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The official story is that Making Light is down because its server is down. Patrick is SpeakerToHostingProviders in this context. All will be well, and updates will appear here in a calm and controlled manner:

But, dear reader, I can reveal to you that this is all a cover-up, because the officials don't want you to know the truth: the Zombie Apocalypse has come, and our beloved Making Light is trapped inside a mall.

For the latest updates, check out the Making Light Twitter feed. I'll repost them in the comments as well, and any suggestions for what our beloved website can do are most welcome.

3:25 pm EST: Per Patrick, the server crashed. Hosting Matters is doing a disk check and will bring it back "soon".

4:14 pm EST: And we're back. It was all a dream. Honest.

That collection of abstractions bound together by a mental model* that we usually refer to as "Making Light" has got back-end troubles. Although it does not reflect the underlying reality, feel free to think of it as the result of an enormous office party by the comment approval gnomes. That's much more entertaining than "too many connections".

The upshot is that you must treat what already sits on the site as a perfect jewel. Feel free to admire it, but you may not at this point add to it. Commenting is broken.

A support ticket has been raised with the host, but until we get this fixed, feel free to chat here.

Further bulletins as events warrant. The final update will mention a murnival.

Further Bulletin One:
The error message all the cool kids are getting has moved from "too many connections" to "Can't call method "created_on" on an undefined value."

I've been trying to write about my life as a bicycle commuter for a couple of years now. I've touched on specific aspects, both here and on Making Light.

But a lot of the ways that biking to work matters to me really are not verbal, so I've struggled to phrase things in any useful or meaningful way. I knew what I wanted to say in the middle of the post (what routes, how far, how long it took) and at the end (thinking as I ride). But how to begin?

My sordid history as a Rush fan came to the rescue. The immediacy of the lyrics of Red Barchetta was exactly the tone I was looking for to pull the reader into the experience.

The result: My own personal Rota Fortunae.

Simple. Tell them that they're not one.

It won't destroy it, of course. Wherever a group of people collaborate for a common endeavor, there we find community.

But communities come in different flavors. My favorite kind includes a substantial amount of trust among the community members, and between them and their leaders/moderators. They are often powerfully goal-oriented, whether the goal is to build something or simply to have good conversation. These ones are electrifying to be a member of. Shared endeavors and a sense of shared ownership seem to actually create energy.

Other communities, however, just depress everyone. A group of rules lawyers, whose shared energy is absorbed in the feeling that bad behavior is punished but good actions go unrewarded, is still a community. It's just not a very pleasant one. One doesn't go out and evangelize for such a community or for what it does. One doesn't hope that others will come join it.

(There is a third kind of community to be mindful of, of course. A mob, like a depressive community, is a common failure mode of an energized community.)

The breakdown of trust is of course the most common reason that the first kind of community turns into the second. It's easy, particularly as a leader or moderator, to feel betrayed by everyone when the crowd goes in a direction that you don't want it to. And the fear of the mob is a powerful motivator. The temptation is to lock everything down, pretend that there is no community ethos but the one you provide.

But people don't work that way. Clamp down on a community, and it turns sour; the community spirit becomes one of grumbling and nit-picking conformance to the stated rules. Spontaneous action for the common good, being unrewarded, goes away.

I've seen online communities go completely sour at this point, as the members in their turn feel betrayed by the moderators. Subsequent events just confirm the mutual hostility. Eventually many of these things break up completely.

This isn't universal; sometimes the shared endeavor of the community is motivating enough to overcome the mutual mistrust. Gradually, a new balance is found; member behavior builds moderator trust and moderator trust reduces member resentment.

Communities may recover in time, but it's not a pleasant process.

This rather discouraged rant has been brought to you by the letter M and the number 2.

I have had two very differing experiences with Web businesses lately. One has left me seething with fury for almost five months. The other filled me with dread and Martin with foreboding, but came out beautifully.

The Good

As I've gained skill as a binder, I've decided to sell some of my work as well as giving it away (advt). Despite its negative connotations in some circles, I'm pretty much inseperable from the evilrooster identity as a bookbinder. So the obvious thing to do was to obtain the evilrooster.com domain name. I used to own it, several years ago, but never did much with it.

Now, I am - apart from a role player named Joe somewhere in the States who turns up on two or three sites - the only evilrooster on the Web. So I was not facing much competition for the name. But old domain names, no longer owned, don't always vanish into the incohate pool of available URLs. If they are still linked somewhere on the web, then they are often bought, en bloc, by search engines and link farms, and redirected to the main search engine page. (It boosts a site's Google rating to have multiple links into it.)

Evilrooster.com was such a site. It was owned by a search engine named Netster, on the strength of a link from my mother's old site. That was discouraging. But the Netster site said that the company's policy is "to transfer a domain name to any person or company that, in our reasonable opinion, has a legitimate claim to that domain name...We do not sell domain names".

These are very important statements for Netster's sake, because the use of domains not immediately related to one's business is a feature of cybersquatting. (The most famous example being whitehouse.com, which is a porn site - try whitehouse.gov for the seat of American government.) And the current body of decisions on cybersquatting makes it clear that buying a URL one is not entitled to with the intention of selling it to the proper owner at an inflated price is not on either.

(A related web offence, passing off is irrelevant to this discussion - they don't bind books - but often gets mentioned in the same context as cybersquatting.)

