A couple of weeks ago I posted Broken Browsers Part One, which I can only pray gave you ample preparation for today’s post, Broken Browsers Part Two!

The truth is, not that much is broken in browsers these days. They’ve been around 15 some years now, so it’s not the biggest surprise all the major flaws to be resolved by now.

In fact, I’d say the reason these two broken behaviors of modern web browsers still exist is because most still (and as I’ll try to convince you, erroneously) consider them features!

The browser should just listen to the caching info sent by the server!

Agreed… WHEN REQUESTING CONTENT FROM THE SERVER!

The fact is, pressing back or forward shouldn’t even request content from the server at all!

As one commenter brought up last week, whatever happened to “offline mode” in web browsers? Because that’s what back/forward should still be… instant “offline mode”!

Anyway, on to the second (and final) part of this browser brokenness brouhaha.

SSL Secure Certificates!

Way back in the day, a secure certificate for your website meant two things:

Web browsers have been around for a pretty long time now.

Web browsers have been broken for a pretty long time now.

Bring on the rotten tomatoes, but I still predominantly use Internet Explorer because it is still the least broken browser when it comes to one of the most important features for me:

The Back Button!

(and forward too!)

I cannot understand why, after zillions of versions and dozens of years, no browser implements forward and back correctly.

It’s like the FIRST feature web browsers even had!

What’s Broken About It?

It’s simple really… what do you expect to happen when you click back (or forward)?

You expect the web browser to immediately display what you were looking at before your last click.

What actually happens?

Sometimes you get a “cache expired” message.

Sometimes you get a dialog window asking if you want to re-post to display the results again (ahem, Firefox).

Sometimes you get sort of what you last saw, but it takes a second while it connects to the Internet and gets updated with new content.

Sometimes everything is the same except that the big text field you had typed your blog post into is now EMPTY!

And sometimes, yes sometimes, it works exactly as it should.

Google Too

I kinda like Google’s new browser Chrome. It’s fast and lightweight. But, I also can’t stand it because it doesn’t seem to cache our web panel or intranet pages at all!

Believe it or not, every once in a while our panel is just a weeee bit slow.. and if I use my back or forward buttons as I navigate around, those teeeeeeeeeeensy delays can add up! All the unnecessary page loads probably aren’t doing us any favors on the server-side either!

Google’s apparently making a big push for Chrome soon, including TV ads etc… but before they push too hard, I wish they’d fix their back buttons!

And Here’s How

The craziest thing about all this is, fixing it would be incredibly simple! In fact, I’ve already worked it all out!

Let me demonstrate how the back and forward buttons should work. You can do this at home.

Click this link.

That should have opened in a new window (or tab) for you. And if you’re back here now, you’ve switched windows or tabs, correct?

Ta da!

That’s it! That’s exactly how the back/forward buttons should work! See how FAST it was to get back to this page? See how you were scrolled to EXACTLY the same place you were before? See how you didn’t even have to be on the NETWORK to continue reading this post? See how you didn’t get any pop up warnings or expired CACHE messages? See how you could switch back to that other window (like going FORWARD) just as easily?

Internally, every time you click a link, the browser should handle it exactly the same no matter if you are opening a new tab, a new window, or staying in the same window.

The only difference when you click a link “normally” is it shouldn’t add a “new tab” to the interface … it should put that “new tab” in your back history!

I’d even say the reason tabbed browsing is so popular nowadays is actually because back and forward are broken!

Internet Explorer has always done the best (though not perfect) job with this; it’s probably why they were the last to add tabs.

It’s the main reason why I still use it… honestly, I’d switch away if there were a single browser (or a browser plugin?) that handled it right.

In fact, if somebody can either fix an open source browser to behave like this (or make a working plugin), DreamHost will pay them $1000!

More formally:

The first person to release a plugin for firefox or chrome that does this should post their submission in the comments.

The plugin should make it so that when you click “back” or “forward”, it behaves EXACTLY as though you just switched to an open tab/window with that content in it (though of course visually you stay in the same tab/window).

As for how many pages to keep “open” in the back/forward history, it should be as many as it can, dropping them out in order of oldest to newest as it needs to due to memory constraints.

