Posted by Luca on December 28th
Whoa no posts for two months? We have been slacking! Unfortunately over the last couple of months James and I have had loads of work to do for uni and haven’t had much chance to work on Juvely. Thinks have been progressing, slowly. The chat section is starting to take shape which is good, we planned to get loads done over the holidays but I stupidly decided to say to my boss I wouldn’t mind working every day for two weeks. Hmm. Anyway, we are both free from other commitments now so we have been pushing on with Juvely. Or we were, until it became apparent that somebody left the PSDs in Scotland…. So we decided to get started with something different.
James and I have both had a few ideas for other apps we would like to see come into life on the big wide web. Unfortunately most of them have had flaws such as being too big or not having a good enough revenue stream. The next idea we were going to try once Juvely had been finished was a simple social bookmarking site, think Delicious mixed with Twitter. I expect something similar had been done before but we decided we were going to try it anyway.
James thought it would be a good idea to have this done before Juvely to get some exposure so he looked into having someone else coding it. The best price he got would have been £200 each! He did a bit of bartering and managed to bring this down to £100 each if I do the XHTML and he does some designing for this guy later. Still, I am a bit of a cheapscate so I decided to look into it some more and thought it seemed rather simple, so I decided to give it a go!
So far I have been working on it for about 12 hours and have got most of it done. The main challenges involved relearning Ruby on Rails as I haven’t used it for so long! Still we have got quite a lot left todo but we plan on launching by the end of the year (yes I know, that is four days time, but I think we can do it!).
Ill leave you with a screenshot of our todo list so you can see how much has got to be done. Unfortunately I have got to work tonight and all day tomorrow so I won’t get any more done until Sunday. Its gonna be tight…..
Posted by Luca on October 19th
Hi all! If you are still reading this thanks for sticking with us even though we have done very little in the past month. The first three weeks back at uni have been hectic for James and I. Hopefully things will start to calm down a bit now and then we can start working on Juvely again! Yay!
Over the last week when I have had some spare minutes I have been looking more into using Amazon S3 pratically as a storage system for an application, as apposed to using in the background as our backup solution. The application I have been playing about with is written in Ruby on Rails so I used the AWS::S3 gem to get going. To ease things even more I used the Attachment Fu plugin which makes things even simpler! About 10 lines of extra code (if that?) and attachments are uploaded to S3!
One of the things I was rather shocked about, as I don’t remember reading about it anywhere, is that Amazon S3 supports BitTorrent downloads. Nothing special is needed, just adding “?torrent” to the end of the query string! As soon as all browsers include a BitTorrent client (I think only Opera does by default at the moment) this could potentially reduce bandwidth costs drastically! If there are no users seeding Amazon S3 will act as a seeder so if there is support there is really no reason not to use this. So who is willing to write a script to detect whether the browser supports BitTorrent or not and passing the relavent S3 url?
Lastly, how would you like to save 15 cents? Although Amazon S3 is very cheap it still costs money during testing you may very well have to transfer huge amounts of data, or just be testing on a machine with a poor internet connection. Well no fear, meet Park Place! A clone of Amazon S3 written in Ruby! It doesn’t support everything under the sun and has a couple of bugs, but it seems fine for most uses!
Anyway hopefully this will help someone out who wants to experiment with Amazon S3! If you discover any useful tools any other hidden features add to the comments!
Posted by Luca on September 3rd
Unfortunately over the last two weeks (as you can probably tell by the lack of posts), James and I haven’t been busy working on Juvely. We have both moved in at uni for our second year so have been busy sorting stuff out there. James has been having a few problems with his internet as well, but hopefully that will get sorted this week and then we can get back to work on Juvely!