But a policy is not the same as an action, and the new owners could very easily have put a maze of red tape in their policy on website transfers without breaking the rules. For instance, since I don't have evilrooster trademarked, they could have denied that I am legally entitled to it. Or they could cut a deal with a registrar that includes a high price for domain name transfers, then recharge me their "costs" for handing over evilrooster.com. Neither would be illegal, and I would have fallen back on an alternative URL rather than get into a scrap about it.

Instead, they engaged in a very civil and helpful correspondence with me. In the absence of a trademark, they asked if I was using the identiy on my work. My rooster finishing tool came in handy then - it's plainly visible on most of the bindings on my gallery page. So they agreed that I was entitled to the site. If I would get an account with their registrar, thy would initiate a transfer. I signed up with the registrar in question, and reviewed their pricing. Their transfer fee was not extortionate. Then I got an email from Netster, which I will quote verbatim.

Hello,

We have moved the requested domain(s) to your account. Please take care to manage it from there. While during this process we have incurred transfer, registration, and administrative costs, it is not our desire to seek reimbursement from you. Instead, we would appreciate any positive references you might make about our search engine, www.netster.com. We are sure that would be more valuable to us than any fee.

Thanks,
Administrator

That email made my day. When I get evilrooster.com redeveloped (watch this space for an announcement when it's up, but don't hold your breath. I do have a job and two small children, plus a lot of binding to finish before Christmas), I'll be adding a link to Netster. Considering that they're primarily a US-based site, I'm not likely to get a lot of use out of it, but maybe the link will be of use to them. I hope so; I want to encourage good Internet neighbours.

The Bad

I wish everyone was as good as these guys. I wish that an internet-based book vendor, whom I had paid, was as friendly, communicative and effective as Netster.

There's a book on headband construction that I wanted. I have a photocopy of it, from when it was out of print and unobtainable. Oak Knoll Press (to whom I will not link lest I boost their page rank), the publishers, printed a new edition, and I wanted to buy it, to support the bookbinding publishing market and the authors who did the work.

So I went to the Oak Knoll site. First problem: it doesn't work in Firefox (the mouse-over activated pull-down menus have some strange ideas about where the mouse pointer is), so I needed to use Internet Explorer. It's a minor nuisance.

I ordered the book on June 17 and paid for it by credit card. Oak Knoll emailed me and told me it would be about 1 week for processing the order, then 5 weeks' surface shipping. So I expected it in late July.

By early August, I was wondering where my book was. I emailed Oak Knoll, and got no reply. I emailed again, and finally got an answer that showed that my email was caught in their spam filter. Without wanting to tell a business how to run itself, I might suggest that a spam filter that traps your customers' emails is probably not a good thing.

Apparently, Oak Knoll's postal supplier lost a bunch of June shipments somewhere in Florida. Did they email their European customers to find out whether the shipped books had arrived? Of course not. Did they contact me and tell me when I'd be shipped a replacement? Don't be silly.

So I waited a bit, then tried again. Again, no one answered my emails. I finally called them and got some attention at the cost of a transatlantic phone call. They said they'd send out another copy on September 17 by expedited delivery, and could I contact them when it arrived? No estimate of delivery time was given, so I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, well into October, I got peeved and sent them another email. I can't say I was surprised that they didn't reply. Only when I sent another email, threatening to post an account of the transaction on the book-arts listserv, did a woman named Jeanette write back. She complained that I was "SHOUTING" at her, and that she was tired of it. She also said that the book should have been inserted into the UK postal service 8 - 10 days after shipping; clearly it had gone astray. Again. Not that they were interested in checking when they could wait for me to complain.

By this time, I was heartily regretting ever having tried to buy the book, or support their business in any way. I finally emailed them to say forget it, I'd source it elsewhere (a UK bookbinding supplier whom I trust to deliver what I've paid for, Shepherd's). Then, after no reply, I emailed them the same thing again, and got an answer. Apparently, without telling me or updating my online order sheet (which I checked after logging onto IE, sigh), they'd already sent a third copy out.

They have since refunded my money, which they held for the 4 1/2 months that they fumbled delivery and failed at customer service. Murphy's law says that the third copy of the book will arrive, at which point I will either contact them and pay again, or refuse delivery and notify them that it is on its way back to them. One thing is certain, though:

I will never buy anything from, or recommend that anyone buy from, Oak Knoll Books.

As publishers of bookbinding books, they will get some of my money from resellers, but I won't deal with them directly again. To be clear: I accept that they can't help it if their delivery company lets them down. But it's when a problem occurs that a company gets the chance to show its competitive advantage. Oak Knoll's policy of never answering customer emails the first time and without threats, much less actually communicating with them when they know things have gone wrong, does not shine.

The IT industry has been gripped by anxiety over the last few months over the growing trend towards "offshoring". More and more companies are moving their software development to countries like India and China, where a highly educated workforce is willing to code for a fraction of the costs of North Americans and Europeans. This is a Bad Thing according to pundits, but, I suspect, an inevitable one. UK call centres and directory enquiries are already frequently staffed from the Indian subcontinent (with operators given "cultural training" so they can chat about the latest happenings on Eastenders.)

I also suspect that my own specialty, software testing, is going to see a renaissance in the US, Canada, and Europe. At present, software testing seems to be moving offshore along with the development. But I reckon a given company will try an average of one offshore implementation without onshore testing before we testers become very, very popular. Even "onshore" offsite developments need acceptance testing. How much more will projects developed across time zones, continents, and language barriers?

But some industries are supposed to be offshoring-proof. Right? Right? Wrong. sporran makers are under threat from offshoring.

Is nothing sacred?