Jay Small's blog

Bloglines beta site remains down this morning, victim of an expired and apparently neglected security certificate. Meanwhile, "classic" Bloglines still exhibits the classic problems that led me to try the beta months ago:

• Item refresh counts out of whack
• Showing thousands of old items as new
• Too many visits by the "Bloglines plumber" (outages)

Along with the impressively frequent "Loading..." and "There appears to be a server communication problem..." dialogs, the long-running beta of Bloglines sported a lean, mean new home page this morning.

I know installing and renewing SSL security certificates can be tedious and time-consuming; however, if you force your beta project traffic through an SSL connection you pretty much have to consider the certificate at or near Job 1.

I can still use "classic" Bloglines, which has no SSL requirement, but seems to sport many of the same reliability problems as the beta. Anyone have an RSS aggregator/reader suite you just love?

Jeff Jarvis discusses the notion of advertising as failure:

"The ideal relationship a company should have with its customer is that it produces a great product the customer loves and talks about and thus sells; there is no need for advertising there. It’s only in the case of failing at that idea that one needs to advertise."

Go check out his post because he expands significantly on this idea in three video segments.

I see the logic, at least in cases with these characteristics:

• A given company and its given product have existed long enough to develop any reputation, good or bad.

Links with enough dust on them to prove how far behind I became in reading and blogging:

Design and UX stuff

• Introducing Typekit: Taking advantage of emerging markup/style practices that allow fonts other than the overexposed "Web-safe" selections, this service appears to be the most meaningful development for better Web typography in a long time. (Here's hoping widespread adoption of new font capabilities will make my ancient Text Style Sampler finally obsolete.)

Watch Evansville's courierpress.com site today -- and not just for the likelihood of more severe weather in the southern Ohio Valley, though they get plenty.

No, I refer to a major site redesign; with it, a new user experience architecture. Barring unforeseen delays, it launches today. Update: It went live about 2 p.m. Eastern time.

I chatted up a piece of new analysis from Nielsen around the office a good bit today.

In the analysis, David Martin, vice president of primary research for Nielsen Online, described an uphill battle that Twitter, the oh-so-buzzy status network, may face growing Internet market share while its user retention rates languish around 40 percent.