Activist, poet, and musician Saul Williams is catching gruff from fans for allowing Nike to use his song “List of Demands” in commercials.

Williams wrote an open letter defending the use of the song.

I received a lot of questions from some about why I would allow my song ‘List of Demands’ to be used in a Nike campaign. Ironically, half of the people now reading this post never heard of me until that commercial aired. That, indeed, was one of my reasons for allowing it. A small circle of poets and conscious do-gooders are not enough to effect the change necessary to shift our planet in peril. We must enlist people from all walks of life, people not accustomed to questioning the norm, people who may simply want to dance uninterrupted without message or slogan. I see no glory in ‘preaching to the converted’.

I think there’s an interesting point here: To create change, you need to reach out to those who don’t already agree with you. If you’re just having agreeable conversations with likeminded people, you’re probably not actually accomplishing much in the way of fostering change.

A common request we get from readers is to describe in more detail how our server infrastructure is setup. That question is so incredibly broad that it’s hard to answer it in any kind of comprehensive way, so I’m not going to try to. Instead, I’m keeping the general desire for more technical details in mind as I work through day-to-day issues with our configuration, and I’ll try to occasionally write about things that I think might be of interest. The topic for today is HAproxy.

Pablo Corral wrote me an email after I posted this tweet about managing on-again-off-again side projects.

I’m very curious about how to use Backpack to have a better experience on braindumps for side projects.

I switch a lot, and my side project sometimes is off for many days, and some weeks. Can you explain more about this?

It’s hard to find steady uninterrupted time for software side projects. Maybe you only have time on weekends or the occasional free night for your project, and sometimes weeks or months go by where you are too busy to sit down and make some progress. When you finally do find time to work, you can waste half of it just catching up on where you left off.

This has been a big challenge for me because one of my projects is a Rails app that supports registration and administration for a biannual retreat course. Four or five months may go by before I return to the app for another course, and with each course there are new bugs to fix or feature requests to implement. A couple years in this situation have helped me develop a system to manage my side projects with a minimum of headaches and wasted time.

My system is a one-two punch: Hosted version control plus a single Backpack page. These two are all you need to keep the state of your project off your brain and at the ready.

First punch: Hosted version control

Sign up with a hosted version control service like GitHub for Git or Beanstalk for Subversion. I advise using version control even for static websites.

There are two key benefits to hosting your source with these services. First, your source is independent of your work machine. If your machine crashes, you replace it, or even if you space out and delete some things you shouldn’t (that would be me), your code will always be safe and secure in the online repository.

The second benefit is an easy-to-read commit log. With one click you can visit a bookmark and see a timeline of changes you’ve made to the code in chronological order and in your own words. Just glancing at the commit log can be enough to jog your brain after a long absence and bring you right back into the project.

Second punch: A single Backpack page

I make a single Backpack page for each project with two lists and some notes. The two lists are ‘To-Do’ and ‘Debt.’

Some great writing by Jeffrey Zeldman. Brief moments artfully exposed though concise, colorful stories.

Our awesome systems administrator Mark Imbriaco participated in the first episode of the SA Pro podcast recently. You’ll hear Mark talk about how formal education is the only way to become a good sys admin and that Perl is better than Rails.

Just kidding, but still check it out!

(P.S. Mark’s using the awesome Blue Snowball mic to get that clear, Fraiser Crane sound.)

Just a quick update on our new 37signals Affiliate Program.

We launched it about 90 days ago and so far we’ve seen about 1000 new product signups referred by 37signals Affiliates. Basecamp leads referrals, Backpack is second and Highrise a very close third.

Some people are working harder than others. The top affiliate has potential earnings of over $1300 already!

If you’re an affiliate, thanks for representing our product to your clients, colleagues, friends, and family. If you’re not, please consider becoming a 37signals Affiliate today. It only takes 30 seconds to get started and there’s no cost to you.

I’ve wanted to redesign the Highrise sidebars for a long time. They’ve felt cluttered and messy to me, and as we add more features to Highrise the mess will only multiply. So I was glad to have the chance this week to redesign the sidebar modules. The visual side of the redesign was straightforward, but implementing the design in code required a few tricks. Here’s a look behind the scenes at the coding decisions we made for the new Highrise sidebars.

