Girish Gangadharan

Fire people who are not workaholics (sic) – Jason Calacanis

// March 8th, 2008 // No Comments » // Pet projects, Textpattern

Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis had an interesting post offering some useful tips on how to run a startup company. 17 tips to be precise. Now some of them were really controversial and drew a lot of negative attention and criticism.

Here are the tips from his list that IMHO, made him look like a cruel slave-master.

Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz.

You see my problem with this “tip” is not the fact that he wants people to put in 80 hour weeks to keep their jobs at his infamous startup but his condescending comment about people that are not workaholics. What is he suggesting? That people that deliver your mail or sell you over-priced coffee with names and sizes (in Italian) are the only ones that lead a balanced life? Really? For some reason, i think if you analyze that statement a little deeply, you might think that even the PO and starbucks employees might feel offended (for not being considered workaholics or passionate about their work? I don’t know.) On a side note, i guess it’s funny he thinks post office employees have balance in their life. May be he hasn’t heard about the American Slang term “going postal”.

Another tip (first one in his list actually).

Buy Macintosh computers, save money on an IT department

Here’s a good one.

Buy everyone lunch four days a week and establish a no-meetings policy. Going out for food or ording in takes at least 20-60 minutes more than walking up to the buffet and eating. If you do meetings over lunch you also save that time. So, 30 minutes a day across say four days a week is two hours a week… which is 100 hours a year. You get the idea.

Yeah…may be you could chain their legs to the tables. Oh wait..that brings us to his 4th tip.

Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs. Tables are a complete rip off. We buy stainless steel restaurant tables that are $100 and $600 Areon chairs. Total cost per workstation? $700. Compare that to buying a $500-$1,500 cube/designer workstation. The chair is the only thing that matters… invest in it.

(Not a terrible idea, as a matter of fact.)

The cheap tables may not hold up when the employees just snap one day and decide to take off, dragging the computers and all other office stationery on the table, down to the floor.

Now to be fair, let me also mention a few good tips from his list.

• Don’t buy a phone system. No one will use it. No one at Mahalo has a desk phone except the admin folks. Everyone else is on IRC, chat, and their cell phone. Everyone has a cell phone, folks would rather get calls on it, and 99% of communication is NOT on the phone. Savings? At least $500 a year per person… 50 people over three years? $75-100k
• Buy second monitors for everyone, they will save at least 30 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year… which is at least $2,000 a year…. which is $6,000 over three years. A second monitor cost $300-500 depending on which one you get. That means you’re getting 10-20x return on your investment… and you’ve got a happy team member.
• Don’t buy everyone Microsoft Office–it’s too much money. Put Office on three or four common computers and use Google Docs.
• Allow folks to work off hours. Commuting sucks and is a waste of time for everyone. Let folks start at 6am or 11am and you’ll cut their commute in half (at least in LA).

My first company Bright Corner was a startup. A bunch of smart guys that used to work at Sapient, got together and started a consultancy services company and they did pretty good. We did great, in fact. We were all workaholics back then and still are. Up to this date, I spend 12-14 hours in front of the computer every day. But i don’t think i was ever given the idea that if i was not a workaholic, i ran the risk of being fired. I worked hard because i wanted to not because i was threatened to.

Not all 9-5′ers are slackers and not all 80-hours-a-week ‘ers are the most productive.

Seems like he has updated his post now after all the criticism.

How to install and use XFN plugin for textpattern

// June 21st, 2006 // 2 Comments » // Pet projects, PHP, Textpattern, Wordpress

Step 1: Download the plugins here. gg_linkxfn_v1.0.txt (admin side) gg_linklistxfn_v1.0.txt Since Textpattern is a PHP based CMS, the plugins are written in PHP as well. But these text plugin files don’t have any plain PHP code in it. The code is actually compiled into a chunk of base64-encoded text, to allow for easy installation and minimize corruption problems.

Step 2: Go to your textpattern admin interface usually yourdomainname.com/textpattern/index.php assuming you just did the simple basic installation. Here’s what you should see now.

Step 3: Now click on the admin tab

Step 4: Click on plugins tab

Step 5: Now in the textarea beside “Install plugin”, copy paste the text from the gg_linkxfn_v1.0.txt (let’s install the admin side plugin first) and click “Upload”. Textpattern will decode the text for you and spit out the plain PHP code, and then ask you whether you are ready to install it.

