Rachel Cook regaled us with the story of her adventures to Silicon Valley as an angel investor. It would seem that some of the crazy stories that we hear are actually true, and it must have been amazing to be literally rubbing shoulders with the big names of the industry. Although I don't think the current level of VC and Angel investment is healthy for online applications, it is interesting to see how that side of the web works.
Next up was Lisa Herrod who once again gave a thought provoking presentation of what usability and accessibility should really mean and how it should be handled with in an organisation. As developers we often think that standard compliant code is enough to make a site accessible - where in reality, you can't predict how an alternative input user will react until you watch them use your site. If you want to view the slides, they are available on slideshare.
A big thankyou to AWIA for the opportunity to sponsor the night, along with the other sponsors. It was fantastic, and I can't wait for the next one!
PS. Jordan Brock videoed both presentations and has posted them to Vimeo. Which I have also embedded below:
Posted by Myles Eftos on January 25, 2008 at 10:39
This release of 88 Miles has quite a number of improvements and bug fixes which I will outline is detail
below — as always if you have any suggestions or comments,
drop me a line!
Saasu.com integration
Many people have been asking for invoicing from 88 Miles, but since it is really outside of where I'd like to
see 88 Miles go (The strap line is Simple time tracking for a reason)
a third party has come to the rescue! Saasu | The web finance engine
is an online accounting system that can deal with everything from invoices to payroll to inventory.
The integration allows you to create invoices straight from your 88 Miles timesheets!
To enable it, you will need to have a full Saasu account. Once you do, click on “My Membership” >
“Manage Files and Users” and take note of the WSAccessKey and the FileUid.
Then, back at 88 Miles, click 3rd Party Apps and then Enable your access (If you are currently
logged in you can save time by clicking here). Enter
the access key and file uid in the fields provided.
You can now sync your companies and contacts (Click on “List companies”)
and create invoices by creating a time sheet report.
OpenID support
88 Miles is now OpenID aware, so you can use your third-party OpenID to login to 88 Miles.
If you have an existing 88 Miles account, you will need to claim your ID. Go to the
Identites page and add you unique OpenID URL. You can even claim more than one
identity!
There has been quite a bit of work on the REST API — it should now be much more consistent (i.e the data that the server sends
and the data that the server expects is the same). To facilitate this, the end points have changed slightly. I would recommend checking
out the developer page for all of the details.
If you aren't a developer, but would like to take advantage of the 88 Miles API, MadPilot Productions
is available for your integration needs. Whether you just need some scripts to migrate across to 88 Miles, or you want to modify an existing
system, MadPilot can do it for you at a reasonable rate.
Pricing changes
After reviewing the different plan, we have decided to reduce the discount of the quarterly and yearly plans. They are still great
value with 10% and 20% discounts respectively. For those of you already on the plans, the change will come in to effect from the
first billing cycle AFTER July. Don't worry, you will get an email reminding you later on down the track!
New Server
Finally, the biggest change is our new server! We have moved over to a Joyent accelerator, which are specifically tuned to the Ruby on Rails
platform. This means everything will be quicker — so now you should be spending even LESS time tracking and more time doing.
Well that's it — I hope you find the changes useful. As always, please send your feedback and suggestions via the website. Happy tracking!
Posted by Myles Eftos on January 24, 2008 at 09:07
Just a quick note to let you know that 88 Miles will be down for maintenance on January 25th 2008 between 10am and 10:30am AWST (GMT+9).
During this time, we are moving to a new server to increase the capacity and speed of the system — I have done a couple of test runs, so that side of things should be fairly smooth. I only really envisage 5 minutes of actual downtime, but with DNS delegation, you never know!
During that time, you won't be able to punch in or punch out of projects — however, if you are punched in on a project, the system will remember it and you should see the running task when it comes back online.
The Ideas series has been a fantastic set of talks over the past couple of years, and this year‘s event should be no different. We are lucky enough to have Lisa Herrod a Usability consultant flying over from Sydney and Rachel Cook a Perth-based entrepreneur, speaking on the night.
