I've taken the ads off infogami sites. Enjoy.

-- Aaron Swartz, May 9, 2006

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The recent pages page for your site should be a little more useful now, actually sorting pages by when they last changed and showing the name of the user who changed it.

And here's an exciting infogami site: The Python Tutorial, which has become the hotspot for improving the Python documentation. Jeremy Hylton reports "One week later [the site's] seen 175 edits. It's probably the most important Python documentation project going. There haven't been 175 edits to the tutorial in the last five years."

Another cool infogami page? Rick Perlstein's personal website.

-- Aaron, April 12, 2006

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Our man Chris has kept right at it and starting today you'll notice a nice list of referers at the bottom of your stats page, along with little graphs. These show you what domain names the traffic to your site is coming from so you know who to thank.

-- Aaron, April 10, 2006

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After over a month of one-new-feature-a-weekday, you may have noticed the feature clock getting a little behind schedule. I didn't want to announce anything until things were closer to official, but it looks like infogami development is going to be slowing down for a little while while I work on some exciting new projects that I can't wait to tell you about.

I've turned off the feature clock, but that doesn't mean we've stopped working on infogami altogether. Instead of big new features, we'll probably concentrate more on fixing bugs and getting the details right on the features we already have. And while this isn't goodbye, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's tested out infogami over this past month or so. You guys have truly been the best users I've ever had the pleasure of developing for. I hope infogami continues to deserve your praise and use.

I'm really excited about what I'm working on now and I can't wait to show it to you. But until then, thanks again for all your support.

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Sorry for the graphs not updating the past few days -- Chris, who's in charge of stats, got a cold -- but they're back up now with two new exciting graphs showing how popular your site has been since the very beginning. Hope you enjoy and sorry about the delay.

-- Aaron, April 1, 2006 (not a joke)

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I'm writing this blog post from my cellphone (yay for standards-compliant HTML!) at the airport. Sorry for the lack of features lately, but we're taking a quick trip to the Big Apple, land of hot dogs, bubble gum, and Channel One.

We'll probably be in meetings most of the time and it'd be a little rude to the pull out the laptop and start programming during them, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait a few more days for updates.

-- Aaron, March 30, 2006

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Chris has been hard at work and today debuts some nifty improved graphs. You can see an example over at my infogami site where the traffic spiked after yesterday's posting. The graphs now call out the high points and the low points and add some (subtle) grids to make things a little clearer. Enjoy!

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One of the best parts about merging with reddit is getting to spend time with reddit's author, Steve Huffman. Steve is an extremely busy man, so I don't get to spend much time with him, but the few minutes I spend with him each week make the merger worthwhile by themselves.

Steve is an brilliant programmer, obviously, but he's also talented athlete and dancer. Throughout high school he would give computer advice to Fortune 500 companies via cell phone while running in his school's cross-country team.

Even though Steve spends 110% of his time developing new features for reddit, he still manages to find time to spend with his beautiful girlfriend, practicing ballroom dance, playing racquetball, and developing a new programming language. To keep his mind alert, he solves Sudoku problems while he sleeps.

And so that is why infogami was truly blessed that he made some time this week to contribute a feature to the project -- the amazing arrow technology he developed for reddit.com. As you'll see on the right of this blog post, there are now arrows which you can use to vote this post up and down. (And because of Steve's deep love for all humanity, these arrows will work in pretty much every browser with every combination of settings.)

If you want arrows on your site, take a look at our tutorial for all the details.

You can see an example of the arrows in action on my quoteblog.

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Yesterday I decided to take some time off from my usual infogami duties (come on, don't I get even a little break?) to build a little side project. The site is books.theinfo.org and it makes it a little easier to search Amazon. Just visit a URL like:

http://books.theinfo.org/lisp

(that's books.theinfo.org followed by a slash and then your search query) and you quickly get a nice, simple listing of the relevant books. You can also use links like:

http://books.theinfo.org/go/0262011530

to provide shorter links to Amazon.