(Oh yeah, you know what browser would benefit the most from this? Safari on the iPhone! It seemingly does NO caching, even though because of its slow connection/processor it needs it the most! You can’t even fake it with tabs because there’s no way (that I know of?) to “open link in new tab”. It supports tabs though (up to eight), so it should be able to keep at least eight back/forward history pages in memory too!)

Speaking of Prizes

Just a quick reminder that our API contest is still going strong with a due date for contest entries of May 31st!

The prizes are as follows:

Grand Prize: $5,000
1st Place: $2,500
2nd Place: $1,250
3rd Place: $500
4th Place: $750

All the entries so far are up on the wiki, and the winner of the April 30th “early-bird” contest ($2000 to the best app done by April 30th) is…

ChirpBot!

It’s a Twitter interface to the DreamHost API!

It’s simple, it works, it looks nice, and it has the whole CRAZY INSANE SUPER HYPE BANDWAGON going for it to boot!

But don’t worry everybody else, there’s a lot more prizes to be won, and it’s still not too late to enter now!

We’ve recently added a test account and lots of new functions, so check out our API documentation and submit your entries over here!

Way back in March, one of our sysadmins Terri attended the Australian linux conference to give a talk about sysadminning at DreamHost as well as the open source distributed file system Sage’s been working on called Ceph!

Blah blah blah, on to the IMPORTANT stuff.

Apparently there’s some country or island or state or something next to Australia called “Tasmania”. And just like Australia, they’ve got totally fake animals and plants growing all over. The place is just lousy with them.

ALSO apparently, one of those crazy fauna known as the “Tasmanian Devil” has started getting FACE CANCER and is now totally endangered!

When Linus Torvlads heard about this, he was so ENRAGED he decided to do something about it. In linux-speak, that means he shaved the beard off some nerd.

He also irrationally and temporarily changed the linux logo from tux to “tuz” for kernel release

This had the unintended and unfortunate side-effect of raising awareness for the SAVE THE TASMANIAN DEVIL fund.

Not to be outdone, Terri and another one of our resident nerds, Jeremy, decided to show their RAGE as well; by getting “tuz” tattoos.

They also forced me to make this blog post about it as well as change the charity that we match donations to to be that same SAVE THE TASMANIAN DEVIL fund.

I said fine, but I’m waiting a couple months so it’s not so topical. And to see if those tattoos really are permanent.

They were. So far. So, they also made me make a special sale where anybody who signs up with the promo code SAVETHEDEVIL gets $50 off PLUS we donate another $50 to save these disgusting little beasties!

I’m enraged.

Well, that’s it. Yahoo! is finally shutting down GeoCities.

This is a sad moment for the Internet in general, and it’s especially sad for us. I’ve always felt a sort of special connection with GeoCities.. lemme ’splain you.

GeoCities was one of the first web hosts on the Internet, being started as “Beverly Hills Internet” in 1994. About four months before we started New Dream Network, in December of 1995, they became “GeoCities” and started offering FREE hosting.

By the time I had heard of them, we were already offering some PAID hosting, and I remember thinking something along the lines of “Damn it! They’re cheating!”

How could a bunch of (completely) broke college kids afford to compete with somebody just giving away hosting? At the time, I figured it could never last.

I was right.

15 years and $3.57 BILLION later.

But that’s not the only reason GeoCities has a special place in our heart.

The main reason is WebRing!

WebRing was a free service for people with related sites to automatically trade links, written by co-founder Sage (it’s not just me and Dallas around here!) back in 1994, while he was still in high school!

A couple of years later when he ended up at our college and we conned him into our play-company, we helped him run WebRing on our server(s).

WebRing itself never officially became a part of New Dream Network, since Sage had started it on his own years before. What we got out of it was Sage wrote DreamBook for NDN and put links to it all over WebRing!

In 1997, WebRing was starting to grow too big for us full-time college students to handle, especially with our newest little project taking off.

So, Sage got Starseed, Inc. to take it over for him. A friend of his from high school worked there and they made a deal where Sage got a percentage of Starseed, an annual “consulting” stipend, and certain creative controls, and they took over everything to do with WebRing.

It didn’t take long for Charley, the head of Starseed, to figure out that the best chance to make the most money off of WebRing was to sell it and sell it fast!

Greetings Geocities

And, sell it he did… to GeoCities!

