Author lost total credibility at that point. Rails is quite elegant, and yes, it is just another tool. Totally unsubstantiated bashing. Surprised to see this on the homepage.
His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that. This does not appeal to me and I'm not surprised to see that others don't like it either.
However, I can see how Rails "gets things done", and why so many people like it.
Perhaps the author came clear with his opinion a bit too hastily, but you shouldn't ignore someone just because you don't agree with every opinion he has. This was not an article about "why I don't like Rails", that's probably why he did not explain why he doesn't like it.
What comes to the article itself, I think it was decent and I don't agree 100% but not bad advice either.
> His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that.
Here we go with the "magic". It is not magic, it just code. Many people are just too lazy to investigate why things works the way they do, and how to change it when the defaults don't fit their needs.
Just for the record, you are wrong about naming conventions, they don't act as mandatory, you can use configuration methods to set up things the way you like it. E.g
Class Users
set_table_name “Usuarios”
end
Rails has many drawback points, I rather prefer Django views, than Rails, but all this "magic" conspiracy theory is just childish.
My first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore 64. So I've gone through many languages and frameworks in my day. In the last year I started writing an app in Ruby/Rails and I must say as someone with experience in other things, I like it.
I happen to like the "magic" aspect of Rails. The downside is that it does make Rails suitable for certain types of development and less so for things that fall outside of its paradigm. That's Ok, as long as you know that. Having said that, my app was actually OLAP, not OLTP, but I was able to extend the framework pretty well to do what I wanted, including working with legacy schemas. So it is more flexible than some give it credit for.
To me the real power isn't in Rails though, it's Ruby, which is the best programming language I've used, albeit extremely slow and inefficient. I haven't not used Python, so want to be clear I'm not making a Ruby v. Python claim.
To be fair, there is no magic in Rails, just a lot of 'defaults'. If you look at the code, its all very clear how those defaults are enabled, and there are clear methods for overriding them. The 'magic' thing started as a sort of marketing spiel to say "look at all these things that you don't need to worry about configuring, because they are all set to sensible defaults" but became 'mysterious' in some people's minds.
Still, I think it's a bit strong for a "so you want to learn programming" email. If I was looking for advice, I'd rather start with the technology and learn the cultural differences myself.
Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views.
Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views.
We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel.
Do you not think the page view stats are completely misleading your users ?
There's absolutely no indication on Posterous that bots are likely responsible for thousands of the page views shown (which given the long tail nature of Posterous I imagine we're talking about the majority of the page views here for a lot of users).
One user even reported that GA was showing 14 visitors while Posterous was showing 9316:
Whenever Posterous has given a response the focus has been on disabled javascript, etc. rather than the fact most of these views are likely generated by bots. For example the email you sent to the user here:
Also I imagine you're going to get a very large negative response when you switch to a working method that's going to be along the lines of "where have all my visitors gone".
By talking about "deeper insight" rather than just openly admitting the data is just bad you're just delaying the inevitable backlash.
A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation.
These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.
You're avoiding the question about misleading your users.
If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors.
If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be regularly off by a factor 200-300%.
Real time or not. Misleading numbers are misleading. Being real-time is no 'cover-up' for a misleading data.As far as 'simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post' is concerned. If a bit visited me a 1000 time and just 100 people read it, that doesn't make it interesting. Reporting bots is seriously no use.
I had the same exact problem when I built the URL shortener Cligs, and back then there was no way to implement a JS-based solution: the HTTP 301 redirect gave instructions to the browser before it would even get to executing any JS.
So I built a very simple bot detector based on IP adresses and user agents. With your volume of traffic you can do this too. Be sure to keep updating it (automatically!) and apply the detection retroactively.
The bot detector cut well over 90% of the hits reported in the real time analytics. Users complained that suddenly they were not as popular on twitter as they thought they were but accepted that the new numbers are more accurate. That's the key benefit you need to explain to your users: accuracy. They care about it a lot more than the vocal minority suggests.
