88 Miles: Tag timetracking

Some more speed improvements

Myles Eftos — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:02:00 +0900

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.

88 Miles in the Business Review Weekly's top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications

Myles Eftos — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:29:00 +0800

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.

Scheduled outage

Myles Eftos — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:45:00 +0800

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.

88 Miles mentioned in PCMag

Myles Eftos — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:39:00 +0800

I just noticed that that 88 Miles was mentioned in PCMag, along with a 529 other hints and tips...

BarCamp 2.0 Perth - A resounding success!

Myles Eftos — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:27:00 +0800

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!

Addition of a project summary page

Myles Eftos — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:26:00 +0900

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.

And the results are in...

Myles Eftos — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:12:00 +0900

On Saturday I posted that 88 Miles was profiled on the Startups Carnival run by VS Consulting. Well, the results are out now, and 88 Miles came a extremely respectable 4th from 28 entries!

A big congratulations to Richard at Scouta for taking out the first prize and to GoodBarry and Suburb View for rounding out the top three.

Also hats off to OurWishingWell, who shared fourth place with 88 Miles.

88 Miles is the Startups Carnival

Myles Eftos — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 10:17:00 +0900

VS Consulting Group has been running an online startups carnival over the past two-weeks, profiling 28 up and coming Australian startups.

Today, 88 Miles is profiled..

It is well worth checking out some of the other entrants, including fellow West Australian Scouta.

A big thanks to Vishal for putting on such an "event" — it really goes to show that the SaaS-o-sphere is alive and well over here in Australia!

88 Miles adds OAuth - share your password no more!

Myles Eftos — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:37:00 +0900

Last month, 88 Miles added OpenID, allowing you to use a single sign in with out having to give us your password details. That is great unless you wanted to use our webservice API, which required a username and password.

This is no longer the case!

I have just pushed out an OAuth implementation, which allows 88 Miles user to grant access to 3rd party applications without providing a password! There are a number of pre-built libraries for a number of popular languages, which will make interfacing with 88 Miles easy.

If you are a developer, check out the development page for details

Finer grain user access

As part of this roll out, I also pushed a change which will allow you to select what users have access to particular projects and companies, so rather than an all-in (public) or all-out (private) company or project, you can select a subset of your staff members that will have access.

To do this, select the "Let me choose..." option for visibility when adding a Company or Project (You will need to select "More Details" first if you are on the projects page) and you will see all of you staff appear.

Happy time tracking!

We need your help...

Myles Eftos — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 16:45:00 +0800

Good morning fellow time trackers!

We have been busy little beavers here at 88 Miles. We are working hard on the comporate edition, which will allow you to add and manage other users from one account - great if you own a small business and have a couple of employees you want to manage.

88 Miles has also been entered into the Western Australian Web Awards. Winners are announced on 18 August - fingers crossed!

88 Miles needs you!

We would like to ask you for a little help, in the way of a little feedback.

88 Miles has been kicking along for the past couple of months, so most of you should have had more than enough time to have had a good play.

If you can reply to the following questions (Either as a comment below or to myles@88miles.net if you want more privacy) we would be ever so grateful!

How often do you use 88 Miles?
What do you like about 88 Miles?
What do you hate about 88 Miles?
What features would you like to see?
What features don't you use?
Would you be interested in beta testing the corporate version of 88 Miles?

A BIG thankyou in advance.