Anyway, it's not much but maybe you'll find it useful. Now back to infogami...

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By day, Chris Slowe is a mild-mannered Harvard University physics Ph.D. student building massive laser contraptions and slowing down light. But at night, he tears off his lab coat and writes code for us. You can see the first fruits of his labor with a basic statistics system he put together. If you go to:

http://_yoursite_.infogami.com/_special/stats/

you'll see four new graphs that give a glimpse of how popular your site is. Obviously this is a very basic first attempt (as our most things announced here), but we hope it's useful.

-- Aaron, March 24, 2005

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Here's a picture you may have seen before:

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When I look at this, I see a gradient of several different colors. The top two lines are red, then one line orange, then one line yellow, five are gray, one is light blue, four are dark blue, two are purple, two are pink, and the bottom one is red again.

What's surprising about this is that each line is the same distance from any other on the color wheel. The first and second lines that both look red to me? They're just as far away from each other as the second and third lines, one of which looks red and one of which looks orange.

It's not just me, of course. Most people see things this way. In 1928 W. David Wright conducted an experiment in which he placed people down in front of a split screen. On one side, Wright would project a color and on the other was projected a color that the subject could control via various dials. The subject's job was to attempt to match the color he saw on the left with a color he made on the right. After his experiments (and an independent set of similar experiments by John Guild in 1931) they constructed a map of the colors as we humans perceived them. The International Commission on Illumination (CIE) constructed a standard from the results in 1931, creating the CIE XYZ color space.

Apparently their model wasn't quite right, though, since CIE1931 was replaced by CIELUV and then CIELAB and S-CIELAB and CIEDE2000 and on until the present day.

So why do we even care about any of this? Well, color comes up in a lot of places on a website, but the big one is today's new feature: "Who wrote what?" (more colloquially known as the blame button). On a history page, you can now click "Who wrote what?" and see, color-coded, who wrote each piece of text. Mouse over a word and your browser should pop up a little dialog saying who wrote it and when. (For a decent example of how this works, check out the javascript wiki.)

But here's where the color problems come in. Each user gets a different color (blue, red, yellow) and that color is made lighter the older the text is. Right now we do the simple thing of giving them all equally-distant colors but this runs right into the above problems. Unfortunately, coming up with equally distant colors for human perception seems a lot harder than coming up with equally distant colors for the computer to present. So we haven't actually done the right thing -- we use the same color model you see pictured above.

But if anyone out there is interested in helping us out, we'd love to get the answer really right.

BTW, I want to thank two people who worked with me early on for the infogami proejct who wrote pretty much all the code that makes these features work and work so well. Sean B. Palmer wrote the code to pick the colors and Zack Coburn wrote the code to figure out who wrote which piece. It was wonderful working with them.

-- Aaron, March 23, 006

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Today's new feature is a recent changes and an index. You can check them out at:

http://_yoursite_.infogami.com/_special/index
http://_yoursite_.infogami.com/_special/recent

To protect your site's privacy, they're only available to people who can view the history of pages.

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Today's new feature is a delete button, down in the bottom right-hand corner. Of course, we wouldn't want you to lose all your work, though, so even if you delete a page you can still go back and view any of its old revisions (and, of course, restore them). Have fun wiping things off the Internet!

While adding the delete feature, I fixed a couple of bugs and fixing some more is next on my todo list. Speaking of bugs, we had a few moderately serious ones this morning (the worst was that you couldn't create new sites for a little while). I think I apologized by email to most of the users who were affected by email, but let me do so again here: I'm sorry. The downside of developing in public is that, despite our best efforts, there will be bugs. I just hope you'll forgive them.

-- Aaron, March 21, 2006

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Well, I know today's update comes a little later than usual, but it's especially cool so I hope you won't complain. We've added a full permissions system to infogami, giving you fine-grained control over exactly who can do what where. Got a weblog entry you only want a few friends to see? Have a directory on your site you want to let everyone edit? What to have a friend collaborate on a page with you? You can do all this and more with our permissions system.

