a canadian startup

Chris Long featured in IT World Canada

Well.ca Lead Developer, Chris Long, was featured in IT World Canada for the community-project he is working on, StartupIndex.ca. Also quoted in the article is Jevon MacDonald from StartupNorth.

StartupIndex is a website that lists all the startups and investors in Canada.

I am so glad to get the chance to work with Chris on this project, and it’s great to see the fame he’s getting. He did a great job on the site. This is a perfect example of an application that finds a specific need in a niche community and solves it with simplicity and style. I am glad, also, that Chris isn’t focusing making money with the project — instead he’s focusing on solving a problem that was bothering him and his peers (namely: finding clear, unbiased information on startups and investors in Canada).

Chris has a very “Craigslist-like” community perspective on the project which I think is smart.

Congrats Chris. When you become uber-famous, don’t forget us!

Speaking at Mesh Conference

I will be speaking at the ’15 Minutes of Fame’ presentations at Canada’s biggest Internet conference on May 22 at the MaRS center in Toronto:

More information here.

Hope to see you there.

Get Access to Amazing Products — Raise Money for Women’s Shelters

Hey, this a great way to get 50% off a rare but popular product and raise money for women’s shelters.

Well.ca is selling two products from Corner Office Beauty, whose exclusive products were featured in many large women’s magazines, at 50% off (never been done!). All profits (yes, all) are going to two very important women’s shelters.

Those of you who know me personally, know that the issue of stopping violence against women is important to me — I’ve been working in women’s shelters for much of my life. The issue is important to everyone that works with us here at Well.ca, and we wanted to figure out a way to help out the cause.

The deal would be amazing despite the fact that we’re raising money for charity — these products are no longer available directly from Corner Office Beauty despite the fact that they were so popular. I got some for my sister and she told me that the lip balm was the best she’s ever used. All the product are made with natural, high-quality, simple ingredients. The packaging is hilarious.

A review of the products at BeautyBuzz is here. You can read more about the deal on our site here. The hand cream used to sell for $22.50, we’re selling it for $11.25. The lip balm used to sell for $7.49, but we’ve got ‘em for $3.75.

Buy these for an important woman in your life. Buy them for yourself. In the process, you’ll be helping two wonderful non-profit organizations that provide shelter and aid for women and children in crisis.

Thank you :)

Well.ca Server DoS, base href, and a Simple Slash

Yesterday was the first day we saw that the Well.ca servers started to cave under increased load. What could be happening? “We’ve been so diligent about handling demand,” we thought.

After a full day of off-and-on debugging, and a couple server-restarts we noticed that we were being hit by thousands and thousands of page requests from individual, but spread-out IP addresses. Our MySQL servers started to cave under the pressure. The pages were all 404′s (i.e. “Page not found” pages). Did some Canadian anti-lipstick hacker mafia choose to DoS-hack our site?

Nope, it turns it out it was a quirk with Internet Explorer 6.

If you go to any random page on our server that doesn’t exist, we display a nice “I am sorry the page is not found” message but we also give navigation so you can shop around, etc. We also load some Javascript in the header. Here’s the beginning of what used to be the source code for a 404 page on our site:

Notice any problems? No, Firefox thinks it’s okay.

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) on the other hand…

If you look at line 11 of the code above, we specify a base href property. What this does is effectively say: “Hey, browser, if I mention a link to any other page, assume the beginning is http://well.ca”. So if we provide a link to “image.gif” the browser should understand that to be “http://well.ca/image.gif”. This is really important for a website where you don’t really know what URL you’re in, so relative URLs don’t make sense, and absolute URLs are too much of a pain because you don’t know if your site might be located in the directory of another site like “http:/site.com/yoursecondsite/”. Change the directory? All you have to do is change your base href location.

Firefox thinks this is all greatness. It’s fine.

IE6, on the other hand, requires a single slash (“/”) in front of every URL you use in the header, and it ignores the base href for things in the header. It treats these URLs as relative!

So some images or scripts don’t load, whatever, right?

Well, not exactly. See, once our 404 page refers to the javascript in line 16, and since we didn’t put a slash in front of the URL, it goes and looks for the javascript in a location relative to the current 404 page. A location that doesn’t exist. Returning… yes, you guessed it, another 404 page that has the same problem. As long as a user keeps their browser open, their browser will constantly and continually request non-existing files ad infinitum. In the process, pounding and pounding our server.

Why did this problem creep up all of a sudden yesterday? We have no idea.

But the fix is simply this:

Notice the slashes?

So what’s the lesson:

• If you’re going to have heavy 404 pages, think about possible recursion problems
• Otherwise, think about static 404 pages
• But if you’re going to have rich 404 pages (which is recommended for eCommerce), don’t return rich 404 pages on requests for non-page objects such as Javascript or images (this can be a hard rule to implement with modern URL formats that no longer indicate the filetype requested)
• Be careful with the <base href=”…”> tag in IE6 and links in your header. Use absolute URLs for at least the stuff in the header.
• Consider avoiding the base href tag completely and design sites that assume they are the root.
• Periodically, spend time looking at your 404 error log.

Fact: Awstats is reporting that Well.ca served up 100 GB of 404 pages so far this month — accounting for 97% of our traffic. Yep.

Did this affect sales? Oddly enough, no. Yesterday was our busiest (yet crashiest) day this month for sales, and possibly our busiest day in sales ever. Of course, having a fast, responsive site is important to us — we’ve fixed the problem and we’ll be looking at it even more.

StartupMap Complete — See a map of Canadian Startups

Ever wanted to see where all the startups are in Canada — all at once?

Now you can!

I am really happy with the way the map of startups in Canada that I referred to earlier turned out. We launched it today at the OCE Discovery ’08 conference (thanks for the help Chris) and learned some new things about the Google Maps API performing on live servers!

Take a look at a map of all the startups we have listed on StartupIndex.ca . As you zoom in to sections, the autoclustering algorithm intelligently (usually) figures out how to draw red circles that are bigger if the region has more startups. If you’re not seeing your startup on the map, it’s because you’re being slow to add your current company — add yourself now!

Check out my work on the front page of StartupIndex.ca

If people are interested in using my modified clustering algorithm, just send me an email.

The back story:

The issue we had from the beginning when making the map is that we knew that if we just straight plotted all the Canadian startups on a Google map, all the pins would overlap and it would be pointless. All the clustering algorithms we used didn’t work the way we wanted — they were ugly and didn’t give an idea of the number of clumped points that they were clustering. It got to the point where the final map I made wasn’t useful enough to go up on the live site (much to my dismay because I spent so many hours on it). I showed it to the others working on StartupIndex and they basically said “yeah, it’s nice but not useful or pretty enough to put up on the front”. So we pulled it from our original plan and extended the feeds to take up the remainder of the page.

Late one night, I had the idea of how to make it work and be pretty — hours later and this was the final product. The others liked enough to put it back into the design. I hope you all like it! I find it’s fun to play with.

Sales Funnels

Chris is a great source of cool-looking graphs. He emailed these sales funnels to me based on live data from our site.

StartupMap

With all the data from StartupIndex, there are many neat ways to represent the information.

I am putting the final touches on an auto-clustering, multi-size pointer map using Google Maps plus javascript magic. It is interesting to see a map of all the startups in Canada — lots of new discoveries.