Some of you may have experienced some problems when trying to create invoices in 88 Miles and saving them to Saasu. Good news: the problems are fixed!
If you are still having problems - Drop us a line!
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been experimenting with some optimisations at all points of the 88 Miles stack — everywhere from code to database queries to database optimisation and Apache configuration. Because of the downtime today, I though I'd finish off some of those optimisations and push them live.
At the server level, 88 Miles is now running Passenger (aka mod_rails) instead of Mongrel, which better utilises memory and doesn't require the overhead of proxing. It's also a lot more reliable and stable (especially when it comes to restarting or pushing out new versions). Although I must admit, this mornings downtime was more to do with some overzealous settings than anything else — I think we are at a sweet spot now, so I don't think I'll need to touch it again for a while.
Much of the code for the core functionality was written quite a while a go, and was in dire need for a clean up. There was a lot of unnecessary iteration and object instantiation that resulted in really long load times for the main page (as well as for punching in and punching out). By pushing more of the work to the database and utilising the fact that a DB is better at searching for things than my code is, I managed a 4x speed increase.
However, that wasn't quite enough! By adding some database indexed to regularly used foreign keys, I managed to bump that speed increase to nearly 10x! And this is just the start — the priority at the moment is the speed and stability of the system.
Hopefully you will notice the speed increase — there is, of course, things out of my control, such as network latency and server load — however on the whole, you should be getting a much snappier 88 Miles experience.
Business Review Weekly released it's list of top 100 Australian web 2.0 lists today and 88 Miles came in at number 58!
There are some pretty cool apps on the list, including big players like Atlassian and of course our good friends Saasu.com, Scouta and Norg Media.
Rounding up the Perth list we have The broth, Minit, Buzka, Gooruze.
Congratulations to everyone who made the list!
An online version of the list can be seen here.
Just a quick note that 88 Miles will be down for about 30 minutes on Friday, 23 May from 6am UTC (2pm Perth time), as our hosting provider will be performing some hardware upgrades.
Sorry for any inconvenience that may cause.
I just noticed that that 88 Miles was mentioned in PCMag, along with a 529 other hints and tips...
Over the weekend, the Perth geek community participated in the second BarCamp — as unconference-style event, where all of the content is generated by the participants (88 Miles was one of the sponsors. There was a vast array of talks ranging from how to use Twitter to Data portability to using Ruby on Rails and Flex.
It was a fantastic day, with over 80 people braving the wet weather. There was even a couple of visitors for over east!
Giant Dice created Silicon Breach, a persuasive game especially for the day, where players were allocated into Web 2.0 companies, then had to find other “business associates”, and steal ideas from other “companies”. The game was really well received with a large number of “Corporate meetings” through out the day. Corporate espionage has never been so fun.
But the biggest announcemnet of the day was that Western Australia is going to get their very own Web Conference this year. Branded, the Edge of the Web, it will be on the 6th and 7th of November 2008. Head over the the website, and pick the logo!
On May 10, 2008 Perth will get to participate in their second BarCamp brought to you by the Australia Web Industry Association. If you haven't heard of BarCamp, it is an ”Unconference“ where there isn't a formal list of speakers — all of the presentations are given by the attendees. It's all very adhoc, and lots of fun.
88 Miles is proudly supporting the event along with Saasu.com, Fasthit.net, Millstream and Scenario Seven.
It promises to be a fantastic day, I will be presenting a Q&A entitled Ask Myles-i the web guy. So if you have any questions about web development — frontend or backend or just want to come along and heckle, then head over to Central Tafe, East Perth and join the fun.
And don't forget to register on the wiki, and to buy a t-shirt.
The Beachhouse has had a steady stream of visitors recently, that have been involved with startups. It has been interesting how 88 Miles is considered a “Startup” which hasn't really been sitting well with me — 88 Miles is a product of MadPilot Productions, which isn't really a startup either.
Well, 37 Signals has just run a blog post, that explains why I have been uneasy. I'm not running a startup — I'm running a business. And I agree that people think in terms of startups, not businesses.
So if you are running a startup, make sure you are running a business too.
I have just uploaded a small change that adds a project summary page which allows you to get a quick overview of a project, including the full contact details for the company the project belongs to.
The "Edit" and "Delete" project functions have been moved into this summary page, as well. To access, hit "Options" and then "Project Summary"
Let me know what you think.
It would seem a few people have been having some problems enabling web service access for their Saasu.com accounts.
To alleviate this, I have updated the help files to include a more detailed set of instructions. Head over to the new help page to find out more.
