It is rare that I make a supplier decision that makes me rave with happiness. It happens, but not often. This is one of those times.

The other day I blogged about choosing a project management system and my decision to go with Teamwork instead of ProjectPlace or Basecamp. Six days later I can report that Teamwork absolutely was the right decision – not only for the application, but for the team behind it.

In terms of functionality, there are a lot of things I like about Teamwork, but the things I love the most have nothing to do with managing projects. At the bottom of every page on my Teamwork site is a button that says Feedback/Suggestions. This isn’t just a form you fill out that disappears into the ether; it’s my feedback page. Every comment I make gets logged, timed, date stamped and posted there. And underneath every comment I make is Teamwork’s response to me. These people aren’t just filing away user feedback for some future user metrics calculation or later version rollout; they’re holding themselves accountable for responding to it.

I absolutely love that; it’s a real world, real value example of the transparency we all blather on and on about but so rarely see implemented in meaningful ways.

Way more than that, when these folks say “We take it all on board… seriously” they aren’t kidding. This morning at 9:06 I made a suggestion for a new feature. By noon, Dan Mackey had not only responded to me, but implemented my request:

As a product user, I’m really not sure what more I could ask for.

Alas, not everything is as flawless as Teamwork. Late last week Teamwork’s host, Hosting 365, suffered a denial of service attack and Teamwork was down for about two hours. Since I have quickly become a dedicated Teamwork junkie and am now using it to run my entire work life, I was on the phone to Teamwork in the first ten minutes. In the two hours that followed, I got two emails and a phone call to update me on the system status. That’s customer service – and I haven’t paid these people a single euro yet.

Today I caught up on some of my far-behind blog reading and read a post from Richard Hearne on another company doing things right: Intertrade Ireland is running around trying to get bloggers to raise the profile of Seedcorn, and managing to do it without pissing off the entire internet. Seedcorn’s got €280,000 for startups who are really going for it. I think Teamwork is a fantastic application with a huge potential audience. It’s an Irish Web 2.0 company with an actual, functioning revenue model, and I think they should enter.

The only thing that would make me happier is if they’d sign their feedback responses to me with “Lurve, Teamwork.”

It took two months, but I’m delighted to see Deb Hadley’s Spicendipity launch today. The site features a full catalogue and shopping cart system, products linked to a recipe index, and a blog. (Come to think of it, I think this is my first ecommerce site in Ireland.) For this start-up, I designed the site, logo and branding, and in a rare foray into the world of print – which I hate – I also did the business cards:

Seriously, I hate print, so every time something comes off the press with the correct spelling and even vaguely centred, I’m inordinantly happy. Plus, vertical cards are just cool, man.

When Maz of Style Treaty emailed to ask if I’d be interested in doing a craft blog, I practically whimpered with happiness. It’s nice to take a break and do something that is just plain old fun. Bugger branding; Made Marian is all about the pretty colours, groovy stripes and every woman’s secret affair with duck egg blue.

A few days ago, I read somewhere I can no longer find that the average person can’t efficiently manage more than three open projects. To be honest, I was very surprised by this number; I really thought it would be more than that. Most people I know who freelance seem to carry more than that at once, although I haven’t really done an official poll or anything.

However, this piece of information did encourage me to get more organised about an overview of the projects I am juggling, and so I went out in search of some project management systems because Post It Notes are just not cutting it anymore. I looked at Basecamp and Project Place but ultimately settled on Walter Wynn‘s suggestion of Teamwork. (Everyone uses Basecamp, and while I’m sure there’s a reason for that and it is jolly nice, I like to throw money out of the mainstream every now and then.)

So far I am delighted with Teamwork; it’s really easy to use, it has everything I want, and when I sent in a suggestion about how they could improve their conversions from their Features Tour, I got back a very nice and responsive email right away. The later discovery that Teamwork is based right here in Cork, meaning I can go round and break their kneecaps if they go out of business and take all my projects with them, was just a nice bonus on top of a great product.

I started entering all my projects, and nobody was more surprised than me to find out that I currently have no less than 15 open gigs going. Except possibly the two clients who I had forgotten about entirely, which if nothing else points out how very, very badly I need to plug into a project management system. Also how much I need to apologise to them, pull my finger out, and deeply discount their invoices.

Even before today’s headcount and dropped client fiasco though, I had begun to grasp that this workload isn’t particularly sustainable. I mean sure, you can survive on four hours of sleep per night for a week or so, but after that you really can’t remember anything, let alone produce anything. Sleep: it does a body good.

So for the past few weeks I have been working with two entirely fabulous people I am incredibly lucky to know. I am still doing 100% of the design work, but a lot of the actual CSS and XHTMLing has gone out to my new CSS Overlord Guillermo Moreno, who quite frankly kicks ass all over town. He’s going to be a superstar when he grows up. (At this point, however, I still worry about keeping him up past his bedtime.)

