roy

Well, after that 20+hour workday, I got about 3 hours of sleep, then I woke up again and started more work on Tabulas. While working, I've been trying to regurgitate some of the lessons I should take from this whole fiasco.

People don't like change

Wow, I had no idea how resistant people were to change. I guess the natural human tendency is to immediately view any change as suspicious ... but the level of hostility I met during the initial release was quite surprising. Rather than exploring the system properly, people were posting within minutes of my post and saying they didn't like the system. How does one form an opinion in a few minutes? The real joy of this control panel grows on you as you use it more (I think you'll agree as you continue to use it).

The Raymond Chen Camp

Joel Spolsky has talked about the internal war in Microsoft regarding how backwards-compatible they make their OSes with each release. There was a story in Joel Spolsky's book that talks about the Win95 team actually checking all popular programs prior to the launch of Windows 95 to make sure they all worked. When they found a bug with SimCity ... they hardcoded a patch in the OS itself so SimCity wouldn't crash. That is amazing.

Part of the reason for the new upgrade was to ensure Tabulas would technically be able to grow - to do this, the templating engine had to be upgraded. The changing of tags wasn't entirely necessary, but I felt standardizing the tags on some level (and adding a few new ones) would allow for a robust system. However, I decided that I would immediately drop for all the old templates and templating engine ... the only form of backwards compatibility was the ability to import an old custom template into the new system (which doesn't even work that well with the entry templating because the old system never specified a link between a template and an entry template!).

So now I work furiously around the clock providing backwards compatibility ...

I tried to pull an Apple but in the end I realized that it would be best to placate all those users (even if they are free accounts) by providing backwards compatibility... but the cost of course is...

Standards

... the old templates are not standard compliant. A bulk of users who adopt their old color schemes will continue to live their existence on the web in a non-standards compliant home ...

Of course, this leads to my next point...

So many different interests

I didn't realize how diverse the Tabulas community was until this incident occured. The demands from each niche of users is really killer. You have those people who want standards compliance (which I think is the ultimate goal at this time). Then you have those people who want style-driven features (better templating control, etc.) ... and then you have people who want ease of use (the lack of the color selector is a big issue with a lot of people). I'm also aware of a small subset of users who just enjoy blogging for the heck of it, and I try to appeal to those users by offering more integration with other services (the future integration with LJ and Blogger should hopefully be cool!) Juggling a balancing act between those is a tough act for me ... but I feel the product so far is a solid mix between all the different demands of Tabulas users.

Lessons learned?

Well, luckily, there will never be such a big upgrade required to Tabulas that affects users as the one made yesterday. Yesterday was "The Big One " (unless there's some logical fallacy to my templating engine I'm missing that will require a change). But if I could do things different ly, what would I do?

• Post more explicitly in the Tabulas journal what's happening. This was truly my fault ... I had grown so accustomed to making changes to Tabulas without informing users (you have no idea how much has changed on the backend; I found a folder with all my upgrade scripts (scripts I run to make DB changes) ... it had 24 files in it. Because of my habit of just making the changes without informing users, I just did it again naturally here... oops.
• Although I am the sole proprietor of Tabulas, this does not mean that I can do whatever I want. I do feel that there is an implied social contract between the users of Tabulas and myself. Although it's becoming more of a burden more than anything, it has made me realize that I need to be more sensitive to all the niche groups of Tabulas when making changes the users will feel.
• A lot of users are forgiving when they realize the circumstances behind the site, which leads me to beg the question ... why do people naturally assume websites are always run by some large corporation that has endless drones available? It seems that during these fledgling times, people would be more likely to be forgiving of sites than critical ... but until I show a personal interest in their problems ... it's always "I hate Tabulas." Of course, a ten-word comment in their journal comes out with "OH thanks!! You're the best!" The personal touch matters a lot?
• If that's the case, do I advertise this journal to the public? Do I let them see the private whinings? I try to keep the ~tabulas journal free of any speculation and emotion; I simply respond to requests. It's in this personal journal I always make my gripes public... hmm. Is the success Tabulas dependent on cultivating the "Roy" cult personality (I know that sounds egotistical, but you know what I mean) or making the site more "professional" and businesslike? (and I don't necessarily mean cold and corporate, either)

But taking a step back, I have to appreciate what's been done. Over a few weeks, I've slowly migrated a 40,000+ user system to a completely new backend and frontend. The actual switch took less than 20 minutes, and I haven't found any noticeable bugs. Most of the time Ive spent so far has been PR and making stuff backwards-compatible... I haven't had to go in and actually make any huge bug fixes.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but I'd have to say the upgrade so far has been a success. More comments lately have been positive than negative, so that's always a definite plus :)