HexLex, The Blog: 2004-2006
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Matt Hamer
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hexlex.com
![[HexLex - Old]](http://static.hexlex.com/images/resized/small/c7/40/hexlexold.jpg)
HexLex, the blog, has been retired. The entries from the old blog were mostly off-topic, so they have not been migrated. The most interesting entries are summarized here.
September, 2004 - I wondered why HTTP proxy servers weren't discussed more often as mechanism for minimizing the bandwidth consumed by the proliferation of RSS readers and aggregators.
October, 2004 - EContent published a nice article about Kinja peppered with quotes from yours truly. Later that month, I went on (a much needed) vacation, with a USB "drive" loaded with portable apps.
November, 2004 - I wrote about hashcash , a spam-busting protocol based on SHA-1.
December, 2004 - I purchased TurboTax and it was broken on install due to JavaScript errors. After hand-editing a file, it worked. (Intuit's applications are horrible about requiring certain versions of IE to be installed.)
March, 2005 - I discovered the Mozilla Web Developer Extension . (I still find it indispensable.)
May, 2005 - "In addition to table elements, please feel free to use blink , and font when you insert ads into your RSS feeds. That whole "separate content from presentation" thing was a pretty stupid idea."
July, 2005 - The Google RSS reader was unveiled and, unlike most RSS applications, respected robots.txt (as do the Attribyte agents - I think it is important. I also questioned the validity of the stats quoted in Technorati's state of the blogosphere .
October, 2005 - Beta Bitter? My My .
First, 37signals called out Kinja for being perpetually beta, and now Mark has done the same. Mark claims that "companies are using the beta label to excuse flaws in their web based software beyond just getting initial development feedback. What else can explain beta versions of web applications that have been in production use for over a year."November, 2005 - Providing subscriber counts in the User-Agent string sent by aggregators was a big deal to Jeff Jarvis . (In fact, tantamount to theft!)Really? Do the GMail and Flickr support teams dismiss bug reports because there's a little "beta" on their logo? I personally respond to every Kinja bug report (there aren't many these days) and I have never cited the beta status of Kinja in my response, or refused to fix any real problem because Kinja is "beta." Some perpetually "beta" web applications are that way because the "beta" label is attached with no objective criteria for removal defined. Others may remain "beta" because completion of the "1.0" version is perpetually delayed. Maybe "beta" is a CYA forced upon developers by the legal department? One thing is pretty clear: The "beta" mark on a web application is meaningless to most users . Does my Mom know what the "beta" on the Flickr logo means? If "beta" scared away, say, 50% of the potential users and revenue, you wouldn't see it very often.
The decision to "release" Kinja as "beta" was made, I think, before I joined the project. If I thought "beta" caused scores of potential users to avoid our simple, free, and essentially risk-free application, I'd lobby to have it removed immediately. However, Kinja 1.05-Build 2073 is just around the corner and I don't have time to answer support email with anything more than "TS Kinja is Beta." Ugh. I feel obligated to add this - :)
My view is that the "beta" term is rarely applicable to web applications and is mostly meaningless in this context. After all, web-based applications are effectively "released" as soon as the pages appear on a public server. The risk/reward decision to use "beta" Kinja or GMail isn't quite the same as, say, developing an application that depends upon new features in OS/2 Warp Beta only to find them changed or removed in the final release.
December, 2005 - Kinja was re-launched with a bunch of new features and a new interface. FAIL .
2006-Present - No entries. I was busy developing a publishing system, a new commenting system, stats collection and facebook-like features (among other things) for Gawker Media. Traffic has increased from 50M views to over 250M views during this time.