Matthew Lang

Kurt Harden shares some thoughts on his connection with nature.

Over the past 24 years I have grown attached to everything that has lived on this property. This place is a sanctuary for me. It is home. It is where I regularly refuel for the daily battle.

— A fallen friend

While our home does not benefit having a large garden with decade old trees, across the street, we did have three trees that this area was built around. In the last few years, we’ve lost one tree, and now there’s a second not looking too healthy.

Over the years, the boys have had great times playing around these giants across the street. I hope the last one remains standing long enough for our youngest Drew to enjoy.

This week we almost missed another school notice about an “own clothes day” for Drew. The reason why? The notice was put on the school’s Facebook page and nowhere else.

The school does have their own website, Twitter account and even an app for your smartphone. They rarely update them all with the same information at the same time, but Facebook is the preferred outlet for the school to communicate with parents.

Schools aren’t alone in this.

Being involved in the junior section at our local golf club, I’m always looking for updates from other clubs for junior events that our junior section can play in. The problem is that clubs have websites, but rarely update their website and instead choose a preferred social media platform (most likely Facebook), and then just share it there.

Community organisations like schools frequently miss the point of having a website and how they should use social media to maximise reach to all parents.

Miraz Jordan sums it up nicely.

Make your website your home. Put all your information on your own website, first and foremost. Put notices on Facebook and include the address to find that information on your own website. Now people have a choice: if they enjoy using Facebook then they’ll see your post (probably / possibly) and can visit your website if they choose. Those who aren’t on Facebook can freely access the information from your website.

If you wish, use other services, such as Twitter, the same way.

— Why not move a community group’s website to FB?

Feedbin was down again this morning, but thankfully it’s back up and running now. This is the first time that I remember Feedbin having a prolonged service outage ever since I started using it when it was first launched.

The thing about service outages though, is that despite their interruption to your day, they can be an indicator of how effective the service provider is at dealing with it. For a service like Feedbin, it shouldn’t cause too much of an impact on a person’s day. It’s a consumer product, but what if you are a service provider for other businesses and organisations?

I remember Gitlab’s database outage a couple of years ago. They had a severe disruption to their service, but they dealt with it in the best way possible. By being transparent with the world and letting everyone know what went wrong, what they’re doing to fix it and finally a retrospective of what they have learnt from it.

Basecamp also had a severe outage not that long ago. Again, they handled it in the same way Gitlab did. By being transparent and learning from the disruption so that it doesn’t happen again. If you really want a deep dive in Basecamp’s service interruption they did a whole podcast episode on it.

Platform interruptions are mostly just a nuisance. As a consumer of both free and paid for platforms, I know that these outages are not that important and eventually, the platform in question will be up and running again. But for the service provider, they’re a great indicator of how good they are at getting back on their feet, and more importantly, how informed they’ll keep everyone during the process.

So even if a service provider does have a significant outage, it’s how they handle it that will be a factor on whether I sign up for it or not.