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And The Winner Is…

Back during the development of Strongspace, I sent out this email to the development team:

I’d like to laugh a little more when reading my dog of an inbox. So, I offer a prize to the most amusing, yet still functional and informative (judged purely by myself) SVN commit message between the start of Strongspace, and the day we go live with 1.0.

So far, the clear clear CLEAR leader is Marten with #431 “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay.”

Details of the prize are yet to be decided, but it will have a value somewhere between a candy bar and an Aeron chair, and am open to suggestions.

It certainly made for a much more entertaining read of the commit logs every day, and we had some really funny posts along the way. Most of them were very much private jokes that I wouldn’t expect others to laugh at, but here’s a selection any way:

  • “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay.”
  • “first cut of a ‘your credit card failed, you suck’ email”
  • “many many things I’d rather not discuss”
  • “actually do the change I talked about last time”
  • “Does anyone else find it disturbing that Jason came up with 99% of these swear words?”
  • “resetted? – ‘oh papa homer, you’re so learn-ed’”
  • “fix my last commit which could never have worked”
  • “Can we get an equal sign up in here!?”
  • “Removed the % from User bar graph. Motioned by Marten, seconded by Justin.”
  • “me and subversion sat down and talked things over”
  • “If this still doesn’t work, we’ll just ditch the damned feature ;)”
  • “hide user permissions stuff from account owner user edit—unlike MC Hammer, they can always ‘touch this’”
  • “not too elegant, but passable solution for a not too elegant, but passable browser named IE”
  • “I swear I just saw something move.”
  • “full spelig/grammer/puncshuation awdit”
  • “it’s not really called a ‘fix’ if it breaks the rendering in every other browser known to man”
  • “Resolves case #846—providing ‘resolve’ means ‘change the rules and doing whater I want’”
  • “What would Zeldman say?”
  • “Needs tarting up. Justin, that’s where you come in.”
  • “Caching Me, Caching You, There is Nothing We Can’t Do”
  • “Bad speling? That’s unpossible!”

Johan had a few in there that came a very close second, and Jason voted for my own “MC Hammer” message, but after much deliberation, I decided the award goes to Marten’s original #431 ode to Frank Sinatra. Call me sentimental, whatever.

Marten will soon be the proud owner of an iPod nano engraved with “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay”.

·:· Posted 23 November 2005, 00:44 by Justin French to TextPeople  |  Got something to say? [6]

Strongspace Beta Begins!

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve begun “friends and family” Beta testing of Strongspace, our secure file storage and file sharing plan. If everything stays on schedule, our first focused plan, our first public Rails application and our first major milestone on the road to TextPanel will be released on August 1.

A picture tells a thousand words, so before I go into some details about what Strongspace is, let’s have a little look.

So what is it?

Strongspace is a secure place to gather, store, back-up and share any type of file with co-workers, friends and family. You can upload, download and manage your files over SFTP or with a web browser over SSL.

It also integrates seamlessly with Basecamp for storing project related files, and with plans starting from just $8/month for 1GiB of space, we think almost everyone will find it useful.

·:· Posted 27 July 2005, 15:01 by Justin French to TextPanel  |  Got something to say? [9]

A funny thing happened on the way to Textpanel

Those of you who are TextDrive customers, or have at least been keeping an eye on things will be probably be aware that I’ve been hired as Head of Development. It’s no where near as cool as Marten’s new promotion to Wizard (yes, he really is using that as his signature on emails), but it’s a nice title nonetheless.

You’ll also know that one of the biggest mountains TextDrive has in front of itself (and something we’ve been promising since day one) is our own control panel (TextPanel) to replace the ugly, highly unusable, but totally powerful Webmin.

So I don’t think it will come as a surprise to anyone when I confirm that yes, indeed, I’ve been working on TextPanel. It probably also won’t come as a surprise that TextPanel, and pretty much every other little surprise we’ve been working on, will be a Rails application.

Working with Rails on applications of this scale and complexity has further cemented my opinion that Rails is absolutely the best choice for web application development.

TextPanel is big. We’re pushing boundaries all over the place, we’re innovating and renovating (that’s Jason’s word, not mine) web hosting and hosting control panels on many many levels. It’s big.

What we needed was a place that we could try out some of these ideas on a smaller scale, with a narrower focus. A place to start with a clean slate, without worrying about the impact each decision will have on a few thousand customers, and a place to prove a few concepts.

At the same time, Jason was putting together a new range of specialised plans, which includes Strongspace (secure file storage, with a few twists). It became pretty clear to us that this was the perfect place to push these ideas out much faster and prove them in a live application.

So, Strongspace will be the first in a new range of focused plans, the first Rails application (of many) to be launched under the TextDrive banner, and a nice little hint to the sort of clarity and simplicity we’ve been pumping into TextPanel.

And I’m pretty excited. We’re a week or two away from launch, and everything is coming together nicely. Matt Thomas (one of TD’s VC200, of course) design a perfect logo/identity which I absolutely love. Marten (who was recently promoted from Rails Maven to Wizard at TextDrive) has really saved my ass on more than a few Rails/Ruby things, and the entire Rails community has been utterly helpful in times of need.

I’ll post some more details soon.

·:· Posted 23 June 2005, 05:43 by Justin French to TextPanel  |  Comment [15]

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