I believe originally the offer they were going to accept was around $1 million.

However, irrational exuberance was on Charley’s side, and the timing couldn’t have been better for everything that happened next.

At the last minute, another bidder came to the table.. GeoCities however, decided they simply must have WebRing, and closed the deal at around $3.5 million!

Of course, this was all for GCTY stock options, and I’m sure they (rightly) figured that it wasn’t real money anyway.

Now the Starseed team (plus Sage) just had to wait and see which came first, the vesting of their options or the popping of the bubble…

The Vesting

Well, while everybody was nervously holding onto their approximately 1% ownership of GCTY, a funny thing happened. In January 1999, Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $3.57 billion, putting GCTY at more than ten times what it was when they did their deal!

And so, Sage’s options in GCTY were now converted over to YHOO. He still had another year before he could cash them all in though. And things were already a teeeeeensy bit over-valued.

Luckily, by the time Sage was able to cash out (and he did) in early 2000, Yahoo! had tripled yet again… meaning that Yahoo! had effectively purchased little old WebRing for about $100,000,000!

The Downfall

So, Yahoo set a team onto merging WebRing into their system.

By 2001 they were done, and everybody hated it.

Users were dropping faster than YHOO stock, and in 2002 an engineer from GeoCities bought WebRing back from Yahoo for an undisclosed sum (rumored to be around $10,000!)

Since then, I don’t really have any inside information on what’s gone on with WebRing. Just from the Internet Archive history, it looks like he more or less kept the Yahoo look and ran it “respectably” until around 2005:

… when they started to really pimp it out for ads!

Then in 2007.. Social Networking!

And today… Web 2.0!

Reminiscing

WebRing’s been around just about as long as the Web, and now that I ponder it, has been a sort of microcosm of the Web the whole time.

It went from a tiny ad-free community service, to hyper-growth, to showing ads, to being acquired for an INSANE price, to being forsaken, to doing anything to survive, to “social networking”, to “web 2.0″, to today!

Back in 1998, who would have thought WebRing would outlast GeoCities? Who would have thought DreamHost would outlast GeoCities?

DreamHost acquires Geocities

Well, not really. The thought sort of crossed my mind, “If they sold WebRing to that one guy, maybe they’d sell GeoCities to us!”

But then I realized.. Yahoo understands the only real value in GeoCities left is those millions of potential upgrades to PAID hosting.

If you go to GeoCities right now, Yahoo! has a big ad for their ($12/month) hosting.. with the first three months half off!

Whoop dee do.

“In honor of WebRing” or something, we are now offering to the first 1000 GeoCities users who sign up TWO YEARS of a completely free DreamHost account (including domain registration)!

No strings attached.

All you have to do is verify you are an existing GeoCities customer by creating a page on your GeoCities account (or editing an existing page) to have the phrase “I’m off to DreamHost!” on it!

Then when you signup for us, simply put the full url to that page as your “promotional code” and you’ll get a 2 year plan (normally $214.80) free!

And we promise to never shut down.

I don’t know if you’d consider DreamHost as one of the BIG BOYS of the Internet… you know, the Googles, the Amazons, the eBays, the Facebooks, the Twitters.

Well, I sure wouldn’t. At least not based on media coverage. Or coolness. Or revenues. (Except maybe Twitter, where I assume we’re blowing their $null/year OUT OF THE RIVER!)

But, all that may be about to change. Because, as you think about each of those afore-mentioned BIG BOYS, what do they all have that we don’t have?

Crazy names? What’s wackier than… “Dream”Host?!

Legions of users? Well, counting the visitors to sites we host, we’ve got a TON.

The adoring media? Does the DreamHost Blog report on ANYTHING else?

Well then, what could it be? What is that missing component? What else do they all have that we ain’t got?

I Know

An API!

Yep, that’s really the ONLY other thing different between us all… the only thing that I can think of!

And, as you may have read in the February newsletter (just a week or so ago), WE now have that too! And how.

Well, so far it’s not much to speak of. It only offers three main functions… but that’s one more than just a few weeks ago!

1. You can get a list of all subscribers to any of your announcement lists.
2. You can do anything you can do on our panel to a DreamHost PS private server.
3. You can now get a list of all your ftp/shell/backup/email/vpn/anonftp users!
4. UPDATE: You can add and remove announcement list subscribers!

