SmugMug's Don MacAskill

We have at least four birthdays here at SmugMug.  I started working on the first lines of code for the project, which was decidedly not a photo-sharing site at the time, in October of 2001.  Then in August of 2002, we decided to shift gears and build a photo-sharing site “as a side business.”  Finally, we launched SmugMug and signed up our first paying customers in November of 2002.

But as far as the government is concerned, February 27th, 2002, is the day we were born.  It’s our official incorporation date and probably marks the day I finally wore my father’s resolve down enough that he agreed to come on board.  🙂  (Which, incidentally, is also the best decision I’ve made running this company).

So Happy Birthday SmugMug!  You’re 8!

Here’s to many more profitable, independent, customer- and employee-focused years!

(This post was written at my old location.  You’re now reading it at the new location. 🙂 )

I’m in the process of moving my blog to hosted WordPress at WordPress.com. Much as I loved the flexibility of hosting my own blog (and the rest of the company), the upkeep required just isn’t worth the extra flexibility. So my customization will go away, which is sad, but I should have to spend less time managing all the blogs at SmugMug. Which might mean I actually blog more often again. 🙂

Here’s the new URL in ‘beta’ form: https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/

I should have redirects up shortly, so everything should work fine, but if your feed reader breaks or something, now you know why. 🙂 Apologies in advance for any hiccups…

And, of course, I write more on Twitter now than I do on my blog. Follow me there if you want quickie goodies. Finally, I have a Facebook fan page up too. Feels bizarre to have a fan page, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use Facebook how I want (only close friends as ‘Friends’, other people ‘Following’) without it, so here it is. My normal Facebook page is marked Everyone for my Wall and Comments, too, so you can feel free to check in there, but I’m just not equipped to Friend the hundreds/thousands of you who ask. Sorry. 😦

I promise to seriously make an effort to blog more of the long-form technical stuff here – I have a number of requests for topics, chief among them being more Amazon Cloud stuff, more Sun Storage stuff, and more MySQL stuff. I’ll get to it at the new location – so see you there!