My very talented friend Katherine Nolan has also been doing the heavy lifting on the e-commerce side of things. We actually met on a forum for our favourite shopping cart software almost 10 years ago, but at this point, I’m about 5 versions behind and she is much better equipped to hack sort out the cart system than I am. (She also happens to be the world’s leading expert on Coranto, which can be very handy.)

So hopefully in the next week or two, things will calm down here and some of the decks will be cleared. It is frankly very hard for me to to let go of any part of what I do because I am a complete and total control freak when it comes to work, but I couldn’t have put any of this stuff in safer hands and I’m really pleased with the work that’s come out of these projects.

So there you go: no woman is an island, and 15 projects is too many. Who knew?

Absolutely ages ago, the absolutely fabulous Aoife tagged me for a Six Random Facts meme, and I completely dropped the ball because I couldn’t even keep track of the six things I had to do before lunch. Better late than never, though, so here are mine:

• I have prehensile toes, meaning I can (and do!) pick things up with them. Oddly enough, in all my years of writing about sex and sexuality, it is this single fact that resulted in the strangest and most fervent fan mail. Moral of the story: absolutely everything is somebody’s kink.
• I am mostly indifferent to insects – no girlish spider screeching here – but I used to passionately hate woodlice. Unfortunately, we have a very damp garden and thus, woodlice. I now perpetuate a very satisfying daily holocaust on the dozen or so who creep in the back door and am no longer squicked out by them. I am however disturbingly addicted to this little smashing ritual, and my husband has begun to look at me a bit oddly.
• On the other hand, I actually really like slugs. I find them terribly impressive and sort of endearingly dinosaur like, and I especially love their little horns. Since at least two slugs a night end up in our back hall (eating dead woodlice) or on the bathroom sink, this is a good thing.
• I like films but I’m not a huge fan of cinemas. I have not actually been to a cinema since 2005. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith merely confirmed my suspicion that cinema tickets are not the best way to spend a million quid.
• I am addicted to the smell of detergent. I have no idea why. I just love industrial perfumes. I have an unnatural fondness for Dove soap, and I use Dove deodorant, and if Dove made perfume, I’d probably wear that, too.
• I like my husband so much I married him twice.

Now, according to the rules, I’m supposed to sic this meme on six other people but so much time has gone by that I think I’ve pretty much blown that one out of the water, and I’m not a huge fan of obligating people to play. Instead, here’s a simple curiosity request: show everyone where the magic happens.

We’re about to (fingers crossed) buy and renovate a house, so for the first time ever I’ll have some scope to design my own working space. I’m very excited about this, and I’d like to see yours. Home office, co-working office, actual office: just take a photo of where the work gets done and post it somewhere. Clean, dirty, it doesn’t matter; I just want to see it.

Bernie Goldbach, Damien Mulley, Jackie Danicki, Martha Rotter, Maryrose Lyons, and YourNameHere, I’m looking at you.

After slacking off for a shameful uh, two years, I attended my very first Cork Open Coffee on Friday when Bernie Goldbach lied to me to get me to go. I had sort of imagined five spoddy boys and the divine smelling Conor O’Neill huddled round weak cups of tea, but it was actually a jam-packed, vigorous and entirely delightful event where I got to catch up with a ton of people and meet a ton more.

I will be a dedicated city centre attendee from now on, so between Open Coffees and the parade of other fun events scheduled over the next few months, it’s shaping up to be a fun summer here in the People’s Republic. Here’s what’s on my calendar:

• 17 June: A farewell dinner for Tom Raftery at Proby’s Bistro before he leaves for the warmer, spicier climates of Spain.
• 27 or 28 June: Lunch with Deb Hadley (formerly of the Humble Housewife and now of Tast.ie) in Cork at Cafe Paradisio.
• 16 July: The very first Open Coffee BBQ in Ireland will take place in Terryglass Village in Tipperary. There will be casual presentations, and I’m hoping to do a gig with Frank Prendergast provisionally titled How the Hell Do I Hire a Web Designer. Eimear the Wonderdog will also be in attendance.

So if you’ve any interest in food, technology or just some fun events with some really great people, sign your name on the appropriate dotted line and we’ll see you there!

So yesterday was the official start date of a project I’ll be working on for the next week or so. Several steps of this project require me to have access for testing purposes to a particular piece of technological gadgetry which I do not own, so I arranged with their internal project manager to borrow one of these widgets for the duration.

This lovely, charming, but geographically challenged man is local to me, and so offered to drop the magical bag of telephony tricks directly to my door. As I am notoriously lazy, notoriously exhausted, and a rumoured agoraphobe (I’m not afraid to leave the house or anything, I just very rarely do), this sounded like a marvellous idea to me and I immediately gave him my address and directions.

“On Blarney Street, off Shandon Street, just past the post office.”

He promised to call me when he was on his way, and I crashed into the duvet and slept like the dead.

