The Buzz

Bug Fixes

During the day I always keep a running copy of our logging software in the background so that I can watch for any exceptions (crashes) that occur. Since we have users in Japan, Sweden and Germany, I also go back through the previous nights log file each morning. I've seen one recurring bug continue to pop up over and over again until I finally swatted it a few minutes ago. It dealt with naming pages using [[Double Brackets]] and "special" characters (#&%(!-+)). It was an odd bug and fairly hard to track down, since it would only occasionally cause an exception to be reported, but always displayed an error message to the end user. I've never been a big fan of writing test suites, simply because I'm a "get it done right away" type of person. However, this is one case where tests pinpointed and helped to solve the issue. It will also make sure it doesn't happen again. Chalk one up for test driven development.

Along those lines... there were nearly 30 changes to the application over the last week that are all now live. Enhanced stability, features and bug fixes!

E-mail to Wiki (ActionMail)

(*rant*) This one has been a long time coming. We've had it ready for nearly two weeks, but thanks to a weird issue with qmail (which we were never able to resolve), rollout just happened a few minutes ago. Spending a huge amount of time debugging and learning about qmail certainly was not my idea of a fun time, especially when there are professionals to do that for you. Since we're bootstrapping this company though, hiring a "professional" for system administration just isn't in the budget yet. Taking a page out of our playbook, we cut our losses and bit the bullet last night to spend another 6 hours installing and configuring Postfix. (*end of rant*)

It was worth it.

Each wiki has a randomly generated private e-mail address that is shown only to authors of that wiki. We chose this model rather than using permissions based security because of the inherent complexity in maintaining a list of e-mail addresses you can update from. We are serial entrepreneurs and have quite a few e-mail addresses that to check and send mail from depending on what I'm doing, and I really didn't want to have to repeat myself each time I start to use another address. "Do Not Repeat Yourself" (DNRY) is super important in anything that you are doing.

To discover what this magical e-mail address is, click the "E-mail" link on the right hand side of the page. At the very bottom, you should now see "Use e-mail to update this page: click here". Personally I added the e-mail address to my contact book and use that to quickly update my wikis. If you come up with any other good solutions, let me know!

E-mail Commands (This must be the first word in the subject line):

Sometimes when you're so busy doing so many different things you feel like you've done absolutely nothing. And if you feel you've done nothing, then there's obviously no sense in writing about the nothing that's been going on. Vicious cycle.

Things have been insanely busy for me. On a personal level I'm wrapping up my Business degree (10 days, good lord) which will allow me to focus all of my energy on StikiPad. Finally.

Jonathan has been busy optimizing code and handling some additional feature requests that have been coming in from the Private Beta crowd. We're looking forward to opening up StikiPad to more people in the coming weeks. If you're interested, remember to signup to our notification list at the main site.

As for those in Private Beta, we remind you once again to not publicly share specific information about StikiPad just yet. Trust you me, the time is coming.. patience, my friends, patience.

It's an exciting time as we get this rolling, that's for sure!