This video is awesome and is a great lesson on leadership and how important first-followers are! It’s also topical for me as I’ve just finished reading Derek Sivers’ book, Anything You Want.
I’ve been researching push notifications for a few months, but I hadn’t stumbled upon my many requirements…until now! Here are my requirements:
And the winner is…Faye!
Requirements 3 and 4 were the trickiest of the bunch, because I am so particular about my environments. I want them to be easy for me to use, easy for my team to use and easy for people in the future (including myself) to maintain. The final piece of the puzzle was Foreman. Foreman makes it easy to manage background tasks and really easy to deploy them to production using upstart. I created a checklist for how to deploy to production here:https://howtracker.com/checklists/How-to-create-a-Rails-Push-Server-Using-Faye-and-Foreman.
A big thank you goes to Ryan Bates for his terrific Railscasts that always serve as a launching pad to learning about and getting started with new technologies. Check these two out:
Tune in next week: I’ll be describing some of the design techniques I used with these tools to create some useful software.
Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of a new web site called faceti.me. At faceti.me, you can sign up for a yourname@faceti.me forwarding email address that will forward all emails to an email address that you specify.
The site leverages a couple of Amazon systems. Amazon Simple Pay makes it easy for users to sign up and subscribe and Amazon Simple Email Service gives our client a cost-effective and scalable way to send a ton of email. The site also stores no passwords, so we implemented a system where users can log in via confirmation links sent to their email addresses.
All in all, a fun project and we wish it the best of luck in the wild! If you’d like an @faceti.me email address, head on over to their site and sign up. It’s only $7/year!
The Rocket Whale blog is back in action! We’ll be using this space to post as many interesting things as we can. That includes:
We’re excited to spark some conversations with you!
What is HowTracker?
The original problem that we were trying to solve at Rocket Whale is that policies and procedures at most companies are a pain in the ass to create, they’re hard to access, are usually out of date and are poorly communicated. After many brainstorms and conversations, we’ve arrived at a solution to a greater problem: the challenge of applying and using existing knowledge.
The solution to this problem is HowTracker and it arrives in a couple of months. For more information, visit our pre-launch page and enter your email address for early beta access and a chance to win a prize.
You can still access Use the List
There’s a link to sign in to Use the List at the bottom of the HowTracker homepage. The direct link to the sign in page is:https://www.usethelist.com/users/sign_in
You can still invite your friends to join by sharing something with them.
The beta is now closed. Use the List was and is an experiment. An experiment in usefulness and feedback generation. We created the original site in 1 month for Startup Riot as what was then a tiny subset of the features we would release in our full “Policies and Procedures Software” suite. We had no idea what that meant at the time, only that we knew there was a problem to be solved. The problem is and remains:
Policies and procedures at most companies are:
This is quite a grand problem that we plan to tackle in pieces.
Our first piece will be a rebranding and transmogrification (yes, we love Calvin & Hobbes) of Use the List. It will be reborn in a few months as howtracker.com. The goal is twofold:
We’re really excited about building this platform and will be hard at work doing so over the next few months. Our biggest worry (and reason for closing the beta) is to be picked up and spread virally too early. We want a phenomenal product to be ready and will be working hard to make sure that is the case.
In the meantime, Use the List will remain up and supported for existing users. You can still share your Accounts, Templates and Lists with new people. They’ll receive an invitation via email with a special link that will allow them to sign up. If anyone has any questions or comments, please let us know and we’ll be happy to help!
Here are the release notes:
New Features
Bug Fixes
Notes
Sincerely,
Tom and Sam
This is an exciting release for us for a couple of different reasons. First of all, we’ve packed a bunch of new, useful features into it that you guys have been requesting. See the release notes below and keep that feedback coming!
It’s also exciting because it marks the end of our functionality updates. Don’t worry, it’s not what you think! Use the List is being rebranded and redesigned. We collected all your feedback, talked to tons of potential users and have our own substantial ideas about what we want to accomplish. We’re organizing all of this information and will be implementing it all with a brand new site. More details to come soon!
Until then, our next update will close the public beta to users and will become invite only. Use the List will continue to function and we will continue to support it until the new site launches in late Summer or early Fall.
Last, we want to address the outage that affected our site on April 21st starting at 1am and lasting throughout the day. Use the List is currently hosted by Heroku, a platform as a service that uses Amazon EC2 for their hosting. With that said, the responsibility of keeping OUR site 100% available rightfully falls on OUR shoulders and our shoulders alone. We are reassessing the technology we use and will have a robust solution in place when we relaunch later this year. We are thankful to have experienced this in our beta stage and will use this knowledge to improve our service in the future.
If you want more information about the actual outage, you can read about it (why didn’t they mention us??) and also read post-mortems from both Heroku and Amazon.
Here are the Release Notes:
New Features
Bug Fixes
Other Improvements
Notes
We had another important bug fix that couldn’t wait! We’ve had 0 reports of it affecting anyone, but it warranted a release for sure.
Bug Fixes
Until next time…
We had to fix a couple of important bugs and since our next big release is a few weeks away, we thought we’d push these out there. Hopefully nobody was affected by them!
Bug Fixes
Until next time…
We’re sorry, IE7, that it took so long for us to support you. It’s not you, it’s us. We should have been there from the start. Won’t you forgive us and take us back? You will??! Hooray!!!
New Features
Bug Fixes
Notes