I did some more for Juvely Mk II yesterday, but have come to a bit of a dead end. The actual logic code for Juvely is rather simple so I have got the main chunks done, unfortunately the complicated stuff is getting the interface code working correctly with this. This is a bit of a problem, as at the moment there isn’t an interface. The plan was for James and I to work on this seperately and merge it together. So yeah, Im at a bit of a dead end. I haven’t read Getting Real since about Christmas so Ill have a read through that to see if it can spark up any ideas.

In other news James needs some urgent work done that will probably take about a week, so there goes my push for Juvely…

Originally we decided to create Juvely using the CakePHP framework because James didn’t know Rails much and we both planned to do the programming, in the end though it was me stuck doing it, and I grew to like CakePHP quite well. It is a nice framework, and clearly a lot of hard work has gone into it, but there are two things I don’t really like about it: PHP is an ugly language, and for some reason on our server is sssllloowww… Keepsy (written in Ruby on Rails) performs a lot more processing and intensive database queries than Juvely but seems a lot faster. Its not as if I have got it setup wrongly, they are both running as FastCGI applications under Lighttpd - you don’t get faster than that!

So anyway, yesterday I begin Juvely Mark II, in Rails. Just to give you an example of how I feel PHP is ugly, here are two identical statements in CakePHP then Rails. It is used to link the Tickets and TicketMessages models.

At the moment there is nothing really to show as I have only worked on it for about 5 hours, but I hope to add a much more Web 2.0 interface (I recently came across MoveMe, it has a really nice design but doesn’t look cheesy), and maybe even Google Gears integeration for offline usage.

Anyway, watch this space! For now here is a screenshot of what it looks like at the moment (not good…):

(P.S. This is also my first time posting with Wordpress 3, it looks very nice although it took ages for me to figure out how to attach an image as the form the ‘Insert To Post’ link is on doesn’t render correctly on Opera…)

I’ve decided that it would be best for me to leave my current university and apply for another. My reason is that I’ve found passion in my life. I’m not talking about with my girlfriend but with design. I’ve completely migrated from my programming routes and gone full time into design. And all I can say is that I absolutely love it. I’ve received an unconditional offer from another university to study “Design for Digital Media“. So it feels I’ve pretty much wasted the last two years of my education I’ve learned a lot of very important life lessons and have really realised where I want to take my career. Now that I’m an official university drop out until september, I’ll be freelancing full time (which is working out quite nicely) and devoting all other spare time to work with our apps!

..So what’s happening then?

Keepsy

Firstly we want to launch Keepsy (the concept of the idea is up and running). The reason behind this is fairly simple, it’s a great little application. It’s really handy and I’ve really taken to it and think a lot of people could benefit from its simplicity. I’ve got some great design updates planned for it, streamlining the user interface and experience, removing bloat and unnecessary UI functionality. Here’s the progress with the current design. (Yep I’m aware that the little photos are exactly the same as twitter, it’s just a concept).

Theres a couple of possible paths we could take with Keepsy. We could launch it as a beta-super-secret-invite-only app, hopefully create some buzz and gather a following. However, we are leaning towards just fully releasing it into the wild. This is still a decision to be made. We hope to have it all done and dusted as soon as possible, most likely a couple of weeks.

Juvely

We have got some great plans (theres a surprise?). However, we are going to put this on hold (yet again) until summer. I’ll be heading to Exeter for a week (to stay with Luca) to finally get it all done and dusted. It’s been an extremely long time, we’re still extremely passionate about the app, it’s just restraints that have held us back. It’s funny to think this all started when I was 16.

Deer & Spiller

This will become the registered parent company for all of our future applications - it’ll be our blog as well. The design is pretty much finished, it just needs to be coded and integrated with wordpress. Once we’ve got the site fully launched, we’ll register the business, hopefully getting everything sorted out (bank, contracts etc) then I hope to write a series of articles helping other young students go about setting up an online business. As well as post tutorials and any other bits and bobs we’re working on.

I’m not a fan of update posts but I thought, its been a while, the loyal readers (yes all 7 of you) might be interested to know where we stand.

Peace out!

