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Would you care to expand? You mean that changing Magnolia's name is idiotic? Or keeping it intact is? I think he should be able to get away with renaming the

Would you care to expand? You mean that changing Magnolia's name is idiotic? Or keeping it intact is? I think he should be able to get away with renaming the site Ma.gnolia (with a dot).

ErrantX 17y ago
I suspect he is referring to the fact that Magnolia lost all their data a little while back due to a poor backup policy (I forget the exact details).
- idlewords 17y ago
  The details are worth remembering. They had an enormous database (half a terabyte or so) due to their decision to store cached content in database tables. Their backup strategy was to try to sync their live DB files to another machine over firewire. When the master database eventually got corrupted, they dutifully rsynced the corrupt files over to the "backup". Once the database finally rolled over and died, they claimed to be unable to recover any user data at all from the hard drives. But it seems they never bothered to go to a vendor specializing in MySQL recovery. Offers of help from Percona went unanswered, at least in public. Full disclosure - I run a competing site (pinboard.in). Magnolia's stunning negligence in securing user data, and Larry Halff's attempts to cast himself as a victim of internet trolls when confronted by his angry users, are pretty much what motivated me to start the project.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    This is a much better reply than someone else's a few levels up. You analyzed the mistakes and you decided to learn from them and create a competing product. That is much more enjoyable to read about than "that guy is an idiot". I wish I could upmod twice.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Thanks for that :)
blasdel 17y ago
He demonstrated pretty clearly that he had no idea what he was doing when he lost all the data behind the site, and then revealed that he had set whole thing up to run on OS X (a sure sign of a dilettante, as someone who had to administer other people's boxes running Mac OS X Server for several years) and that his backup scheme naively synced the in-use database files. Now he's decided to change the name based on a ridiculously weak letter that anyone who'd even bothered to look at the introduction to the Wikipedia article on Trademarks would have brushed off with laughter.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Yeah, your social bookmarking site did much better. (My point here is that maybe things aren't as simple as you are making them seem. It is easy to critique other's mistakes, but it's not quite as easy to avoid them in the first place.)
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - idlewords 17y ago
    Running a public, for-profit website for years without generating a single usable backup is a fireworks-party-on-the-hindenburg class of mistake. There is no excuse for that level of incompetence.

Would you care to expand? You mean that changing Magnolia's name is idiotic? Or keeping it intact is? I think he should be able to get away with renaming the site Ma.gnolia (with a dot).

ErrantX 17y ago

I suspect he is referring to the fact that Magnolia lost all their data a little while back due to a poor backup policy (I forget the exact details).

idlewords 17y ago
The details are worth remembering. They had an enormous database (half a terabyte or so) due to their decision to store cached content in database tables. Their backup strategy was to try to sync their live DB files to another machine over firewire. When the master database eventually got corrupted, they dutifully rsynced the corrupt files over to the "backup". Once the database finally rolled over and died, they claimed to be unable to recover any user data at all from the hard drives. But it seems they never bothered to go to a vendor specializing in MySQL recovery. Offers of help from Percona went unanswered, at least in public. Full disclosure - I run a competing site (pinboard.in). Magnolia's stunning negligence in securing user data, and Larry Halff's attempts to cast himself as a victim of internet trolls when confronted by his angry users, are pretty much what motivated me to start the project.
- jrockway 17y ago
  This is a much better reply than someone else's a few levels up. You analyzed the mistakes and you decided to learn from them and create a competing product. That is much more enjoyable to read about than "that guy is an idiot". I wish I could upmod twice.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Thanks for that :)

blasdel 17y ago

He demonstrated pretty clearly that he had no idea what he was doing when he lost all the data behind the site, and then revealed that he had set whole thing up to run on OS X (a sure sign of a dilettante, as someone who had to administer other people's boxes running Mac OS X Server for several years) and that his backup scheme naively synced the in-use database files. Now he's decided to change the name based on a ridiculously weak letter that anyone who'd even bothered to look at the introduction to the Wikipedia article on Trademarks would have brushed off with laughter.

jrockway 17y ago
Yeah, your social bookmarking site did much better. (My point here is that maybe things aren't as simple as you are making them seem. It is easy to critique other's mistakes, but it's not quite as easy to avoid them in the first place.)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- idlewords 17y ago
  Running a public, for-profit website for years without generating a single usable backup is a fireworks-party-on-the-hindenburg class of mistake. There is no excuse for that level of incompetence.