Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Jan
28.
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Category: Uncategorized

You may have seen our farewell letter to blogger. And yes, it is true. We have switched from a Blogger system to a WordPress system.

The transition was made during the late hours of Saturday night. We hope we have caused as few disturbances as possible – we have even relinked every old article to its new permanent address (by hand none the less!). Still, let us know if there is anything that is broken or doesn’t seem to be working like it should. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

So why did we make the switch? Well, as the first post hinted, we have had trouble with Blogger’s stability. But this was not the main reason we switched. The main reason was that even that we were hosting our own published version of our Blogger blog, there were a few links that were part of every page that went back to Blogger.com material. And despite Google’s legendary connection speeds, Blogger.com did not seem to get any of that. Time and time again we saw situations where the front page was not loading for several seconds as the web browser was waiting for a Blogger.com file. And whatever they were doing, they didn’t even seem to have cache control enabled. So these files would be fetched over and over again, possibly with a multiple second delay.

We don’t think WordPress is faster than Blogger. In fact, I’m very certain that WordPress is slower by an order of magnitude. Blogger generated static pages for all content. Every time a comment was posted, the relevant post’s static page file was updated. Every time a new post was made, old pages were regenerated with the relevant links to the new page. This of course is optimal. You can hardly make a web server any faster than it is when serving static pages, especially not with the right Apache configuration.

So in theory Blogger was extremely fast, and we will be taking a performance hit by switching to dynamic pages with WordPress. But in practice, Blogger was often very slow due to those few non cacheable header links. It shouldn’t take seconds to load a single page, especially not if all images are already cached.

So we didn’t have a choice. Blogger was pushing us to upgrade to the new version of Blogger, and if we did that we wouldn’t be able to use WordPress’s built in Blogger import feature, which we ultimately used to get all old posts and comments over to the new system.

That said, the switch wasn’t entirely because of Blogger’s drawbacks. There are some very nice things with WordPress. For example, you can create pages like our About page. This is a great touch of CMS functionality that saves us from the trouble of theming random pages by hand.

Next we will look into generating a new sitemap and page caching. We hope that your Playing With Wire experience is faster already though.

Please let us know if you find anything that doesn’t seem to work as expected.

Update 1: We did try to contact Blogger about the performance issues two months ago, but we never heard back from them.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

Dear Blogger.com,
We liked you for a bit, but after a while you started to let us down. Come on, that’s not how a friend is supposed to be. Lately you were never there when we needed you. Late at night when we needed to post a blog entry, you were gone.

After you started to hang out with Google you changed. It feels like we don’t know you anymore.

Now we’ve found a new friend. His name is WordPress. We haven’t known him for that long yet, but so far he seems like a much more reliable friend than you ever were.

We’ve had it with you Blogger. WordPress is our new best friend.

Sincerely,
PlayingWithWire.com

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Jan
25.

Today I went to the Post Office to apply for a PO Box. The process is very straight forward and doesn’t take much time (unless you have to stand in line). You just fill out a form with some information about you and your company, such as who will have access to the box etc. You also specify the size of box you want. WireLoad won’t be receiving that much snail mail, so we settled for the smallest one.

When you’ve handed this form in, they’ll go a head and process the application and send you a mail to the address you specified in the application. According to the lady at the post office, this should only take a couple of days. When you receive that mail, you need to head back to the Post Office and that’s when you actually get your box (and find out the address). That’s also when you make the payment for the box.

What you need:
– 2 forms of real ID (credit card is not enough)
– This form (or you can fill it out there)

What you get:
– A size ‘1’ box (3″ by 5.5″)

What you pay:
– $20 for 6 months

UPDATE: As it turns out, the local Post Office only charge $20 / 6 months instead of $37 as announced on the homepage.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

Note: This article only applies to California, and Santa Clara county. For other counties and states other rules may apply.

Two day ago we finally sent out our FBN-filing to the Clerk-Recorder’s office. The process of filing these papers was very straight forward. Go to the Clerk-Recorder’s homepage and download the PDF-file. The form is really intuitive, and won’t take you too much time to fill out. However, in order to file these paper you need an EIN. In addition to that information, you just basically fill out what the FBN is, where you’re located and names etc.

After this filing is done, you need to run a small advertisement in a magazine or newspaper (San Jose Business Journal is cheap) for 4 weeks to establish your FBN. When these weeks are over, the magazine will send you the ads, which you will archive with your business papers. The reason for this is that if someone later on will claim the name which you filed the FBN for, you have these ads as a proof of that you were the first one to use the name.

Why do you need an FBN? First of all this establishes you company name. In the case when you use a name other than your real business-name when conducting business, you need to have a FBN that links your FBN to your company. If you file a FBN for your real business name, you simply just establish your business-name further legally. In addition to that, whenever you want to file for another FBN, for let’s say a product or service, you don’t need to go through and file all the papers again. Then you just file an Addendum to add the product/service.

What you need:
– A registered company (LLC in our case)
– An EIN
The form for filing FBN
The form to file for additional FBN (optional)
– Two envelopes and two stamps (one for the filing and one for the self-addressed stamped envelope)

What you get:
– An FBN that’s valid for 5 years

What you pay:
– $37 for the initial filing
– $7 for each extra FBN (Addendum)

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Jan
20.
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Category: Business

We were well prepared. We had every possible company paperwork neatly filed in a manila folder, three forms of personal identification each; our suit pants had perfect creases, our shirts crisp white. When we entered the bank, heads turned.

Either that or we were dressed pretty much like normal and didn’t have a single form except in digital format. And when we entered the bank we had to sit down and wait like everyone else. :)

Either way we have now taken our first ‘official’ action as a company, and WireLoad has opened a bank account. The idea is mostly that we want to pay things out of a company account instead of our personal accounts going forward.

Just to let you know: Washington Mutual, the bank of our choice, was not able to accept digitalized copies of company documents. The following things were needed, at least here in California and for Washington Mutual:

  • Articles of Organization, with the ‘File’ stamp indicating it had been filed with the government.
  • Statement of Information. In particular the bank needed to know who owned the company. There might be other ways to demonstrate this but a statement of information is probably the easiest way.
  • An Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS.
  • Two forms of identification for each person. Viktor previously had an account with Washington Mutual, so a single form of identification was sufficient there. I had to provide two pieces. This turned out to be easy: a primary id, my driver’s license, and a secondary id: a credit card with my name on it.
  • A checkbook to make the initial deposit/pay fees.

All in all it wasn’t too bad. Apparently we can expect checks and a debit card to arrive within a few weeks. The terms for the account weren’t bad either. Free checks, free debit-cards, no minimum balance and no charges for deposits or withdrawals. That’s pretty much all we need at this point.

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