Shafted by FastHosts
August 4th, 2008
As most people will know, as well as my full time job at Engine Yard I am a co-founder of Litmus along with Paul and Matt.
We re-launched our previous product SiteVista as Litmus pretty much a year ago in August 2007, anniversaries are normally such a happy affair but in our case it has become anything but. As a small self-funded start up company running a service that is very hardware intensive we had to make some careful decisions – sure we’d love to have kicked off hosting with our own custom built cluster with the best hosting company in the business but it just wasn’t possible if we wanted to retain total ownership of the company.
Paul and Matt had both hosted applications with Fasthosts before, they had some of the best value servers at the time and meant we were able to get the servers we needed with the budget that we had. Just to be sure here, at no point have we scrimped on budget with Litmus or tried to just get the cheapest servers we can find. The service requires nearly 10 physical servers to run, all need to be a reasonable spec as nearly all of them have to run Windows operating systems and keep the UI very responsive. As you can imagine this is a fairly big financial burden for a start-up to bare, I’m very proud that we’ve managed this so well and coped with the massive increase in capacity as we’ve grown – this is a testament to Matt and his ace .net coding.
Read the rest of this entry 5 comments »Me in Denmark
June 23rd, 2008
On Wednesday I will be flying out to Copenhagen to attend the Reboot conference on Thursday the 26th and Friday the 27th of June.
If you’re there – or nearby – and want to meet up with me or Paul (CEO of Litmus ) then just drop me an email from my contact form – we’d love to speak to you!
You’ll spot me possibly in my black Engine Yard t-shirt or you can recognise me from my picture otherwise.
0 comments »Shout - at a glance status
April 21st, 2008
Inspired by a recent 37 Signals blog post A peek at In/Out, an internal app at 37signals, we decided this would be great for the Litmus team as well. A quick glance overview of what everyone is working on at this moment in time.
Not wanting to go too overboard and create something we never went and updated, we decided to tie it into Twitter which we all use anyway. Direct Messages fit the bill perfectly as we weren’t too keen on broadcasting the inner workings of Litmus across the internet.
Merb was the framework of choice for this little web app. Using the Twitter Gem to check the direct mail of an account we set up, it then republishes the messages to a page we can all view inside our management app. Merb worked a treat, and we got the app up and running in a couple of hours, a quick style overhaul from Paul and we had the app live and in use from today.
We hooked the app into a Fluid browser and Paul knocked up a little applescript app that posts a direct message to the correct Twitter account.
We’re all really impressed with the result…
The plan is to release this app via Github once it has been cleaned up a bit and properly tested, check back here for details of its release.
I should point out that while we were playing around with this we called it “in/out” (that’s what appears in the screen shot) but obviously the fine people at 37 Signals have already used this name. Therefore our app is known as “Shout”.
Extension-less Formats in ActiveResource
March 26th, 2008
When trying to integrate Litmus with Fetch recently we came across an API that whilst appearing RESTful, didn't quite map onto ActiveResource conventions because their URLs 404'd if we included .xml as the extension.
So I quickly whipped up a little plugin to let us specify new formats that don't include extensions.
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class Something < ActiveResource::Base self.site = "http://someone:password@an-app.com" self.prefix = "/api/" self.format = :xml_no_extension end |
Now, calls to
Something.find(:all) |
Perfect!
You can grab the code from the ExtensionlessFormat GitHub repository
A productive morning for Litmus
March 6th, 2008
This is a somewhat self-congratulatory post today, after a few weeks of hard slog and testing we finally put the Litmus 24 hour passes live!
We’ve received lots of requests from customers for a credits based system, but we felt this didn’t fit the model of how people would use Litmus. When fixing a template bug people want to fire off lots of tests as they iteratively work through a problem without fearing how much each test is costing them. So we decided that a pass to use Litmus for 24 hours for as many tests as you care to do works perfectly. From the response we are getting from customers we know this was the right thing to do. We even got a nod from John Gruber over on Daring Fireball
That’s not all though…
In light of the growing demand for Litmus and our booming API/Whitelabel deals the current database server was taking a beating. So at 7am this morning we managed to successfully move the database over to a much more powerful server with only 20 minutes of downtime. So far the load looks to have eased and we look forward to the increased response times for our customers.
If that wasn’t enough, Matt managed to launch IE 8 Beta testing which should be available to all our customers immediately!
So if you haven’t already, swing by and give us a try – there’s a 7 day trial included in the monthly plans, or the new 24 hour pass is only €12.
Litmus goes live
August 15th, 2007
After two months of toil and late nights to fit it around my daytime contracting job - Matt, Paul and I have finally managed to get Litmus out the door and live.
There were some tense moments after we had taken the old SiteVista site down and began hitting some extremely annoying problems with our hosting company. But after a pretty heroic effort from everyone we finally got it up and running just a day later than we had originally planned. Credit especially goes to Matt who stayed up over 24 hours straight to get ready for launch! - Matt, I can't really thank you enough for your dedication to making this a success - I'm sure your effort will pay off.
At the moment we're running a Litmus launch promotion - offering an insanely cheap package to celebrate, and as Paul puts it:
What's the catch? There isn't one. We're looking to expand our product line by adding OS X and Windows software clients for Litmus, but could do with some extra R&D money to invest in developing them. Offering a small number of patron accounts seemed like a good way of raising some additional cash for the side project.
Having seen it work so well for Textdrive we thought a promotion like this was exactly what we needed to kick start Litmus and crack on with adding extra features and capacity asap.
We now have a 30 day free trial with no charge made to your card until the first 30 days is up - and quite soon the ability to signup with your PayPal account
A new beginning
August 1st, 2007
It's official - the team behind SiteVista (me, Matt and Paul) are almost ready to release the new incarnation of SiteVista... and we've called it "Litmus"
Keep an eye on litmusapp.com for details and I'll also post an update here when we go live.
This is the culmination of many months hard work and bringing in all our skills to get the site completed. Paul on the design and marketing, Matt on the backend .net work and me creating the Rails based customer facing site.
More news soon.
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