Moving to Flexiscale
October 23, 2007
We’ve been experiencing a little grief with the dedicated servers hosting tiinker, so for this and other reasons we’re going to shortly try out Flexiscale, a relatively new pay-as-you-go virtual hosting provider. This means that instead of running on a small number of fairly crappy computers dedicated to us, tiinker will be spread across a number of more powerful computers, but share those computers with other customers. Flexiscale have a utility model of computing that allows us to turn virtual machines on and off at will, paying only for what we use (rather like Amazon’s EC2).
We think this will suit us quite well though. tiinker does a lot of work in the background regardless of how many people are accessing the web site, but Flexiscale should be able to move things around on the fly so that we have CPU available to do it without impacting their other customers. We’ll also be running on much faster disks, albeit over a network, so database access (a bit of a bottleneck right now) should improve.
It’s not all roses of course. Flexiscale don’t yet have a Debian image going, so we’ve been re-packaging all our applications and supporting libraries for CentOS. This has been more of a struggle than anticipated but it’s also helped us generalize our build system. All in all we think it’s a good move, and we’re pleased to be one of Flexiscale’s early customers.
Invite your friends
October 10, 2007
Before tiinker goes public, we’re giving our fantastic beta users the chance to invite their friends to check it out early. Along with a few graphical changes we sent live a couple of days ago (oooh, icons!) you might now notice a big “invite a friend to tiinker” button over on the right hand side of the front page. Clicking that will let you send an invitation code to a friend and they’ll be able to start using tiinker right away. The more the merrier!
You can now also tell tiinker to look out for news from your home region plus any other countries you specify, tailoring your news stream to regions of interest. Other updates over the past few weeks include RSS feeds of your news, clearer marking of rated stories, reorganisation of the front page’s “feature” area and new icons.
Bug-fixes trump features
October 8, 2007
It’s quite annoying sometimes when you’re sitting at your computer and you have a really cool idea for a new feature, or a way of implementing an existing feature which is more efficient, more accurate, more bad-ass. Then you snap out of fantasy-land and realise that there are more important things at the moment than writing new features. I have spent the last few days looking for a mysterious memory leak, only to find a mystery crash in the process. It’s frustrating to be looking for a specific error, only to find others; its like you’ve just done negative work, at least it feels that way. Oh well — fixing them feels good.
In other news, I have to say, I’m quite happy with how our beta is going; it seems now like a few of the features which were a bit iffy earlier on in the piece are finally coming together. A lot of our users seem to like tiinker and genuinely find it useful. Hopefully we can fix all of our bugs and implement a few remaining features soon, and release tiinker to the world as soon as possible.
Improvements
October 1, 2007
What a busy time! We’ve been enabling a heap of accounts on tiinker recently, and things seem to be working well. We’ve also rolled out a few updates improving the usability and look-and-feel of the site (with another coming soon).
The list of things we still want to do before unleashing tiinker on the public is steadily shrinking. We’ll be looking to expand the user-base a little more rapidly too soon, to make sure things scale ok (current beta users stay tuned!).