If you click the prefs link in the corner, you can set the permissions on your entire site. Who can read it, write comments, edit it, etc. Then you can also set permissions on each individual page or directory. There's no link yet in the interface but you can go to:

http://_yoursite_.infogami.com/_admin/pagename

and set the same set of permissions.

I'm pretty excited about this -- I don't know of any other software that lets you do this kind of thing. As always, let us know what you think.

-- Aaron, March 20, 2006

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As they say in that movie about dinosaurs, we're back at long last! We had a great time in California, meeting with all sorts of interesting people and also getting to check out the next batch of Y Combinator startups which all look interesting. (You can follow them on the yrumors infogami site.)

While we were gone the feature clock stood sort of still -- a problem compounded by me being sick when we got back. But we're back on track now and the first results are up -- we've got a very basic version of commenting working. If you go to your prefs page, you can now decide who gets to comment on pages -- nobody, just you, logged-in users, or everyone. Plus it's got the same threading system as reddit so you can reply to existing comments. Obviously there's lot more to do -- and we plan to do it -- but I hope you enjoy this for now.

-- Aaron, March 16, 2006

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Hate to say it, but updates are probably going to be slow this week because we're off to San Francisco for a week. I'll try to keep this blog updated with what we're doing, though, and hopefully I'll be able to do a few things on infogami during the downtime. But for the most part we'll spend the week touring and schmoozing, like any good California visitor.

(BTW, if you're interested in meeting up while in the bay area, send a note.)

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Today's new feature is a little "show/hide formatting help" link down at the bottom. Unfortunately, hiding doesn't quite work on Safari. I hope this helps folks. If anything seems unclear, just let me know.

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This morning I put together a little addition to the history page so that you can now see the differences between two versions. For example, here's an edit some kind soul made to the Javascript wiki's sidebar. You can access these differences from the usual history page for your site. (As per usual, history is currently only available to people who can edit the site.)

Infogami can also find the differences between two arbitrary revisions, although I haven't made an interface for this yet. For now if you're audacious, you can edit the URL. For example, to see the differences between revision 60 and revision 50, visit:

http://yoursite.infogami.com/_history/pagename?b=60&a=50

And then, per dhain's request, I made random only show pages that don't start with 'It worked!'. There are still a lot of undeveloped pages, but this makes it a little more interesting.

I've also added a password reminder feature, which (already) many have asked for.

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I decided to take a look through the access logs to see what people are using Infogami the first day after it launched.

Our most popular site today is javascript, presumably for its JS tutorial (which made the front page of digg and reddit (server didn't break a sweat, tho)) and other cool stuff.

Dave's Place is doing some very interesting things with the easily-customizable templates infogami provides.

Not That I'm Bitter provides a long list of things that the author is not exactly bitter about.

It's very exciting to see so many people already using Infogami. If you have a cool use you want to feature, send some feedback. And if you're interested in seeing what Infogami sites are out there, you can now visit a random infogami site.

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Per popular request, blogs now have web feeds so that you can subscribe to them in a news aggregator. The feed is at http://yoursite.infogami.com/blog/atom.xml -- for example, the feed for this blog is:

http://infogami.com/blog/atom.xml

Enjoy!

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So late last night I flipped the little switch that made infogami.com appear to the public. I didn't tell anyone outside the apartment about it, but I sat and watched the access log to see if anyone would notice. Amazingly enough, a couple people did and I carefully watched their every move on the site to see how things went. Everything seemed to go OK and a couple more people came by (I don't know how they found out about it so quickly). After a little while, Steve updated the header on reddit.com to provide a subtle little hint and a bunch more came over and then one of them submitted it to Reddit, where it skyrocketed up the charts. As I went to bed, there were already a hundred sites, with new ones seeming every minute. As I write this, there are over a thousand, with the number continuing to grow -- ten were added just as I wrote this.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised by all the attention. This wasn't supposed to be a "launch". Infogami isn't done; in fact, I wouldn't even say it's "beta". Frankly, it's just at the point where it's barely usable. Normally, a company would toil away on the product in private for months, making sure it had all the right features, and then test it with a small group of people. But that didn't seem like much fun, so I decided to take a chance and do something different -- I decided to do the rest of developing it in public.

