Dev talk 101

Being that today is the start of the BlogHer Business Conference, I may not have much time to post anything. However, I planned for this sort of thing and asked Derek Greentree, one of our Senior Software Engineers, to do a guest post in my absence. (Of course, some teasing had to take place before this could actually happen, but what's new?) This will be the first in a series of posts that he writes about what exactly a developer does at Lijit. Enjoy the peek inside his mind and a big thank-you to him for doing this!

What users see when they come to Lijit is our website: it's where you interact with the service, maintain your account, introduce new sources of content into your Lijit world and your search results, and, most importantly, where you configure and pick up our wijit for installation onto your blog.

Of course, like any big application, there are lots of moving parts just under the surface that you don't see that keep what you do see running smoothly. For example, on your Lijit profile page, you'll see a nice display of your network, the things you've been searched about in a pretty tag cloud, and a few other goodies, like who includes you in their searches and how many times you've been searched.

Dig down into your stats page, and you'll see a lot more. Some of the benefits we want to provide to you when using our service are the tools you'll need to grow your online presence, and ultimately your readership and exposure. When Lijit helps you increase your readership, you in turn increase Lijit's exposure, which helps drive more stats to you, so that you can more efficiently increase your readership - and so on.

Now, keep in mind that we're maintaining those snapshots of networks, as well as detailed stats information, for many users. It's a lot of data to juggle and work with. And, the perennial problem with web applications traditionally is the "big cliff" - all but the most dedicated users will lose interest in clicking around your website if it takes what even feels like "too long". As soon as a user clicks, they're moving toward the edge of the cliff. Unless you serve them what they clicked very quickly, they'll fall off and go somewhere else - probably not where you want them to go. If you haven't already gotten them to create an account yet - for example, they're going through a signup flow - you've probably lost a user.

These are the sorts of problems that developer types like me think are fun.

Comments

[Stuart Grimshaw]

Hi There,

I'm trying to get hold of a copy of the Ruby Upcoming api that a certain Derek Greentree wrote, and I was wondering if it's the same guy you mention in your post?

[Tara Anderson]

Stuart, unbeknownst to me, this is the same Derek Greentree. I spoke with him about your request and he should be emailing you with more information soon.

[Derek]

Hi Stuart,
I shot you an email, but for posterity (and anyone else reading this comment), Dan Kurtz at Bricks Without Clay is now maintaining this library. Check it out at:
http://www.brickswithoutclay.com/software/upcoming_ruby/

Sorry for the late reply.