I’m leaving this blog, but I’m not leaving blogging. If you want to read my latest rants on social media, public relations or any of the other random topics I’ve discussed, please head over to StrikePad, Match Strike’s blog on web development, where I will be stretching topicality to its limits.

Fedorable was started alongside IvyLees, which would eventually turn into Presskit’n. Greg and I wanted a place to talk about what we were doing, and what we thought about public relations and technology in general.

After Greg died, I decided to continue on with this blog. Since then, I’ve written some of my best posts, even though my time was more limited than it had been previously. Four months later, I’m a bit more clear-headed on the issue. I  can blog in one place without feeling like I’m abandoning an old dream.

Some of the posts here, like the one linked above, are particularly dear to me. For that reason, we’ll be merging Fedorable’s content into Strikepad. We’ll also be taking care of redirects and the RSS feed. If you’re a loyal fan, your subscriptions should keep right on working. If you haven’t subscribed yet, feel free to do so now.

You can also keep up with me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading Fedorable. You’ve been a great audience.

So here it is:

1. Create a Presskit’n account. Enter your e-mail, name and password, and then confirm through that same e-mail address.

2. Create a social media newsroom by clicking the big “Create” button. Enter the SMN name and check the box that you’re affiliated.

3. Repeat step 2 until you have as many social media newsrooms as you want. (This step might put you over 30 seconds!)

And you’re done. You now have a feature-rich social media newsroom. Decide in five months that you don’t like it? Well, we give you a full RSS feed with an entire social media release in each post. Our promise of quality is letting you leave whenever you want.

One big question we get: What if I want just the Presskit’n social media release format with the full RSS feed? We’ve added locking to let you do just that. Do all of the steps above, and then click the “Lock” tool in your newsroom. That instantly shuts off your SMN (not the releases) to crawlers, while at the same time directing any newsroom traffic to your RSS feed. You can then unlock it again whenever you want. Cool, huh?

It’s been a pretty wild year (and decade) for public relations. Take these next few days to relax and enjoy the holiday spirit, and most importantly to remember what matters: Friends, family, and good times.

Well, I waited too long, because last week it became all too clear that the Great Facebook Brand Backlash was upon us.

In case you weren’t around, here’s what happened: Facebook rolled out some new suggested privacy settings. It concerned experts. It was a fiasco. It could only be elaborate trickery.

I had heard some rumblings by the time the changes got around to me, on Twitter and on the blogs I read. I took a deep breath as the new privacy screen popped up, knowing a new future had arrived. I could see the big, robotic eye of Facebook watching my every move, subtly manipulating me into buying products or making new connections without my conscious knowledge.

And then I checked a few boxes.

Phew. The fiasco wasn’t really a fiasco at all. Perhaps the only strong argument against the policy is that users might not read the message. Considering that users are forced to read it to continue, and that the message contains multiple check boxes, which obviously imply a decision is to be made… well, I’m loathe to call it elaborate trickery.

The whole thing might be unsettling if Mark Zuckerberg had suddenly changed his position on anything. He’s been rather openly for openness since the beginning. It has been a recurring theme in his open letters to users of the site, and I imagine it will stay a recurring theme. This move isn’t unexpected, isn’t out of line with his (or facebook’s) feelings on the issue, and it isn’t Earth-shattering.

But when you read about it, it will be. Everything they do will be. And that’s the Great Facebook Brand Backlash in action.

Greg died on Sunday, September 13th in a car accident while returning from ProgPower, a metal concert in Atlanta. He was 25.

Together, we had learned a lot of our start-up lessons the hard way. We had been slapped by the chicken-and-egg problem. We had several of the I-should-be-asleep-right-now rushes to fix last-minute bugs. We had major new features go virtually ignored. We had faced criticism, both fair and unfair. We had struggled to maintain a constant user base.

And, every time the going got tough, every time we failed, we shrugged our shoulders and continued on.

Then, out of nowhere, Greg died. Suddenly, scrambling late at night to find an elusive bug seemed like nothing. His death wasn’t nearly the same type of problem. I found myself unable to lift my shoulders, and unable to go on.

