Archive for February, 2008

boo hoo – $135 million, 18 months… a dot.com story from concept to catastrophe

Friday, February 29th, 2008

boo hoo is a book about the rise and fall of boo.com – the short lived fashion and sports clothing retailer that appeared at the height of the .com boom and collapsed when the bubble burst.

The book is written by Ernst Malmsten (who was the CEO and co-creator of boo) along with Erik Portanger and Charles Drazin (whose link to Ernst is never explained). I’m guessing that they helped turn Ernst’s musings into a well written book. Certainly Drazin has plenty of other books under his belt.

boo.com was formed in the late 90’s by Ernst, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin. Over the course of less than two years they managed to create a company that at its height employed 400 people in many different countries, raise $135 million and then lose the lot.

They committed millions to various companies for the technology behind the website. Huge amounts went on salary payments. They recruited like mad and gave high salaries to attract the more senior staff. The amount of travel that went on was amazing as well. It seemed from reading the book that every week or two they’d hop on a plane to New York.

Whilst the business was being built up they were entirely funded by money from investors. Many tens of millions of pounds was flowing in even as the date for the website launch went further and further out.

boo tried to build a global business from day one rather than starting small and growing as profits allowed. It was this over-ambition that allowed such a catastrophic failure to occur.

There is not as much information about the technical computing problems that boo faced as I would have liked but I guess this is because Ernst was more involved with the business end of the company rather than the technology end.

The book provides a good account of just how it is possible to spend such a vast amount of money and have it lead to nothing. It was published in 2002 which means you should be able to get a very cheap copy.

Verdict 8/10.

FTP uploading a directory of files using perl

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Here is a simple script to upload the files which are in a particular directory. I use something similar to automate the file uploading for my tube walking blog.

Whenever I take photos for the blog I put them into a directory with the current date as the directory name. So I have a structure like this:

c:\website\080115\
c:\website\080203\
c:\website\080205\
c:\website\080218\

I want the images in these directories to be uploaded to a new directory on the FTP server where the FTP server directory is named with the date e.g. ‘080218′.

The script is run with a command such as:

perl imageupload.pl c:\website\080218\

The script will then:

  1. Extract the date part of the directory – ‘080218′.
  2. Connect to the FTP server.
  3. Create a directory called ‘080218′ on the FTP server.
  4. Get a list of all the local files in the directory that you passed in as the argument.
  5. Upload each of these files to the FTP server.

Here’s the script. You’ll need to modify the FTP server address, username and password if you want to use it.

use File::Basename;
use Net::FTP;

my $directory = $ARGV[0];

my @parts = split(/\\/, $directory);

# get leaf directory name from whole path
my $length = $parts;
my $dateDir = $parts[$length-1];

$ftp = Net::FTP->new("ftp.yourwebsite.com", Debug => 1)
    or die "Cannot connect to hostname: $@";

$ftp->login("username", "password")
    or die "Cannot login ", $ftp->message;

$ftp->cwd("/website/data")
    or die "Cannot change working directory ", $ftp->message;

# create 'date named' directory on FTP server
$ftp->mkdir($dateDir);
$ftp->cwd($dateDir);

# set binary mode which is needed for image upload
$ftp->binary();

opendir(DIR, "$directory");
my @files = readdir(DIR);

foreach my $file (@files)
    {
    if (not -d $file)
        {
        # make sure the names are lower case on the server
        $file = lc($file);
        # upload the file
        $ftp->put("$directory\\$file");
        }
    }

$ftp->quit();

The script is simple, but it can easily be integrated into a more complex set of scripts to help you manage your web site.

Roll on one click updating of WordPress plugins

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

Today I saw the future of WordPress plugin upgrades.

Anyone who has a WordPress blog with a number of plugins installed will know how much of a chore it can be to keep those plugins up to date. The official way of upgrading any plugin involves:

  1. Spotting the plugin has a new version available from the WordPress plugin page.
  2. Downloading the new version of the plugin to your computer.
  3. Unzipping it.
  4. Deactivating the current version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin page.
  5. Uploading the new plugin via FTP.
  6. Activating the new version of the plugin.

This is boring, and wastes my time, but unfortunately is often essential. Especially if the update is to solve a security vulnerability. I have two blogs, this technology related one and my London Underground walking blog. Each of these blogs has six active plugins so each time one of these plugins is updated I have to update the plugin in two separate places.

Today I went onto the option page of the All in One SEO Pack plugin and spotted an option which I hadn’t seen before – ‘One Click Upgrade’.

One Click Upgrade option on WordPress All in One SEO Pack plugin

As it happens this plugin was out of date so I clicked it and after a second or two saw this message.

One Click Upgrade option on WordPress All in One SEO Pack plugin

How cool is that? Very. It has changed upgrading this plugin from a chore to something that is almost fun. Behind the scenes when you click the button it fetches the latest version of the plugin and extracts it to the correct location.

This is the kind of feature that we are used to seeing on PC software but it is the first time I’ve seen it on a WordPress plugin.

On further investigation I spotted an interesting project which attempts to generalise the one click update of WordPress plugins. It is called the One click plugin updater. This tries to add this facility to existing plugins. From the comments on the plugin page it looks like it doesn’t work for all everyone but it is certainly a very good idea.

This facility is definitely something that WordPress should think about integrating into its core code base and encouraging all plugin creators to adopt.