Hi Lovely Simplerista,

"If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family" said Ram Dass.

I've been spending time with my family this weekend, and sure enough, there were a few challenges. Thankfully not as much as it used to be, but I'm still plenty capable of being triggered.

I'm still listening to Experiments in Truth with Ram Dass, the audio I was talking about last week. And it's so great. I've tried reading some of his books before, but never gotten very far. The audio program is excellent. Funny, too.

Copenhagen is really showing itself from its most beautiful angle, and I'm really taking it in.

Latest From the Blog

This past week on the blog has been of a more practical nature.

I've written about how to handle the back catalog in your "monthly theme" club - the type of membership where you offer your customers a new content pack each month, for as long as they're a member. The question is: What do you do with the old content for new members? Do they get access or not?

I've also written about content theft - when people get access to your content without paying, because someone gave it to them. This is something that concerns many, and to which there's a very simple solution.

Finally, I've written about why audio is such a great format for your content, and what you need to record great quality audio for your programs.

News From Simplero

This week was one of embarrassment on our part. We had a total of 1 hour and 16 minutes of downtime in this past week. That's just unacceptable to me.

We had two main incidents - one lasting 52 minutes which was due to a bad hard drive. A couple of events inflated the resulting downtime, and it took us quite a while to get the server back up. We had to actually power off the physical hardware, something that very very rarely is necessary. But here it was. As much as I hate it, though, these things do happen and are a bit outside of our control.

The second incident was all my fault. I ran a command destined for our new server, but forgot the magic keyword the sends it to the new server rather than the old, which then wiped out the entire directory where the source code that runs Simplero lives. Thankfully it was fairly easy to restore, and the downtime was "just" 13 minutes.

The good news is that the server is very stable now. We've had some problems with unbounded memory growth in the past, but those are completely fixed now, and everything runs very very smoothly.

We're still working on getting a new server operational - hopefully this week, but we'll see about that.

In terms of development, there have been no major features this week, only bug fixes. The next feature we'll push out should be integration with Zapier, which will in turn let you integrate with about 200 other systems.

Fun Stuff From Around the Interwebs

This bit on writing by Danielle Laporte is absolutely excellent.

This article on the habits of creative people is fun, though most of them don't really appeal to make. The blindfold, I'm going to try next. The others that tend to work for me are the hotel room, the bathroom, and the hangover.

It also reminds me about John McAfee's setup. If you don't know him, he's the guy who founded McAfee virus software, which he left a long time ago, and has had nothing to do with since other than it using his name. In fact, he's so unhappy with the company and its products that he made this incredible video showing how to uninstall McAfee software. A big part of his setup is illegal "smart drugs" from China and extended sex! He's one crazy dude :)

That's it for this week. I hope you're feeling the love wherever you are.

Have a wonderful week until we meet again.

With unbounded love,
-Calvin

PS. I managed to write the exact same blog idea twice in the past week. Whoops. What to do? Should I delete one of them? Which one? :)