To top it off, we’ve also now changed the authentication method to our API. No longer does it use your actual web panel password: IDIOTIC.

Instead, there’s now a special API section to our panel where you can create (multiple) API “keys”… you now use (one of) THOSE to authenticate.

This is “cool” because now you don’t have to give out your main password to some random application that uses our API. This is also “cool” because you can at any time delete API keys for applications you no longer want to have access to your account.

(UPDATE: Now when you create a new API key you also can choose which specific API functions you’d like it to have access to.. so that way you don’t have to give like an announcement list management app full access to everything else on your account!)

We recommend you create a new API key for each different need, so if you decide to revoke access to one for some reason in the future, you don’t revoke access to everything else!

Everything Else Like What?

Of course, that begs the question.. what ACTUALLY has been created with this API? Well, uh, it’s kind of new, okay? Not much.

There has been one kind of cool thing already though: the developers of SmartFTP have now added the ability for it to automatically load in all your DreamHost FTP accounts!

Give it a shot… could this mean the end of FTP login problems?! FOREVER? What will our Happy DreamHost Customer Service Team do?

Sadly, SmartFTP is not free. But, happily, this is just the beginning of what I’m sure will be a “thriving ecosystem” of DreamHost-y applications using the API… catapulting us instantly into the BIG BOY ZONE.

ANNNNNNNNNNNNND…. just to give the catapult a little extra thrust, we’re going to throw a little kerosene on the nascent developer flame. With a CRAZY $10,000 giveaway contest!

Here’s the deal:

Develop any application (Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, iPhone, Facebook, Boxee, Firefox Plugin, whatever…) that uses the DreamHost API by April 30th May 31st 2009, and submit a link to it in the comments to this post.

We (I) will personally review all entries, and CASH prizes will be awarded to the best apps to the tune of:

Grand Prize: $5,000
1st Place: $2,500
2nd Place: $1,250
3rd Place: $500
4th Place: $750

(I told you it was crazy!)

Now, it may seem like there’s not a lot of flexibility right now with our API.. however, that can change! Just request a feature you’d like us to expose via the API in the comments and we’ll try and add it ASAP!

(In fact, the users listing thing was requested by SmartFTP directly, so you know this ain’t just small talk.)

It’s big boy talk!

I’ve kind of dropped out of it, but years ago I used to be somewhat of a frequent eBayer.

Back then I would even get requests from friends to sell their stuff on eBay.

In fact, I think it was in ‘96 that I had an idea to make a business like those “I Sold it on eBay” franchises (they didn’t exist yet). But, I decided to focus on web hosting, it being essentially zero work!

Would you like to know my secret to successful selling on eBay?

WOULD YOU?

Here it is: Start your auction at 99c.

That was it really. No matter what you were selling, even if it was a laptop or a plasma TV, there is no reason to start your auction at anything higher.

In fact, there’s even a reason not to .. eBay charges a higher listing fee the higher your start price! And, because eBay is about the closest thing to an efficient market we have on this planet, there is essentially a 0% chance that a 7-day auction will end at anything less than the market price for the item being sold.

(If you’re worried about the market price being less than you’re willing to sell for, you can always set a reserve price.)

In fact, if you start your auction low, I found the chances were actually better that you’d get a price higher than average.

Personally, I attributed this to the fact that you’d get more people actually making bids (and more bids) along the way, which meant near the end your auction would have like 35 bids compared to the 0-2 bids on the similar ones. People, being the herd animals that they are, seeing that there have already been lots of bids, are actually more likely to bid… despite the fact that it means they’ll probably end up paying more!

The Opposite of eBay

Well, I sorta stopped doing eBay a while ago (there’s no point in buying anything normal there, and things I would have sold before I just donate to goodwill now.).

The only major buying and selling I’ve done in the last five years has been real estate, and despite it theoretically being very similar to eBay, it seems to me that real estate agents have done their darndest to make sure it is anything but.

For some reason, the way real estate transactions universally work, is the seller puts a price on their house that’s generally way over the market price, and then they wait and see which is more, their motivation to sell or the number of suckers.