Wouldn't simply excluding any http request whose user agent contains "googlebot" from the displayed count make it dramatically more accurate without needing a switch to JS-based analytics?
Trust me on this: no. I used to have ABingo ignore hits from several common bots. I then got around to implementing JS challenges. Participants in A/B tests prior to login immediately decreased by 75%, to about what my GA stats showed.
That, theoretically speaking, is supposed to catch most common well-behaved bots. Feel free to copy/paste it if you want, as it is better than nothing, but it probably won't get you in the vicinity of good numbers.
Incidentally, since page views are a vanity metric which don't really matter, I don't think that worrying about "good numbers" is that productive either way.
The only reason I was eventually convinced to care for A/Bingo is that artificially suppressing conversion rates can through statistical tests off, and A/B tests actually create actionable information for my business. For people who blog because they want to be heard, though, would lying to them to tell them they're more popular than they actually are actually hurt them? That strikes me as being close to the canonical white lie, in response to "Does this dress make me look fat?"
The key factor is that for a lot of bloggers audience is the reason they blog. Audience is the ROI of the time spent blogging. Someone who thinks they've got thousands of visitors may spend more time blogging rather than spending it with their families or working (which they would have done if they only had 10 readers)
It's even worse if you're using it for a company blog (like many startups are doing). Because your blog page view stats can often become part of investor pitches or sales material to show traction. If you write an advert and say 10,000 people read your blog when they don't and that influences your customers buying decision, you can be prosecuted for misleading your customers.
This is an anonymous article on Quora -- if I could provide more attribution, I would. In fact, I have now added a ton more attribution and links back to the main quora page. I love Quora.
That blog is just my interesting snippets blog. It just so happened that this snippet was so interesting that the entirety made sense. I usually try to break it down into the smallest most interesting bit.
Imagine my surprise as to the reaction to this article. The blog is mainly for myself and my friends / twitter followers. There was no malice here, and I've altered the post to more prominently link to the source content.
The nature of the Internet is such: My blog drives some amount of attention. I don't monetize it and have no intention to. If Quora can make more money by the traffic I direct to it, all the better.
I did not post this to Hacker News. I had no intention of it receiving the attention that it did. All in all, I'm happy that some people got value out of the story. Whoever linked to my post should have linked to the original quora post. That's that.
Hey Garry. Definitely I would agree that you didn’t do anything inherently wrong here, given the Quora ToS; mostly I am arguing reposting entire articles/items to be a bad idea because it would encourage your users to do so when it’s not legal. I hope my comment doesn’t feel like an attack and want to thank you for finding & sharing this interesting anecdote.
I am basing my criticism of “Posterous culture” solely on your post and the one I mentioned that copied my entire blog post. Do you think I’m on to something, or do you think Posterous users probably infringe just as much as users of any other blog service?
We use Bitpusher as our vendor for sysadmin/ops at Posterous. They're a great group of people to work with, and they get to see a lot of different environments since they specifically specialize in working with startup ops.
If you're willing to hire a full time person, Google's AdWords team has hundreds of very talented optimizers and account specialists who are in general fairly unhappy with their jobs. They have very deep knowledge of PPC/Adwords from the inside, and have seen a variety of client accounts.
Google doesn't do a good job of nurturing since they tend to hire highly intelligent nontechnical people, train them all about Adwords, but then give them no real way to move up in the organization or challenge themselves.
Things like Airbnb don't exist without the Internet -- fundamentally they connect people who wouldn't have met any other way.
It's about building communities that didn't exist before. That's significant. The modality is the difference. People didn't have a reliable and simple and cheap and instant way to connect. Now they do.
Agreed. My point is that there are certain people that would likely be predisposed to share anyway. And although the internet has provided new opportunities for sharing, other types have occurred in different communities (village, folk, scientific, etc.) for ages.
Basically, new opportunities don't mean that people wouldn't have shared or weren't sharing in other ways.
