Slamdot

Just a quick followup post to show off our new office sign. We’re pretty pleased with it! High Resolutions hooked it up. We’ll be painting the wall behind it Slamdot blue, but here’s a picture of it the way it is now.

Daniel balancing sign

Sean mounting sign

The New Year is getting off to a great start here, and because of that we needed to find a new home for Slamdot HQ, with a little more space, and a spot all to our own. Naturally, we found the perfect office, 119 S. Gay Street, not more then 50 yards from our last office in downtown Knoxville, so it was a short walk to move everything. Then again, with some of our heavy furniture that short walk seemed to be a mile long!

We spent most of the weekend hauling everything down, getting wired up (literally), and getting all the furniture in place. You’d think we were all interior decorators with all the back-and-forth discussion going on. Getting 4 people on the same page to come up with the perfect setup took until about 2 or 3 am…and even then we made changes the next day!

Here are a couple of pictures from the weekend and our big move. We’ll add more soon as we continue sprucing it up.

We’re not really lifting

Daniel and Emily

Lots of work ahead

Quick support check

Daniel hanging curtains

Elizabeth and Tux

The team here at Slamdot would like to wish you, your family and your friends an exciting and fun-filled holiday season! Be safe, enjoy yourself, and spread a little cheer.

And don’t worry about your hosting, we’ll have that covered even as Santa takes to the skies, so let those sugarplums dance on as you rest in peace!

Due to a security issue in PHP 5.2.7, we’ve promptly upgraded to PHP 5.2.8.

The server-wide upgrade to PHP 5.2.7 has just been completed. As you know, we dropped support for PHP4 back in 2007, so there’s nothing special that you need to do to to take advantage of PHP5 at Slamdot. Enjoy!

Ruby on Rails 2.2 came out last month and includes a lot of great enhancements that we’ve already started taking advantage of in our own internal projects. So, to share the love a little, we’ve rolled out Rails 2.2 across our entire server fleet for all to enjoy.

Note: RubyGems was also updated to version 1.3.1.

We have been on Twitter for a while now. We’re going to start using it to announce server migrations/upgrades and more. So, follow us on Twitter if you’re an avid “tweeter” (or is it twitterer? or twit? I saw tweeple somewhere, too - take your pick!).

After putting out some ghoulish decorations a couple weeks ago, we spent this afternoon decorating our office even further for Halloween, which is just two short weeks away. As luck would have it, some of the spiders we set free all over the office (plastic of course) were a cool, yet spooky, neon lime green, so they matched the normal office decor at the same time.

The dense spider webbing really added a nice touch to the doorways. I just hope our guests at the office aren’t arachnophobic or we may end up meeting somewhere for lunch instead.

So, why all the ghastly excitement? Well, we really got into the Halloween spirit this year more than last because we had a hand in getting a big Halloween bash started here in downtown Knoxville called Scare in the Square. With All Hallows Eve falling on a Friday this year it fell into place perfectly. There will be a live band, costume contest, trick-or-treating among businesses, and other games for kids. It should be enough fun to make a werewolf howl!

Happy Hosting, Happy Haunting, and Happy Halloween!

We’ve been getting some flak lately for neglecting our blog, and especially for failing to provide updates about the new Slamdot rollout. In fact, I just got off of a live chat session with a potential customer who said (in a nutshell) that our recent blog stagnation has deterred him from signing up with us. Totally understandable.

Where we’re at with Slamdot 2.0

Okay, so this is what everyone wants to know. The truth is that we thought we were closer to being finished with the new version than we actually were. We had been utilizing a third-party billing and support application behind the scenes to handle those respective aspects of Slamdot 1.0. We did this through an API integration that allowed us to implement our own customer interfaces, while offloading the heavy billing and support lifting elsewhere. While that worked well for a while, we realized that this just wasn’t going to fly any more if we were going to accomplish everything slated for Slamdot 2.0.

We built our own billing system

So, we ended up building our own central billing system. The best part about this endeavor was that we got the opportunity to build it our way; the way we wanted it. So many inefficiencies existed in our old way of doing things that creating this software was a breath of fresh air. The remaining work to do before we can launch the new Slamdot involves hooking it into our new billing system and weeding out the old stuff.

Other distractions

Some other things delaying our relaunch have been tons of recent client work and a content management system that we developed to manage that workload. The good news is that we’ll be publicly releasing that CMS, which will include a free plan. Our new billing system streamlines the invoicing and account management processes of any future apps (like this one) that we decide to build.

When do we go live?

We don’t know yet, but we’re hoping to get everything launched by the end of this year or early next year. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it’s the best we can do for now. We will start sharing screenshots and some of the things that we’ve learned throughout the development process. We apologize for the lack of updates and we’ll try to do better from now on. Thanks for hanging in there!

We’ll be including Phusion’s Passenger (mod_rails) in our feature lineup for Slamdot 2.0 due out in June. This will replace our current FastCGI setup and should improve overall performance for everyone using Rails on our servers. The most important part of this switch is that it’ll enable us to move over to Apache 2 (finally!) which will be great for everyone.

Overall, we’ve got some great things coming (hint: multiuser and reseller functionality) that we’re excited to start showing off here. We’ve been quiet lately as we’ve been working like crazy on the new Slamdot and now we’re ready to start blowing the whistle on some of the new features coming!