A decade of fixes: Celebrating MacFixIt's 10th anniversary

Originally posted Monday, March 20th

This week, MacFixIt embarks upon its 11th year of publishing. Earlier this month the site's founder, Ted Landau, waxed reminiscent about the site's history and its genesis. Now we'd like to continue our commemoration with some thoughts from the staff.

Like any publication celebrating a milestone, we're taking this opportunity to thank our loyal readers. Unlike most publications, however, it's not solely patronage for which we owe gratitude; the MacFixIt community has established itself and henceforth remained a vibrant and hard-working collective squarely intent on a goal -- the elimination or sidestepping of troubleshooting problems affecting the Macintosh platform.

While our editors work tirelessly to verify and discover solutions then communicate them back to the reader-base at large, the individual user reports that pour in every day represent the raw fuel that powers MacFixIt. Time and time again, our readers have proven that a distributed approach to troubleshooting results in more reliable and more quickly disseminated solutions than internal testing or one-on-one sessions.

Speaking of internal testing, it's no secret that MacFixIt has taken criticism over the course of its existence from developers who would rather not have software flaw exposed, take issue with the enactment of some workarounds, or believe that problems should be solved exclusively in-house. In the significant majority of cases, however, our dialogue with developers -- albeit heated at times -- has generally resulted in the discovery of new solutions, and refinement of already existent ones. And that's the bottom line: getting our users with mission critical applications back up and running as soon as possible after something goes wrong.

Firms like to talk about mission statements, and MacFixIt is no exception. Rather than contriving one, however, we thought it best to incorporate some reader input. MacFixIt reader Scott Jones encapsulates our purpose better than we could ourselves:

"It seems that almost all, if not all, software releases and updates will cause problems for someone. Other forums will list all these problems, but MacFixIt does more, evaluating how widespread the problems are and providing solutions (among other things). This is greatly appreciated (one reason I pay money for a subscription) and helps in deciding to install or wait or not bother. Please continue. Thanks for the great work."

To mark our 10th birthday, we have a couple small tokens of appreciation for the gift you, our readers, have been helping to provide since 1996.

First, we're opening up a new beta version of our search engine that will hopefully make searching through our vast archive of solutions more easy and comprehensive. Test it out at the beta site and let us know your thoughts: feedback@macfixit.com -- note that you must change the "www" in the URL to "beta" after entering your search term and then press return.

Second, we've got several prizes up for grabs. First and foremost, we're giving away 10 10-year MacFixIt Pro memberships -- 10 more years of fixes on us.

We're also giving away ten sets of speakers from iRhythms, ten copies of Mac OS X Help Line, Ted Landau's troubleshooting magnum opus, ten sets of the 2004 and 2005 editions of A Year of Fixes, and ten iPod Cocoons. Check out the contest details.

Thanks again for ten great years, and as always, let us know your thoughts.

-- Ben Wilson, Editor and the MacFixIt Staff

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