Slamdot

Greetings loyal Slamdot Blog subscribers! We have made the decision to go ahead and move completely over to PHP5 rather than to continue a mod_php4 and PHP5 CGI combination. This decision was based on the recent end of life announcement:

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

If you need assistance with testing your code to ensure its stability on our servers, just shoot us a ticket and we’ll take a look. We know that this is a real treat for those of you who have been having to work around the PHP5 CGI method previously implemented.

Enjoy!

We just added what could quite possibly be our top requested feature to Slamdot: OpenID logins. For the uninitiated, this basically means that you’ll be able to use one set of credentials to access Slamdot, and all of your favorite sites on the web that also support OpenID, without needing to remember a separate username and password to each.

Enabling OpenID

To use the new feature, simply log into your Slamdot account and click on the “Edit my account” link on your Dashboard. From there, simply type your identity URL into the OpenID field and hit “Save”. The next time you log in, just click on the “Login with OpenID” link and enter your URL.

Stay tuned because we have a lot more great stuff in the works.

We’ve had the pleasure of being reviewed by Terri Wells of Dev Shed. The review was published today:

If you want a professional-looking web site, whether you’re a blogger or a small- to medium-sized business, you probably want your own domain. And in that case, you’ll want to work with a web host who understands your problems and offers intuitive tools. That’s where Slamdot comes in.

Slamdot recently launched a new control panel that it built based on web 2.0 technologies. Designed with user-friendliness in mind, the panel integrates billing, support, hosting and domain name management into a single AJAX-based tool. Best of all, you only need one username and password to access all of its features.

Terri continues further in her article:

In addition to the context-appropriate FAQs, a search box for help is available on practically every screen. Slamdot has set up a pretty comprehensive help site for its users, with plenty of FAQs and articles to explain topics. I get the general impression that the company is very open to feedback and quickly answers questions. To give you a little example, when I pointed out a discrepancy between Slamdot’s web site and its press release, the web site was quickly corrected (by “quickly” I mean within ten minutes).

We would like to thank Terri Wells and the folks at Dev Shed for taking the time to review Slamdot. We appreciate your interest in letting others know what we have to offer!

We’ve recently made some changes to the Web Stats page that greatly improved its speed. Users with lower-traffic web sites will probably not notice much of a difference, however those of you with more popular sites will see a major improvement over the previous loading time.

Nothing visually has been changed, so there’s no cause for alarm. We basically just revisited our method for calculating hits and implemented some further caching. Anyhow, this is just one of many enhancements to come in the near future and we do hope that you enjoy!

We’re live! After months of writing code and browser-testing (yuck!), Slamdot is now publicly available. So please raise your glasses as we toast our company, our team and all of you for your support. There isn’t much else to say, except, give us a try!

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (July 10, 2007)—Slamdot, Inc. (http://www.slamdot.com), today announced the launch of their new control panel built exclusively on next-generation, Web 2.0 technologies. The company has focused its attention on developing a user-friendly, thoughtful, web-based account management tool that serves as the foundation of its Web hosting service…

You can read the full press release here. If you haven’t already, please check out the tour and let us know what you think!

To have a successful company, we needed a couple of things. One being a name, otherwise people would walk around referring to us as “that super-awesome, ridiculously-cool hosting company,” or something similar. Secondly, we needed a logo. These were both necessary to begin building our brand identity.

Our brand represents integration. Therefore, Slamdot conveys our brand as integrating, or slamming together, all the pieces, or dots, of a web presence. It’s all things good (short, powerful, fun and meaningful) and no things evil, so what’s not to love?

Next was the logo, which needed to be a visual representation of the name. We sketched out a few ideas and then contacted our good friend, Kale Purdue to give it some love. He created a sweet logo that was bold, simple, and truly said Slamdot, with the “s” and dot forming a sort of modified exclamation point. The rounded square block is reminiscent of classic video games like Super Mario World. And thus, we have something unique and memorable that reinforces our mission - to integrate for simplicity’s sake.

Up until now, we’ve been working with XHTML wireframes and some minimal (read: boring) CSS. Our designs sat cozy in their respective PSD files, longing for the day that they’d be sliced into existence. Since we’re basically finished with the back-end coding, we decided it was time to get those interfaces underway.

We hired Hamid Palo to take on the task. Hamid has been absolutely instrumental in bringing Slamdot to life and it is very exciting to finally be able to see it in a web browser.

Daniel has been working on the help topics and the copy for the website. Within a couple of weeks, we should be bringing all of the components together. So far everything is looking great!

On our way to a more RESTful Slamdot, we ran into a slight snag with the way Rails’ routes were being generated by Resources. We needed to be able to pass the user’s currently active domain name as a part of the URL, which turned out to be a little more difficult than we had hoped.

According to the Rails 1.2 RC1 release notes, the solution was simple:

Action Pack has an all new implementation of Routes that’s both faster and more secure, but it’s also a little stricter. Semicolons and periods are separators, so a /download/:file route which used to match /download/history.txt doesn’t work any more. Use :requirements => { :file => /.*/ } to match the period.

Only not so simple. At the time of this writing, resources don’t allow for a :requirements option to be passed on to the routes being generated. So, using Jamis Buck’s incredibly-useful articles about routing, we were able to monkey-patch Routing to do exactly what we needed.

The code

module Slamdot
  module Routing
    module DSL
      module MapperExtensions
        def self.included(base)
          base.alias_method_chain :connect, :domain
          base.alias_method_chain :named_route, :domain
        end

        def connect_with_domain(path, options = {})
          options[:requirements] = { :domain => /.*/ } if path.include?(':domain')
          connect_without_domain(path, options)
        end

        def named_route_with_domain(name, path, options = {})
          options[:requirements] = { :domain => /.*/ } if path.include?(':domain')
          named_route_without_domain(name, path, options)
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

ActionController::Routing::RouteSet::Mapper.send :include, Slamdot::Routing::DSL::MapperExtensions

What it’s doing

We make use of the alias_method_chain idiom to wrap our custom connect_with_domain and named_route_with_domain methods around Rails’ default behavior. So now, when our routes are being generated, we intercept them and inject our :requirements option (if necessary). Then, we sneakily hand the route construction back over for completion.

That’s all for now!

We’ve been working (secretly) behind the scenes for the last few months to create a cooler, simpler, more exciting approach to web hosting. This blog, like Bare Naked App (only not quite as naked) will highlight our progress as we move closer to launch.

What is Slamdot?

Web hosting in the past has been an ugly, complicated, unavoidable must-have for most website owners. As web applications have evolved, becoming more visually-appealing and easier to use, hosting control panels have fallen short. Slamdot is a refreshing way to manage your hosting account, keep track of your domains, access your billing information, and get support — all from the same place.

The Slamdot manifesto

We believe remembering separate passwords to hosting control panels, domain registrars, billing systems, and help desks totally sucks. Your Slamdot account unifies everything; and you only need to remember one username and password!

We believe managing your web presence should be fun and easy. Slamdot is painless and dead-simple to use.

We believe in being small and agile. We’re Getting Real with our development and we’ll be turning to our users along the way to build the perfect hosting system.

We believe in modern web technology. Slamdot is built using Ruby on Rails and web standards. We only support modern web browsers.

We believe in performance and reliability. Slamdot’s servers are real rack-mounted production-class machines located in the Softlayer data center near Dallas, Texas.

We believe in security. Your Slamdot account and all back-end server communication is SSL encrypted. Your billing information is also encrypted and kept completely private.

At the end of the day, we’re just a couple of guys (and one gal) who want to make web hosting fun and exciting.