The Buzz

As my good friend Yukon Cornelius says every year around Christmas, this weather isn't fit for man nor beast. And believe you me, I've taken that to heart the past few days.

Aside from freezing our stikis off this past week, we've shifted some servers around to better balance the increased load we've been seeing over the past little while. The good news is that you should notice a big speed improvement on your site immediately. The even better news is that we'll be continuing to rollout improvements over the next few weeks (we know it's needed!).

To all our friends who are stuck next to the chicken fingers in the deep freeze like we are, please, bundle up!

Wow, it's summer. And we all know that means barbecues and margaritas and pool side fun is to be had. Perhaps at Team StikiPad we've been doing too much of it, because it's been a long time since we've posted. Yikes.. lets not do that again, shall we?

Much change is on the horizon (as usual), and some things we think you'll be impressed with. Also, we're interested to talk to users who use StikiPad for their business.. drop us a line to feedback at stikipad dot com and we'll have a perk in it for you as well (a thank you for your time).

Hang on, just one last drink before we get down to business again..

Well, it's been a while since we've posted and that's because we've been eagerly going through a lot of changes behind the scenes. It's rude not to bring your friends up to speed on your life, so here's ours, in a nutshell.

New features coming soon.
We're just about ready to unveil two new features to StikiPad - one that's pretty small (but has been asked for a lot), and one that's pretty big. With the latter it opens up the door for a whole slew of things that we've been thinking about but haven't yet gotten around to. We're excited about them and will be making an announcement in the next few days.

New tour
Our new tour has been given a fresh coat of paint and is ready to show you what StikiPad is all about. Gone are the days of wordy explanations which have been replaced in favour of some screenshots that show you StikiPad in action.

Application restructuring
Paul Graham said it best about how first versions of software are just that - first versions:

Another group was worried when they realized they had to rewrite their software from scratch. I told them it would be a bad sign if they didn't. The main function of your initial version is to be rewritten.

Although there has not been a noticeable change in how StikiPad operates, there has been a slew of work done on our backend in order to prepare it for the next phase of development. Although we haven't completely re-written the application, there's been a significant amount of changes that proved to be quite time consuming. Alas, it's done and we're ready to move onto things that you will notice. Rest assured, your feature requests haven't fallen on deaf ears.

The Kansas chronicles, part two.
Yes, that's right, the rumours you've heard are true - this Canadian is south of the border battling Internet Explorer and dodging tornadoes. We're still getting settled but have some exciting things lined up within the next month that include a few things you might be interested in.

Take a look at our Flickr photostream for our latest antics.. maybe even a sneak peak into some things in development (aren't whiteboards dandy?).

Some of you may know that I travelled down to Kansas last week to meet with Jonathan and to solidify some things with StikiPad that we'd been talking about for a long time. Aside from my flight getting cancelled and therefore being stuck in Chicago due to a big snowstorm, it was a very productive trip. We implemented a bunch of UI changes and brainstormed some new features in the process. And I suppose we had a bit of fun too (check out the photos!).

Our new server came in last weekend and we migrated all StikiPad users over on Sunday - we had a few issues but those were corrected within the hour that we switched things over. Other than that, the machine is working perfectly and we're quite happy with the performance thus far.

We've been pushing forward to move out of private beta soon. Our private beta users have been the best, and we can't thank them enough for keeping us on our toes throughout the past 6 weeks. Special thanks to those who keep giving us feedback - it's invaluable!

We'll have more announcements in the next few days about where we're going. Until then, from Jonathan and myself, Happy Holidays!

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!

Funny stories come back to me from my university career about the ides of March. A couple years of great stunts on a friend of mine who was petrified of the idea of not knowing what was going on. Oh ambiguity, how I've learned to cope with thee over the years.

There's lots of things going here at StikiPad and I'm only reluctant to start talking about them because I simply don't know what to talk about first. Aye, there's the rub.
But, on a completely un-related note - and the reason why I'm popping my head up at this time - is to wish a good friend of mine a Happy 22nd Birthday. He means a lot to me, and I'm grateful to call him a friend.

Happy Birthday, Jonathan!

Matt and I first met on IRC in late 1998, early 1999 while we were both still in high school. At the time we were young and full of idealism. Okay, so maybe we still are. Anyways, both of us seemed to pick up on the idea that we were actually going to do something with our lives, and from that point forward we've been pretty good friends. We have a unique relationship in that we've never met in "real life", have only spoken on the phone a handful of times, yet we've cultivated a close friendship and professional relationship.

Since we first met, we've always pitched ideas back and forth to each other. One of the best parts about our friendship is that we're not afraid to let the other person know when they've come up with a dumb idea. Over the years we've both shot down a number of various entrepreneurial ventures, but I believe we've finally hit on one that has more potential than any of our previous ones.

On February 2nd, between 2 and 3 A.M. I came up with the idea for StikiPad. I scrambled to find my wallet, pulled out my credit card and registered the domain about 30 seconds after that initial flash of inspiration. I couldn't wait for Matt to wake up so I could pitch the idea and didn't even go to bed that morning out of pure excitement. Matt finally woke up and popped online, I quickly pitched the idea and got a thumbs up... then I went and promptly fell asleep.

You know you've got a good chance at succeeding when each morning you wake up and you're more excited than the day before about what you're creating. Since the private beta started, the feedback we've received has simply been amazing. It's absolutely awesome to learn how each of our clients are using StikiPad, because everyone seems to use it differently. The notion of building a tool with as little structure as possible opens up a world of creativity for anyone that uses it.

So from the idea on February 2nd, to the first private beta on February 23rd, we've finally opened up Everything! StikiPad (now known as The Buzz. Hopefully we'll both look back on this post someday to see where we started from, and wonder where we'll go next.