Before I had even heard of Linode there was one thing I just didn’t like about SliceHost: they required you to pay for 3 months in advance, and they don’t appear to offer a money back guarantee. This may not sound very major, but to us it was the deciding factor. Other than this they are very evenly matched. So onto what I believe to be the number one rule of business: make customers believe you service is risk free by providing a trial and/or refund policy. I could go on all day about this, but ill get back to the main point…

Anyway, Linode seemed to put you more in control by providing you with the nitty gritty details such as deciding how to setup your partitions and all other stuff us closet Linux users dream about so I went with them…. Another factor was that to me they seemed to be innovating more, over the past few months they had a number of new developments that looked good, including a private virtual LAN so you could transfer data for free between your ‘nodes’ (what they call a machine instance). Not that we need it yet, but if we ever need more than one machine its good to know.

A point where SliceHost wins though is that they are currently using Xen virtualisation which is supposed to be faster than UML (which Linode are using), but Linode are in the process of beta-testing their Xen system. Linode also provide slightly more resources, but we would be fine on the minimum that Slicehost provide so that wasn’t really a concern.

The setup process was fairly straight forward, it took about an hour for my account to be initially activated at which point I recieved an email saying my account was ready. Upon logging in I was asked where I wanted my node to be situated (Linode have a choice of three datacentres). I had read in the forum about ports being blocked in the Atlanta datacentre, so I avoided that and chose the Dallas one. After this I was prompted to chose my Linux distribution and setup partitions and a couple of minutes later I was sitting at the terminal of my shiny new server.

I chose Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) as I was familar with this and then procedded to set everything up. I won’t bore you with the details, but the hardest bit was the mail server. Slicehost and Linode both have wikis that have a wealth of information, so look there if you are interested. Here is a list of packages I used:

Webserver - lighttpd
Database - MySQL, phpMyAdmin
Mail - Postfix, Courier IMAP, Spam Assassin, Super Secret Email Managing Thingy™ (with added pzzzzaazzzzz!) - our frontend to the awful Postfix configuration, RoundCube Webmail
Firewall - IPTables
And a load of custom backup and management stuff…

I had a few niggles with some of the Ubuntu packages so had to compile a couple of bits from source. The lighttpd package was out of date and had a major security flaw, so I built that, and the ImageMagick (for Keepsy previews) from Ubuntu didn’t work so I built the latest version.

I changed the backup script a bit so it properly backup the MySQL databases (before the actual files were copied, but I realised this was flawed as data is held in memory before being flushed to disk), as such instead I used mysqldump which dumps your database in SQL format, this is also much more efficient (we now store about a meg of SQL data - which compresses easily - rather than 30 Mb of MySQL databases - which doesn’t compress well). I was also quite supprised that the final system only uses around 800 Mb, so I figured we might as well put Amazon S3 to good use and create full system backups to easily restore in the case of problems. We just used tar set to exclude certain directories, it ended up create a 200 Mb backup!

Now onto performance. In my last post I said there was nothing wrong with MediaTemple. Well, sorry guys, but compared to our Linode setup, yours was poor. Everything just seem ssssooooo much faster now! We have plans to make it even better though, if you follow my keepsies you may have noticed I added cfis : Making Rails Go Vroom, a post about making Rails applications run faster - some quick initial tests showed that a few changes here and there would make a huge difference! Watch this space!

If you have any questions about our setup feel free to leave a comment!

The chat section is near enough finished, we just need a few GUI changes here and there, we have started creating an API and an Adobe AIR application! (If you want some cool links on creating an API or Adobe AIR app check out my keepsy feed!)

While I have been busy coding, James got carried away while tinkering with the Knowledgebase UI…

So, yep we shall have a new UI at some point for Juvely, we have also got redesigns lined up for the Juvely marketing site, creation of the Deer&Spiller site (our company name) and integration with the blog. I think James has ideas for a Keepsy redesign floating around too!

Resources on the server are getting a bit tight so I am considering moving to Slicehost (which I keep typing as Slidehost). There is nothing wrong with (mt) by Slicehost are cheaper and they allow you to build your server from scratch as you need it, which will allow us to save on memory.

Oh, and inauguration of the company!

Over the next few days we hope to rollout some GUI changes to Keepsy! I have now finished for Easter (six weeks off, woop!) so we plan on getting a lot done over the next few weeks, including inaugurating the business, so this place should start to get quite busy!

Unfortunately this doesn’t work in IE, but has been tested to work fully in Opera, Safari (not sure about an iPhone, does that even support bookmarklets?) and Firefox!

To get this new version head over to http://www.keepsy.com/button!

OpenID originally looked like a very promissing technology but things haven’t turned out well for it, although adoption is growing by the big companies. Last week I spent about 6 hours trying to find an implementation of a consumer (the application) that works with Rails 2.0. Eventually I came across this and I thought, yay, I can get this implemented on Keepsy within a couple of hours. I then did some more reasearch on the best practices, and in the end decided to avoid OpenID.

