for that link with commentary: I'm asked directly, at least once a week, where someone should host a civicspace or drupal site. I always say site5.com. Its not that site5.com pays me, or I hope that they someday will. With my hand on the holy bible, I swear that now -- as I have in the past, and will in the future -- openly admit any conflicts of interest that involve the dollar sign when discussing anything.

Given the fair amount of traffic I get, my complete lack of ads testifies to my distinct lack of interest in making money by blogging. So why site5? Plain and simple, their specs fully support civicspace, drupal, ruby, ect.... and there price, bandwidth, diskspace, ect. (i hate listing this stuff) comes at a price that in my opinion is the best value on the market. Not to mention, there customer service has saved, and forgiven my stupid ass on more than one occassion, and there response time is out of this world. All in all, they rock, except for:

My god, Netadmin and Multiadmin have proved to be the  biggest headache. I have absolutely no clue what use passports are, because I've never gotten one to work. Given that I've worked on 7 site5.com accounts so far, you'd think I would have figured out how to get into netadmin. I haven't, and I opened yet another support ticket tonight trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong.

Folks, I'm an idiot. However, I'm less of an idiot than your average person who wants to host a website. If I can't figure out HOW TO LOGIN TO "MY" ACCOUNT something is wrong with the interface, and the design. For god's sake, I am wasting away 12 hours a day working with these sorts of interfaces. Okay, I might be stupid. However, relatively to the average user in the webhosting market, I'm freakin' Einstein when it comes to any web based interface.

I kind of complained earlier today, and I got remark which I felt had a clear "I'm sick of hearing this complaint" in between the lines. I suspect site5.com's management needs to review  the development schedules they put on their poor developers, and start emphasizing foolproof, simple, and quality design, instead of fast development times.

Get real. Developers will build it as fast as their jobs depend. Just because they churn out something using ruby doesn't mean it was a success. Ruby is not a platform to build good websites. Its a good platform to speed developing time. If there interface sucks, it sucks.

Across the board, and this does not apply necessarily to site5.com, upper management needs to make an effort to understand the occult arts of development. For those who don't understand software development, I ask you this: when you took math tests in high school, how did the amount of time you were given affect your score? The same principle applies to development: time X knowledge = success*. When you cut away time, the sum of your success decreases. Never forget that golden rule. Bad websites happen to good companies when "big picture leaders" think they can be both ignorant of a what their employee's do, and set unreasonable schedules. I forsee riches beyond the dreams of avarice for site5.com if they can make their netadmin setup process make sense. And I think that is all jolly good, since I will always give business to folks who make my life less hell like.  *So I pulled the formula out of my ass. You understood the point, though, didn't you?