I wanted to A/B test a new home page on Vogogo featuring an explainer video. Having been involved only loosely in the process before, it didn’t seem like there were many options outside of using companies that specialized in the creation of explainer videos. Unfortunately, they all seem to fancy themselves as modern day Donald Draper’s who want thousands of dollars, and months of design and review, to create just one video. A video that you have no idea how it will impact conversions until you release it into the wild, making the whole process seem rather dated compared to the rest of the...

Django has several asynchronous processing options available like Celery, Chronograph and Django Tasks. They all offer lots of features but if you want something simpler, maybe just the ability to send a webhook on the submission of a form without having the user wait around for the webhook to complete (or the remote site timeout), it seems like overkill. As a result I came up with the following simple Django asynchronous processing application. It was written to work with Django 1.3 but works with Django 1.4′s, sans the new select_for_update functionality. There is just one file called...

I finally got around to moving from Posterous to a self hosted WordPress instance. The future of Posterous is unclear, since they were aquried by Twitter, but that really didn’t influence my decision to move. My main reason for moving are the limitations of Posterous such as the disallowing of embedded Javascript and not having the ability to do sitemaps. Initially this wasn’t a big deal, I just wanted something quick to set up. At the time I looked at Tumblr, Blogger and WordPress.com and landed on Posterous. Matt Warren had set up the WordPress instance we use at Vogogo and, after playing...

We had a few extra monitors kicking around the office and, rather than just letting them sit there, I decided it would be good to use them as dashboards to communicate important information to the rest of the company. I figured that if live production stats were broadcast throughout the office it would help focus people’s efforts while at the same time building a sense of unity. Four low profile VESA monitor mounts ordered off of Amazon, some HDMI to DVI cables and mini display port to HDMI adapters off Monoprice, and a pair of Radeon 6950′s I had from Bitcoin mining last year and I was all...

Last week I attended my first Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I meant to post last week but I have been trying to get caught up on things on the Vogogo front, as well as getting over a cold I came down with right before leaving. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the conference so I registered the day before, which was a good thing as when I returned the following morning to have breakfast I was presented with a massive line of people zigzagging throughout the main level of the Moscone Center waiting to go up to the 3rd floor for the keynote. I made the decision to skip breakfast and hop...

Last weekend we launched a completely redesigned vogogo.com based on customer feedback and usage metrics collected over the last year. The new system is significantly simplified over it’s predecessor, written in a technology stack that speeds development time and will allow us to introduce new features with greater speed and confidence. Outwardly it allowed us to accomplish three major goals:   Show, not Tell The old vogogo.com tried to explain with long blocks of text and images what Vogogo did. Most of that text originated from what we thought people needed to know about our service with a...