I’ve been a fan of bbPress for quite some time; I’ve even contributed code to the project. For those that aren’t familiar with it, bbPress is an open-source forum system written in PHP. It’s fast, lightweight, easy to install and even easier to use. It also scales, quite well.
bbPress was originally written to power the support forums WordPress.org, which get quite a bit of traffic. Later, it was released as a separate project. While it doesn’t have nearly the feature set found in more popular systems such as vBulletin or phpBB; it makes up for it in simplicity. It’s designed to be conversation-centered, where the clear focus is on what people are saying, not the bells and whistles provided by the software.
I’ve used it for a couple sites and couldn’t be more pleased; though now I fear the end may be near.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com (and ListPress.com) has committed to supporting the project; though primarily in context to its role in the WordPress world. bbPress as a separate product has so much potential, though it seems Automattic has little interest in this; instead the interest seems to be in making bbPress just another add-on for WordPress.
At one point there was a lot of excitement and interest surrounding bbPress, though for a project like this to succeed you need input from the community, you need an open and fast paced development process. Unfortunately for bbPress, it had no such process. There were people who had the skill, time, and interest to lead the project and make it a success; but they were pushed away and the project was allowed to stagnate.
Today, there is some activity going on, and I’m glad to see that it won’t fade away completely; though I see little chance that it will live up to what it could have been. I have a lot of respect for Matt and Automattic; they’re very successful and build great products; but they could have done so much more.
bbPress will go on I’m sure; though I believe only as a shadow of what it could have been. Though maybe Matt will prove me wrong, I certainly hope so.
Good developers need good tools, it’s simple as that. If you are building software for Windows, the only real option is Visual Studio. The down side to Visual Studio? The $1,200 starting price tag. While Microsoft is now providing the free Express editions, these are aimed more at hobbyists, not serious developers.
Microsoft thankfully is here to help: If your company is less than three years old and has less than $1 million in annual revenue, they have a program to give you all that you need. BizSpark provides the key tools and technologies to get your start-up moving without impacting your budget.
The BizSpark program provides Visual Studio Team Suite + MSDN Premium for your developers (up to 25), plus production licenses for software like Windows 2008 Server and SQL Server 2008. Unlike Microsoft’s other start-up helper Empower, there are no requirements that you use certain technologies or pursue any certifications.
While Empower does provide licenses for things such as Office for employee use which BizSpark does not, BizSpark more than makes up for it in the production server licensing.
For a start-up with little funding (normally what the founders happen to have in the bank), building for the Linux platform using MySQL and Ruby on Rails can be very tempting. Now with BizSpark the money takes a back seat (at least for the first three years), and the technologies can compete on a level playing field.
I’ve been a fan of Tasks for quite some time, though as time goes on and updates don’t come out, it seems less and less attractive. As most web-based services have fully embraced Web 2.o with all its AJAXy goodness, Tasks remains firmly entrenched in Web 1.0; and I’ve finally given up.
We are in a world where instant is no longer a nice-to-have, but an absolute must. Applications and services should; no, must provide immediate feedback and minimize full page loads whenever possible. Tasks has failed on this front.
Enter Remember The Milk, a simple yet highly customizable task management system. While some things are rather different from Tasks (such as having multiple task lists, and not having nested tasks) for the most part it does everything that Tasks does – only it’s free (or $25/year for a Pro account). With a low price, simple easy to use interface, and plenty of AJAX to keep things moving – it’s a real winner.
When I started using RTM the biggest issue I had was the lack of nested tasks that I had become so accustomed to in Tasks. The more I use RTM though, I’m finding that not burying tasks inside of other tasks is actually helping me to get more done, as less is being lost and forgotten about. While seeing all of the tasks laid out in front of me does seem a bit overwhelming at times, I am getting more done.
Overall, RTM helps me get thing done, while wasting as little time as possible managing tasks. Highly recommended.
I normally don’t write posts just to point out an article by another author, but the latest by Jeff Atwood is a must read:
Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive
I point this out because this is something I’ve been fighting recently. It’s easier for management to tell the development team to fix a performance issue than to request money for the new hardware that’s needed.
In the long run it would be much cheaper to just throw more hardware at it – though that requires higher level approval. Whereas assigning a couple developers doesn’t require going nearly as high.
Once again, I’ve decided to switch email clients; this time from The Bat to Gmail, or more specifically, to Google Apps. After some recent issues with The Bat (mostly relating to a recent update), I decided to make another go at switching to Gmail; but this time trying the Google Apps version.
After my last attempt, I was informed that the Google Apps edition of Gmail doesn’t suffer the Sender issue that so plagued me before. After almost a full day of work, the transition is complete. And I couldn’t be happier.
The only downside is the expense – all in all, it cost $78.95 to go through this process. This was spent on two tools that made the process possible:
- Aid4Mail – A key application used for converting the various mail-storage file formats.
- gMOVE – Used for importing PST files into Gmail.
The process itself was simple, once I had found the software I needed, which took some doing. Here’s an overview, and some notes if you happen to try something like this (this assumes that you have Outlook installed).
- Export messages to mailbox format. (If you are moving from Thunderbird this isn’t necessary as it already is stored in that format.)
- Use Aid4Mail to convert the mbox files to PSTs
- Load PSTs into Outlook and cleanup as necessary (remove duplicates, cleanup directory structure)
- Launch gMOVE and use it to import the messages from Outlook to Gmail
There are a couple major differences in this attempt, compared to the last. A few things annoyed me about the way things worked after the last time, not the least of which is that by using Gmail Loader you loose all meaningful timestamps. So you don’t know when a message was sent or received.
gMOVE eliminated that problem. It sends the messages to a special POP3 server, and automatically configures your Gmail account to use it. That way, they can control the timestamps, and set them to what they originally were 1.
So after all is said and done; I think I’m happy with this system; much better than last time. I simply can’t justify using a desktop based email client anymore. It just leaves you too out of touch.
1). There is a security issue here, so I wouldn’t do this with anything containing sensitive information.
I recently heard about JungleDisk (hat tip: Ryan), and decided that might be the backup solution I’ve been looking for.
I’ve got thousands of pictures, hundreds of megabytes of source code, and documents dating back several years, all of which I’d like to ensure I never lose. So far I’ve shied away from all of the online backup solutions due to the expense. But JungleDisk uses Amazon’s S3 service for storage, complete with its rather inexpensive pricing model.
With that pricing model, JungleDisk has the potential to provide most of what I need, and some extras that are quite nice; all at a better price. So far, I’ve looked at two options:
- Use an online service. Much lower startup cost, but comes with a recurring fee.
- Build a backup server. This will require at least 1TB of fully redundant storage. I’ll also have to identify software that will meet my needs. Much higher startup cost, but only minimal maintenance costs after that.
JungleDisk has a few upsides, the biggest for me is that I can access it from anywhere that I can install the client, not just when I’m connected to my home network. With a low price, simple, but flexible interface, and a great storage system on the back end – it certainly sounds like a winner.
Though, there are some features I’d like to see, that it doesn’t offer:
- Access to files without installing software.
- Incremental backups. This would make backing up PST and similar files far more reasonable.
- Store multiple versions of a file.
- Compress data before uploading. This would save a fair bit of bandwidth for me, as I backup things such as conversation and chat logs.
Will these missing features be enough to not use the service? I don’t know yet, I’ll give the service a couple weeks to see how it goes. So far I’m fairly impressed, though wish it offered more features.
Once I hit the two week-mark, I’ll post a status update; and my final decision as to whether I’ll continue to use it.