When the phone rang four hours later, I was still asleep and in a state of what might be best described as train wreck. My plan was to ignore the fact I was clad in my PJs and just brush my teeth, open the door, thank the nice man, and go back to bed. This plan was going roaringly well until he rang again to ask “Where are you? I’m at the post office.”

I stepped outside my door on the cordless to ask if he could see me, since I live mere steps away. Needless to say, he couldn’t, and after a bit of faffing we determined that he was: a) at the wrong post office; b) parked, and c) wandering around Shandon Street.

Make a note for future reference: most plans devised on four hours of sleep and no coffee have flaws. Tragically, at this critical juncture I was simply not awake enough to remember this.

“Right,” I said, “I’ll walk down the hill, you walk up the hill, and we’ll bump into each other in about two minutes.”

And so I did. I walked out in exactly what I was wearing, which was:

• Light pink pyjama bottoms with huge bright pink stars;
• A ratty Disney World sweatshirt circa 2000, complete with one hole and a bleach stain;
• Freshly washed hair, which I had kipped on whilst wet, and was now perfectly straight on the half I’d slept on and wonderfully curly on the side that had air dried.

I hurried, at some pace, down the hill. Past the post office. Past the school. Past the car dealership. Past everything, in fact, right down to Shandon Street. With each landmark I passed, the absolute humiliation of this sartorial parade of mine became ever more excruciating. The Yummy Mummys queued up for 3 PM pick-up looked every bit as horrified to see me as I was to see them; no doubt they thought this completely insane looking bag lady was going to make off with a complete matching set of Little Tarquins. Carriages were clamped. Babies were clutched. Children were told to avert their eyes.

As if all of this were not bad enough, it goes without saying that I never found him. And so back up the hill with me: past the garage, past the post office, and past the ladies who were now absolutely convinced I was a an unmedicated menace to society and stalking their offspring.

Finally back at home, the phone rang, a car drove up, and kit was delivered. I went back to bed and vowed to never, ever leave the house again.

Agoraphobia: it’s a plan.

It isn’t very often that you get to watch a real live-action example of true crisis PR. But when you do, it’s always instructive, and usually amusing in that “bang head against wall, wash, rinse, repeat” kind of way.

This weekend, The Planet experienced a catastrophic outage when a transformer at H1, their Houston data center, exploded, blew out the walls of the electrical room, and started a fire. The building was evacuated, the fire brigade called, and at the insistance of the fire chief, all power – including backup power – shut down.

The good news: nobody was hurt, and data on all 9,000 servers was secure. The bad news: none of the servers had any power.

I do not consider this to be a particular failing of The Planet. Catastrophes happen, even with the best of plans. While it sucks for the people affected, and we were lucky to not be on that list, at the end of the day people, not hosts, are responsible for data resiliency and catastropic backup plans. If you’re not prepared to pay for the technical know-how and costs associated with that, then you’re either not running anything mission critical (my blog: not mission critical) or you’re going to have to be prepared to suck it every now and then.

Amidst all the bitching, moaning, threats of law suits, and small contingent of cheer leading, The Planet did a lot of things right:

• Within hours, they promised updates every sixty minutes on their forum, and delivered them – even if all they had to report that there was no update.
• They let customers know very early on that their SLAs would be honoured and that refunds and credits would be calculated as soon as normal operations resumed.
• They pulled in manpower from their vendors, contractors and staff in the middle of the night on a weekend and worked for 28 straight hours to rebuild a power system virtually from scratch and manage a huge volume of support calls.

There were also some extremely odd choices made, some of which are harmful to their PR. As everyone playing along at home can guess, these failures were primarily in the area of transparency:

• NONE of these updates appeared on The Planet’s blog. Not a single word. If you were pissed off enough to hunt down and root through their customer forum, you got info. If you go to their blog, which is where you’d expect to get crisis updates, you get bupkis.
• For a particular set of legacy customers, both NS1 and NS2 nameservers were both hosted in the H1 data center. This was an example of EPIC FAIL on the part of The Planet, one which they remained basically silent about while the 3,000 customers hosed by this oversight were still without websites.
• They did not post photos of the crispy data center. Seriously, guys: pics or it didn’t happen.

But there is one more thing they didn’t do that was a complete no brainer. Let us assume that several thousand people were on the phone, screaming for their boxes to be rescued from the embers and transported to the nearest operating DC. Let us also assume that there are only a certain number of boxes The Planet can fit into the racks in Dallas. At that point, you either take the customers who make you the most money, or knowing that you’re going to lose a boatload of customers one way the other other anyway, you take the customers who are in a position to do the most damage to your reputation.

They should have located the servers that host b3ta, the world’s most awesome and snarkiest website for nerds and geeks, picked them up, put them in a car, driven them to the Dallas data centre and prayed to the gods of DNS propagation for mercy.

But they didn’t. And three days later, b3ta is still in the “hosed” camp, without a website* and instead running an emergency forum, where the punters are predictably making “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” jokes and creating graphics that will commemorate this event for far longer than The Planet’s lack of blog entries.

This is really not a group of people you want to fuck with.