Catching Up

Published 9 March 06 by Justin French, 2 comments

TextThing

Last time I checked in, TextThing was “almost ready for a beta” — yeah, right! Since that day two months ago, not a single line of code has been added.

I thought this site would be running TextThing by now, so I’ve been avoiding new posts to this site in the vague attempt to make the sync between old and new databases a little easier after I flicked the switch.

But I’ve got too many cools things to talk about, and too many chunks of code to share, so we’ll worry about the sync later.

Comment Spam

Then I was hit hard with comment spam. For the first time ever, hundreds of comments plastered my virginal site (aiming mostly for my two most popular and widely linked articles), so I did what I hoped I’d never have to do, which is turn off comments.

Sencer from the Textpattern team encouraged me to upgrade from 4.0.2 to 4.0.3 today, so we’ll see how things go, but this also raises some interesting problems for TextThing — having never faced a real onslaught of comment spam, I hadn’t really had the motivation to invest time in protecting TextThing from such attacks. Yet another reason why TextThing isn’t ready.

Joyent / TextDrive / Strongspace

Man have we been busy! I made a brief but really valuable visit to New Zealand to bury my head in code and planning stuff with Koz. Make no mistake, Koz is one smart guy.

Shortly after that, Joyent soft-launched (and then officially launched), opening it’s doors for business early February, and the response has been fantastic. Customers really seem to dig it, and the development team should be proud of feedback like “this is the most beautiful web app I’ve ever used”.

Straight after that, I turned my focus to Strongspace, as we prepared everything for the Mixed Grill customers and fixed a few niggling things here and there. While we’re waiting for terabytes of Strongspace data to sync across to a new Solaris/ZFS set-up, I’ve finally buried my head deep inside RailsBase for the final push.

Insanely busy? Sure, but I’m loving every minute of it.

The Wedding

We set a date for later this year, and so begins the seemingly never ending list of tasks in front of us to get everything organized. Even a simple, relaxed, fun, non-conventional wedding like ours seems to eat up our spare time in ways I never thought possible.

On the other hand, we’ve made it this far without a single argument or even a moment of frustration, so the way I see it, either I’m a complete pushover, Kate’s a complete pushover, or this whole “organize a wedding” thing is just another test we’re passing with flying colors.

And Finally

I’ll also be posting over at Joyeur (the official place to discuss all things Joyent and TextDrive related) alongside the entire Joyent team, which includes some of my favorite writers on the web.