Initially I had wanted to write this post on the technical details of this event. I wanted to separate the emotional parts. But I can’t. It just doesn’t work that way.

Relationships between co-founders can range from a 9-to-5, just-the-business relationship to “Sure, I’ll get a blood test to see if my kidney’s good for a transplant” friends. Greg and I fell into the kidney category.

If a start-up has the foresight to prepare for something like this, they’ll usually do it in a very details-oriented way.  There will be preparations made for roles in the company, tasks to be done, and for shares of ownership.

But after the fact, those are just details, especially if the co-founders are good friends.

Greg was great with Django. He was ceaseless in championing our products. He could fix any problem just as soon as it popped up.

After his death, I didn’t find myself asking, “Can I go on without someone great with Django, someone who could champion our products, and someone who can fix bugs on the site?”

I found myself asking, “Can I go on without Greg?”

It’s been 12 days since his death. Only now is the answer to that question even beginning to shift towards Yes.

I suppose, in the end, the only way to prepare for an event like this is to set aside time away from the project. As they say, time heals all wounds. Even as someone who throws himself into his work to get away from stuff like this, I found myself simply unable to distract myself through it, since I worked so closely with Greg on a daily basis.

I won’t get back to work today, and probably not tomorrow, but I will get back to work. It’ll just never quite feel the same without Greg.

In the tweet, the tenant said her apartment was moldy and also mentioned the company, Horizon, by name. The damages claim? 50,000 bucks.

The tenant had 20 followers. That’s 2500 bucks a follower.

At the moment, Horizon Realty is a trending topic on Twitter. I have to wonder: Is it worth it?

Some companies jump at the opportunity to answer a customer’s complaints on Twitter. And then some companies get sue-happy.

You can usually tell that a website is secure by looking for a lock image somewhere in the browser. If you use Firefox, the area behind the website icon in the address bar will turn blue or green. The image above is from Firefox 3.5beta. They’ve added the domain name to the blue backgrounds.

There are many places that you can get an SSL certificate these days and they will work with 99% of internet browsing devices. GoDaddy, Comodo, GEO Trust, VeriSign, and Thawte being the big providers that come to mind. I spent a day researching all of the different sources to find out what would be the best value for the price. I started by looking at sites that I use frequently to see what certificate they went with and I discovered that there isn’t a big winner that everyone goes with.

With a little more research I found WhichSSL. It has a chart comparison of many of the available certificates.

Later, I found that NameCheap was giving away free SSL certificates with a domain purchase or transfer. Since I had a domain that needed to be renewed, I transferred it over so that I could try it out. NameCheap is a reseller of a few different brands of certificates and the free one was a positive ssl from comodo.

You can now go to https://ivylees.com and know that all information being transferred is secure.

We use the framework Django for ivylees.com and it provides an easy way to create sitemap files. Since the framework knows about all of our pages already, we only need to add a little bit of code to tell it how to generate the sitemap.xml file for us automatically. Django also makes it simple to ping google when there are updates.

With django we were able to make it as simple as possible for google to index new news releases as soon as possible.

And they helped us out. Big time. Thanks, guys.

You’ll notice some changes on the site as a result of their feedback. We’re not done yet, but the bulk of the suggestions are implemented. I’ll try to highlight some of the changes:

• You can now create News Releases without signing up.
• The front page lets users know what the site is about, what they can do with it, and what they can click on a bit better now.
• The Tools link is gone. The tools are still there, of course, but they’re presented elsewhere, in more logical spots.
• We’re now calling Associations NewsRooms, because, well, that’s what they always were.
• Collections are now piggy-backing on the Contacts page. You can manage all of your contacts (whether mutual or not) in one spot now.
• We upped pitches to 300 characters. We will probably be tweaking this amount until we find a happy compromise between pitchers and pitchees. Feedback is, as usual, appreciated.

We’ve still got work to do. Stay tuned for more info.

-Rex