When: January 30, 2008 7–10pm
Where:The Melbourne Hotel, 942 Hay Street, Perth, Western Australia
The Australian Web Industry Association is proud to announce the first speaking event of 2008 - Ideas4.
Please come along, hear two great speakers talk about usability, accessibility, web start-ups and more, mingle with industry peers and support the work of the Australian Web Industry Association.
Tickets are $25 for members and $35 for non-members and will be available soon from the Ideas4 website. They usually run out quick, so keep an eye on the site!
Posted by Myles Eftos on January 16, 2008 at 00:17
Anyone in the Rails community would have read Zed Shaw’s rant about Rails. For those of you who don’t know Zed, he wrote Mongrel, which is the default web server library used in Rails, and which coincidently powers 88 Miles. It has blown up and been discussed on just about every rails list around. I’m not going to discuss what he said, or his tone, as it has been done to death, and he seems like the type of guy that you need to know to understand where he is coming from.
What did hit home from me was what he said out enterprise Rails. To frame this correctly, have a listen to the first half of this podcast from RailsConf.
As a rubyist, I could never understand why projects like JRuby or IronRuby existed. Why would you want to run another language in a different virtual machine? After reading and listening to Zed, the answer is obvious - integration for enterprise. If you look at existing enterprise systems they will run on technologies such as Java and ASP.NET and as a result, prefer to use things like Tomcat and IIS - they don’t know (or care) about Mongrel or Lighttpd or even Apache in many cases.
So take the easy and speed of development of Rails and put it into an environment that has traditionally been in the realm of complex systems that are hard to maintain and hard to use. Instead of worrying about writing XML configuration files, developers can spend more time making sure their apps are easy to use
I've been playing around with IronRuby a little lately, and am planning on trying out JRuby just to see how it is all going to fit together — and I have to admit, I'm getting pretty excited about having a truely cross server language that will be easy to deploy and maintain.
Posted by Myles Eftos on January 07, 2008 at 20:29
By now, we have put 2007 to bed and are waking up to 2008. I was lucky enough to be in our nations capital, Syndey for the cut-over from 2007 to 2008, watching Australia's biggest fireworks display.
I was also lucky enough to be invited to crash Saasu’s
(purveyors of fine online invoicing systems) Christmas party — involving a sail around Sydney Harbour.
Saasu’s CEO, Peter created a short video documenting our adventures. It was a lot of fun — if you get a chance to jump on one of the East Sail Beneteau’s, do it.
A big thankyou to Marc and Peter for inviting me — I'm sure 2008 is going to be a big year for both our companies!
What’s happening in 2008
88 Miles is turning it up a notch in 2008. A new roll out is scheduled with in the next two weeks, introducin some bug fixes, a new server and some exciting new features! More news closer to the date…
One of the changes does affect the Web service API, so if are using the API, please drop me a line and I can give you access to a sandbox server, so you can make the transition as smooth as possible.
So again, wishing you all the best for 2008, the year of Software–as–a–Service!
Oh, and for those who are wondering about the new changes that have been made in the past couple of days, there is a newsletter due sometime this week.
The announcement for the 2007 WA Web Awards finalists has just been made, and 88 Miles has gotten a guernsey in the Online Application category!
The WA Web Awards is in it's third year and is run by the Australian Web Industry Association (formally known as Port80). For those three years, it has congratulated the Western Australian Web community for the fine work that they do.
The quality of the entries this year were fantastic, so it is a huge honour to be included amongst the list.
The awards night is on August 17 — listen out on this blog to see if we won!
88 Miles wasn't the only Western Australian Web 2.0 app to make the list:
In at number 5 was Minti, the parenting social network. Number 6 was Scouta - the Podcast suggestionsnetwork started by Richard Giles. 23 was Bronwen Clune’s PerthNorg. Number 29 was the social bookmarking tool, Buzka
Watch out for the Australian startups, they really are starting to gain momentum!
The announcement for the 2007 