Monthly Archive for August, 2007
Last night it became painfully obvious that I had to do something to speed up statzen before I could go much further. After some quick indexes and a little database configuration tuning, some queries went from 5 seconds to milliseconds.
This is a huge step towards letting people use the system. You may have noticed it is not just the database that is speeding up. Development has accelerated over the past two weeks as well. This is mostly because I have been getting some very positive feedback from people I have been talking to. I have also been very fortunate to be able to work smart, not hard. I think last night I deleted more lines of code than I wrote, but in doing so I was able to add more functionality to the system.
While I have not been making releases public, I have been following the “release early, release often” mantra. Last night I crossed the 150th revision in subversion and I have deployed at least 30 releases to the server over the past few months. Once I start letting people on the server I will probably limit releases to once a week or so for a while.
If you are itching to be one of the early alpha testers, leave a comment here or shoot me an email. The time is getting near.
Tags: development, performance, prelaunch, statzen
A few months ago I developed a proof-of-concept widget for statzen. It showed a list of the items on my blog that received the most attention (via the web and feed readers). While I thought that was neat, I also wanted a tag-cloud based on attention. I replaced the top posts widget with a top tags widget.Tonight I revamped the widget to have both the top tags and the top posts. There is a little micro menu in the widget to switch between the views. I am also planning to add more contextual information to the ‘this page’ option with the widget. I think it will be neat to share some of the information statzen has about the page that is currently being viewed in the browser.
I really like the idea of widgets as micro applications. Too many widgets are billboards advertising a service. While I am surely branding the statzen widget, I am more interested in sharing the functionality. I mean, once people know what this thing can do they will want to use it.If you want to see an example of the statzen widget in action check out the right side of jaxn.org.
Tags: development, prelaunch, statzen, widget
The time has come to have a dedicated place to share information about statzen. Well, this is it.
If you are subscribed to my personal blog you will automatically see the posts from blog.statzen.com in the feed. (Combining feeds into a single feed is one of the many capabilities of statzen).
The primary purpose of this blog is to be a place to talk solely about statzen. I plan to post about development progress and new features as well as business announcements, etc.
It is not much to look at yet. I am more worried about starting to get information out. Branding and a polished look can come later.
Tags: general, prelaunch, statzen