“Subjects” in Highrise

Which sidebar modules am I talking about? In Highrise you can keep track of People, Companies, and Cases. These all have the same basic code and UI. You can keep notes about them, set tasks for the future, and manage some common types of metadata. Since People, Companies and Cases share so much plumbing, we’ve abstracted them as subjects. A subject is anything in Highrise that you can attach notes and tasks to. When you look at a subject’s page, you see a sidebar with some modules for adding or editing metadata such as contact information, background information (a kind of static text description), dates to remember for that subject, and more. The screenshot below shows a subject page with the sidebar modules highlighted.

Redesigning the modules

Each module has a header like “Contact Bob” or “Dates to remember” and data below. In the original design, modules can be either “active” or “empty” based on whether they have any data in them. Empty modules have a grey header and an “add” link floated right. Active modules have a light blue header and an “edit” link on the right. We made this distinction so your eye would more easily catch active modules when you’re looking for information. The idea was good, but the original implementation looked messy with its mix of grey and blue, scattered red action links, and lack of separation between modules.

Wanna feel ripped off today? Sign up for an online virtual service that charges a one-time activation fee. It’s a special feeling to hand over $35 for nothing.

I’d almost understand if there was actual work involved. Or hardware was manually set up. Or someone had to climb some stairs and walk down a few halls to flip something on.

But to charge me $35 to “activate” my account by adding a few records to a few databases, well, that feels like… You know what that feels like.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
Top magic site thrives due to Highrise and Getting Real
“The real crux of our system is Highrise. We use it in managing projects, production, post-production, and marketing. We use it to stay organized. We use it to manage our authorized retailer clients around the world. And we couldn’t breathe as well or sleep as well without it.”

Backpack
All about tags in Backpack
A tag is a simple label or keyword you can use to categorize your Backpack pages any way you want. Then when you click a tag you can see all the other pages that have that tag. It’s a great way to keep your pages loosely grouped in ways that make sense to you.

Scottish wood floor company runs its business using Backpack
“Our first task was to store documents that we use on to our ‘Important Documents’ page. Traditionally these documents were stored on our company server but it was sometimes problematic accessing these via a VPN if we were working from home or abroad. Accessing them on the cloud via Backpack has simplified this task and we are now working faster and with less hassle.”

McKay Hardwood Flooring, a Backpack customer, installed the flooring throughout the National Galleries of Scotland.

Basecamp
Embedding a tutorial video into a Basecamp project
“I used the same idea to embed our Camtasia videos into our Tutorials project… solves a huge issue for me since before I could only add a link to the video … I have attached a image of how it looks. It was a great help.”

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The other day I went to sell some books at The Strand bookstore. They have a separate desk in the back for selling books. I brought in a bag and two clerks started sorting through them.

Then another guy lined up behind me. One of the clerks said to him, “You here to sell books?” He said, “Yes.” The clerk responded, “Wait in the line outside.” The guy went outside.

Thirty seconds later he was back. The clerk repeated, “Wait in the line outside.” The guy said meekly, “There is no line outside.”

The clerk sighed, looked at the other clerk, and sarcastically said, “There is no line outside.” The other clerk said gruffly, “If you can’t figure out the line, then you can’t sell books here.” The potential seller walked back outside meekly.

A minute later, a girl walked up with books. “Wait in the line outside,” said the clerk again. She walked outside. A few moments later, she was back. “What are you doing?” She said, “Selling books.” He said, “The line is outside.” She walked outside again. The clerks laughed. “Let’s see if the Mensa society out there can figure out how the line works!” And they laughed some more. As if both these customers were complete morons.

Lucky for me, I had arrived moments before these other two. Because I sure had no idea there was a place outside to wait in line. Or that “there’s a line outside” actually means “form a line outside.”

I think a lot of people who work in customer service make a similar mistake in laughing at customers or making fun of them behind their backs (PEBKAC comes to mind).

It can be a dangerous trap. Sure, any one customer might be stupid. But if multiple customers are repeatedly making the same mistake, maybe it’s not a mistake on their part. Maybe it’s a mistake on your part. If no one can figure out where to wait in line, maybe that’s a sign that you’re not doing a good enough job explaining it.