Step 6: Click Install. Now you should be back to the list of plugins under the plugin tab. On the gg_linkxfn plugin row, click on “No”(under the “active” column) to change it to “Yes”, to enable the plugin.

Step 7: That’s it you are done! Now to see the plugin in action. Click on the content tab. You should see a new tab named “linkxfn” under the sub tabs. Click on the new tab.

Step 8: There ya go! All set. Now you can choose your options from the fields, build the relation tag and see it in the “xfn” text area. Hit Save and you just have saved the values that will be populated in the “rel” attribute when you display the links using gg_linklistxfn plugin.

Step 9: Now repeat steps 1 to 7 to install and enable the gg_linklistxfn plugin.

Step 10: Here’s how you use it in your forms or pages.

<txp:if_category>
<txp:gg_linklistxfn form="waw_links" columns="1"
columnwraptag="ul" columnclass="alllinks" listwraptag=""
listclass="" headless="1" headwraptag="h3" argname="c"
category="Friends-and-Colleagues" />
<txp:else />
<txp:gg_linklistxfn form="waw_links" columns="1"
columnwraptag="ul" columnclass="alllinks" listwraptag=""
listclass="" headwraptag="h3" headless="1"
category="Friends-and-Colleagues"/>
</txp:if_category>

Since this plugin is an extension of Manfre’s mem_glinklist plugin, you can just read how to configure it from his help page. There are no new parameters to add or nothing different about how you use it.

Step 11. Here’s a demo. Right click on any link on blogroll there and click on properties. You should a relation name-value pair. Check out the screenshot below.

UPDATE: Step above will not work anymore as this site has been upgraded since the time this plugin was written. It runs on WordPress now and hence doesn’t support any textpattern plugins.

Step 12. Most important of all…..ENJOY!

XFN Plugin for textpattern

// June 20th, 2006 // No Comments » // Pet projects, Textpattern

Turns out that a bunch of smart people decided to start off yet another practice that they hope would make better use of hyperlinks to put a human face on linking on the web.

XFN? (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their href tags

...

I think it is a pretty interesting concept considering how the rel attribute could be used to build social networks just based on the links to other people on each person’s site.

So i decided to write a plugin for textpattern that would help people build rel attribute just like the wizard here.

I knew it was not going to be easy. It wasn’t. I actually had to write 2 instead of 1 as planned. But it certainly was a lot of fun. I’m almost done with it. So the first one is an admin side plugin, which involves altering the txp_link table in the textpattern database – adding an extra field to save the attribute, that helps people add links to their site just like they do under the default links section but with the extra rel-creator wizard. Here’s a screenshot of the admin side plugin.

And then i had to extend Manfre’s mem_glinklist plugin(i like it better than others) to display the links with the rel attribute because textpattern doesn’t support this by default(which explains adding a new field to the table in the db). In case you didn’t know, the description you enter for each link gets displayed as the title attribute in the hyperlinks when rendered as html.

You can check out the links section of this site and see for yourself. Either right click on any link there and click on properties to see the “Relation” attribute or just view the page source and check out the hyperlinks.

I’ll submit these 2 plugins to the textpattern community forum pretty soon after some clean up and final touches. Stay tuned…

Observing a pattern in textpattern

// May 21st, 2006 // No Comments » // Fun, Textpattern

I must admit it is a lot of fun setting up a site using textpattern. Especially when it is on a windows box and apparently, you need to install PHP and MySql before you install any php based CMS like textpattern or wordpress. Trust me. It is NOT fun at all. Convincing Windows Server 2003 that PHP is not all that harmful is a pain in the butt. But heyy…i learnt so much in the process which is awesome (as long as i don’t forget it, which i will pretty soon – all credit goes to my selective amnesia. God…not again!).

Anyways…after a lot of procrastination, i finally decide to work on my site. For those who don’t know me that well, i already had a website that i had to pull down, out of sheer embarassment after i saw my colleague Jared’s site cuz mine looked like crap! Seems like he’s changed it at least twice since the original design based on which i took mine down. Not sure if i like it though. Oh well! He seems to like it and guess that’s all that matters. Jared’s online presence is referred to as “F***ing awesome” on Garrett’s site.

Here’s Luis’s joint which was built on textpattern too just as with Garrett and Jared. He said he’d help me set mine up. Hopefully when mine is done, i don’t have to take it down for at least another year. So far so good…