I suppose people do this because of a combination of greed and the illiquidity of real estate. No two houses are exactly the same, so it’s more difficult to know their current actual value than say, a green iPod nano.

It’s also such a large transaction that the fear of losing out on even 1% of the max possible value of a sale weighs heavily on the sellers mind. “What if I list it too low and we sell it for $5,000 less than we could have made?!

I guess I can’t really blame real estate agents for existing. They exist primarily to introduce sellers to reality, with a teensy dash of marketing your house to buyers mixed in.

Of course, there’s just the Multiple Listing Service for that now, so really all a seller’s agent does is take 3% of the sales price for convincing you to lower your price.

And that’s exactly what they do. And fast. Although it may seem like your and your agent’s interests are aligned (to maximize your sale price, right? After all, they get more if you do!), in fact, they are not. Your agent knows that a difference of $50K in an asking price can be the difference between selling your house in 6 months and 6 days.

And if you were an agent, would you rather get 3% of $300,000 ($9,000) in 6 months, or 3% of $250,000 ($7,500) in 6 days?

But as a seller, it’s likely worth your time to wait 6 months for an extra $48,500.

In fact (and agents will tell you the opposite), real estate for sale by owner on average sells for more (and that’s not even counting the 3% commission saved!) than real estate sold with an agent. It just takes longer.

Why wait?

But, what if for some reason the seller doesn’t care about the money as much as selling their house quickly, then they should just use an agent, right?

If that’s the case, I would still recommend selling your property yourself (unless you really just can’t be bothered)… just list it WAY below market price!

It’s just like starting an eBay auction at 99c.

Although it’s not exactly an “auction,” by setting the price insanely low you will get a lot of offers that will result in a bidding war… as long as you get the word out about your property for sale.

Fortunately, the only thing you have to do that is get it on the MLS… and there are plenty of services that will do that for a flat fee.

Now that you’ve created interest, and shown buyers you’re serious about selling, you just have to hold a few open houses and let people know offers are due by a certain date. (Just like a 7-day auction, you need to give a little time for people to find your amazing deal.)

Et voilà, just like eBay, there is now effectively a 0% chance for your place to sell for less than the current market price. Whether that is an amount you’re willing to sell it for is a different matter, but now at least you know and you can stop wasting everybody’s time.

Free Web Hosting for Life?

Oh ha, that was just a trick to get you to read this totally off-topic blog post!

No, no, no, not really. Believe it or not, for once I’m actually practicing what I preach!

My wife and I are selling our Manhattan loft ourselves! And if you buy it (or even just refer somebody who buys it, or even just make a serious offer), you’ll get a free Happy Hosting plan forever!

The place is #6B at 718 Broadway and we’re having just two open houses: Sunday, March 1st 2009, 2 – 5 pm and Wednesday, March 11th 2009, 6 – 9 pm. Offers will be due by 5pm (eastern time) on Sunday, March 15th 2009.

We’re putting the asking price at $850,000, despite all comparables on the market being around $1,300,000. And of course, theirs don’t even include free web hosting for life! :)

Stop by to check it out, pick up an offer sheet, and complain to me in person about your site being down!

Here’s the site with full details, and lots of pics!

Thanks for helping us put DreamHost Apps through its paces. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve gotten so far.

Remember, by signing up during this beta period you’ll have access to DreamHost Apps free forever.

If you’ve not yet signed up, or if you’ve got some friends that would like to sign up, we’ve got some more invitation codes for you at the end of this post.

First, however, we’ve got some exciting news to share – you can now generate your OWN invitation codes that you can distribute to your friends, family, and “other”. Just look at the top of your DreamHost Apps management panel and click to generate your codes – bingo bango!

Right now you’re limited to creating just two codes, so choose your recipients wisely!

If you don’t know of anyone with a DreamHost Apps account and want to get started right away, here’s a few more one-time-use codes that you can use right now!

CYBFWKCH
CYVWJNOI
ETCPDPHM
IIVHBIWK
JIWKYZPY
JYMROGVL
KTLZJN
LHKWLGOC
LJENWGQA
LKLFBMXL
NPHARQIR
NRNIOHJE
PZVDWFIF
Q7djPWkW
SAQYUFCU
VSQITNKV
WDFTVAXC
WRLHZEDO
ZTCLYVAE