My main reason was because so many sites have poor implementations of it and users are just going to get confused. Possibly the worse case is the Beast forum. In order to use an OpenID to login to a forum you need to register with a username and password, kind of defeats the point no? 37signals have done slightly better with the signup process for their Basecamp application, you can choose to use an OpenID instead of a username or password but still it isn’t brilliant. What if people don’t know what an OpenID is (most internet users)? Although they provide a link for information people really aren’t going to bother clicking. The main problem I believe is the name ‘OpenID’. It provides no indication as to what it is, something like ‘universal login’ would be a better choice. You can also argue that Microsoft’s Passport platform (does that still exist?) suffers from the same problem, but that has exposure through services such as Hotmail and Windows.

Anyway, back to my original argument about poor implementations. Brian Ellin has done an excellent job redesigning the OpenID login page for Pibb, but I think it could go further, especially on sites that support OpenID and traditional logins. My idea is to have a login page that has all this OpenID stuff at the top, and then at the bottom the tradional username / password and registration stuff. If the user enters an OpenID that doesn’t exist on the system, then they are shown a basic registration form (prepopulated using the simple registration extension) asking for whatever data you need (i.e. displayname and email if you must). Once confirmed they are logged in and are using you app within 30 seconds of visiting the homepage. Its simple, as OpenID should be!

Anyway, thats my two pence on OpenID! Hopefully one day the problem we be solved, but until then, no OpenID for Keepsy!

So much for our 5 days from idea to launch, it did seem a bit extreme but I am glad we have got something up and available for everyone to try. We are trying to embrace the ‘Getting Real’ approach by releasing early and releasing often. Keepsy is so much smaller than Juvely that we decided rather than having two versions running on the server (production and development), whenever something is committed to the repository it is updated on the live version of Keepsy. This aids in bug fixes as if we need to fix any on the live version of Juvely we need to SSH into the server and run a few commands, where as for Keepsy we just need to commit! I expect we will change this as it grows, but that does mean for now you may experience a few bugs…

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

Rather than making a poor attempt at explaining Ill give you a copy of Jim’s spec he sent out when getting quotes:

The scenario. You and your friend spend alot of time on the internet in general (reading blogs, watching videos etc). You constantly come across new and interesting content you would like to save for later. You also find that friends with similar interests may find the sites interesting/fun. Keepsy will provide a way to store website links you find interesting/fun and want to save, it will also allow your friends to see what you save, allowing them to come across new and interesting content as well.

Upon arriving the Keepsy.com the user will be present with a short descriptive paragraph, a login form and a register button (which i will design and provide).

Once logged in the user will be able to edit their account settings and view all their latest “keepsies” (bookmarks). Every user once signed up is designated a profile page, which will look like the following ( http://upload3.net//uploads/251home.jpg). These can accessed by visiting username_of_user.keepsy.com (example jim123.keepsy.com ). Profiles can be made to be public or private. Public means anyone can access them by going to the user.keepsy.com url, private means only friends and the person themselves (once logged in) can view the profile.

The user profile will have a calender feature which will simply allow them to select a certain date, to which the page should display the keepsies (bookmarks). It will also list their friends in the form of little images (the friends profile picture, as seen on the design preview). A simple keyword search, which will search the tags + the title of each bookmark, then display the most relevant keepsies(bookmarks).

User will add the keepsies (bookmarks) by using a javascript bookmarklet (more info on bookmarklets here: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html ). When on the target website, the bookmarklet will just need to be pressed once, then a small unobtrusive box will appear asking whether they would like to add tags to their submission or not. Once save is pressed, the user will continue browsing. The user will obviously need to be logged into keepsy on the computer they are using to add keepsies (bookmarks) to their profile.

We also have a couple of other features planned but we shall leave those a suprise for now.

Anyway, as I said we have got most of the features needed for launch done. Unfortunately we still have got quite a lot to do and it hasn’t helped that my boss scheduled me in to work for 8 hours over the weekend - arggg. Don’t fret though, we still plan to release by tomorrow night!

Ill leave you with a screenshot of what we have got so far (the design has changed slighty since the screenshot linked above):

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…..

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!

(Closed)

Bug Fixes

• Password wasn’t hidden on staff settings page
• Various browser bug fixes
• Lots of stuff we forgot about!

New Features

• Quoted email text is hidden
• Suggested ticket replies
• Attach other files & file manage page
• Scrolling ticket list
• Brand new design