Unfortunately, people don't seem to have gotten the message. People keep asking why it doesn't have any features, how it's different from other software. Well, the answer's pretty simple: it's not done yet. In fact, it's hardly even started. We can't put all the interesting new stuff in it on day one. You'll have to check back later for that.

Of course, lots of people don't seem to mind. We've gotten some great emails from people who love the site and are excited to get to use it. I hope these people and others who are interested will stick with us and help us turn it into something great. I know I'm looking forward to it.

And now, a more boring note. A bunch of people have complained that they haven't received their verification emails. I just added a little account page where you can see and change your email address and resend the verification email. There should be a link from the message asking you to check your mail, or you can visit http://yoursite.infogami.com/_account/ -- hope this helps and keep the feedback coming!

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Yay, Infogami is finally out. (If you don't know what Infogami is, go check out the front page.)

I began working on Infogami last summer, as part of the first batch of Y Combinator startups. At the end of the summer we had a working prototype and a number of offers for funding. Things were going so well I took a leave of absence from college to work on it.

But getting funding, as I hope to describe in later posts, wasn't as easy as I thought. I spent the next few months working full-time chasing funding offers, but eventually they all fell apart. I found myself stuck without any money, any partners, or any place to live. The whole experience was incredibly trying. There were many days when I felt like my head was going to literally explode.

One Sunday I decided I'd finally had enough of it. I went to talk to Paul Graham, the only person who had kept me going through these months. "This is it," I told him. "If I don't get either funding, a partner, or an apartment by the end of this week, I'm giving up." Paul did his best to talk me out of it and come up with solutions, but I still couldn't see any way out.

The next night I had dinner with Paul and his friends. They noted my birthday was tomorrow and asked me what I wanted. I thought for a moment about what I wanted most. "A cofounder," I finally said. We all laughed.

The next morning was my birthday and I was awakened by a knock on the door from Paul. "I thought of a solution to your problem," he exclaimed with his inimitable energy. "Merge with Reddit!" "That's an interesting idea," I said, still picking the sleep out of my eyes. As we discussed it, we just got more and more excited -- it seemed like such a perfect fit. I still can't even imagine a better solution.

Steve "spez" Huffman and Alexis "kn0thing" Ohanian, the team behind Reddit, also liked the idea and we began working together that very day. Immediately, we could see things were going to work out great. We also got Steve and Alexis's housemate, Chris "KeyserSosa" Slowe, a Harvard physics Ph.D. student, to join the team. Together, we felt unstoppable.

Last month, when we got back from winter break, we began working on Infogami in earnest. It was clear that the prototype I'd built would never work for any serious site, so Steve built an amazing new industrial-strength database system while I built the software to talk to it. Unfortunately this amazing system is pretty much invisible to the outside world, but it's going to allow us to quickly build software that's more advanced than anything else out there.

Last week we moved over reddit.com to the new system, proving that it can handle a lot of users. With that finally finished, I decided I had to get Infogami up as soon as possible. Normally, we'd spend another couple months working on the software before we'd show it to the public, but I just couldn't wait much longer. So we decided to work like crazy for a week and launch whatever we had after seven days.

Obviously there's lots more work to do -- right now we only have the most basic of features. But instead of continuing to work on it behind closed doors, we're going to try something different: we're going to build it in public.

There's tons of stuff left to build, including lots of things we can copy over from my original prototype. But more importantly, we want to hear what you want. Send us feedback and if you have an idea for Infogami, post it to our reddit where other users can vote it up and down. We'll try to implement the most popular requests.

Here's my goal: something new for Infogami every weekday. Some days it'll just be a blog post or a bug fix. But most days, we'll try to add a whole new feature. I hope you'll stay tuned.

—Aaron Swartz

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