According to this article, At Last — The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded, Mark Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook was slightly devious, but no doubt, that little bit of ruthlessness and his generally risk-taking behavior at Harvard made his business succeed.

The story goes that on November 30, 2003, he was asked to write some code for an on-campus dating site called the Harvard Connection. Then on December 7, 2003, Zuckerberg wrote in private communication:

Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook thing comes out.

Although it isn’t clear to me that Zuckerberg did not conceive of the “facebook thing” long before his meeting, for somebody who claimed he did not want to work under anybody else, it seems at least curious why he would accept spending time to write code for a similar site. On the other hand, he was skeptical about a straight dating site, designed facebook to be not primarily for dating but something more stealthily innocent (the right call). So it is possible that he was mostly concerned with the timing of the launches of two different sites, rather than their content.

In any case, the real shock is that the whole thing took only two months. The facebook domain was registered on January 11, 2004, and the site launched on February 4, 2004.

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WordPress stats is a nice little filter for WordPress, one of those devious hidden image IP trackers. Unfortunately, getting it to accept the API key doesn’t always work (even if it works for Akismet without complaint).

You may keep getting

Enter your WordPress.com API key to link this blog to your WordPress.com account. Be sure to use your own API key! Using any other key will lock you out of your stats.

even if the API key is correct. or if you hard code the API key

An API Key is present in the source code but it did not work.

The WordPress.com Stats Plugin is not working because it needs to be linked to a
WordPress.com account.

I didn’t find a solution in any of the forums, so I looked at the stupid script some more. Basically it uses the API key to get a “blog_id” (database index, most likely) from WordPress.com and can’t find one. So I made up a blog_id in the code. That shut up the plug-in, but of course stats aren’t tracked.

Finally, I went to http://dashboard.wordpress.com, logged into the account, made a new garbage *.Wordpress.com blog, then a bit later took out the made-up blog_id from the code, de-activated and re-activated, and … everything works. The external blog shows in the “Global dashboard.” Also the real blog_id is returned from code. But, if I take out the hard coded API key, it stops working again.

This is definitely a WordPress.com problem with registering externally hosted blogs, so to make it work, hard code the API key, make sure there is at least one *.Wordpress.com blog, wait a little bit, then re-activate the stats plug in.

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