Inter-sections.net : Category miscellaneous, everything about miscellaneous

Announcing Woobius and Scribbles

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:30:00 +0000

I’m working on the part 6 of the hyperbrain series, but it’s not finished yet. It takes time, of course, and in the meantime I’m working on many things, including my business, and the future blog that will replace inter-sections.

Perhaps it’s worth finally mentioning that business here! Fancy that, I hadn’t actually done it before. Incredible.

So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce: Woobius, and its associated blog, on which I write regularly: Woobius Scribbles.

What is Woobius?

Woobius is a collaboration tool tailored for the needs of the construction industry. In the process of designing and building any sort of building, architects, consultants, engineers, and a whole lot more people have to exchange large numbers of files that need to be kept track of. If you would like more detail on this, do have a look at this article which I wrote on Woobius Scribbles: Document Control - how hard can it be?

This can become a huge problem, because there are a lot of those files and they have to be shared between dozens of companies. Most common file sharing solutions (like usendit, box.net, or even Dropbox) are not well suited to this, because they completely fail on the “collaboration between companies” part.

There are some industry-specific solutions, but without exception they’re slow, bloated monsters that try to control every aspect of the project, and end up pretty much requiring full-time staff just to deal with them. They’re very hard and slow to use, so people end up bypassing them at every corner. And they’re extremely expensive, too.

This is where Woobius comes in. It’s designed to be intuitive and easy to use, automates most common tasks to save time, and is more than an order of magnitude cheaper than the competition.

So, this is what I’ve spent most of the last year working on. The good news, since I did follow most of my own tips, and since I work with a fantastic team (I know it’s cheesy to say it, but it’s true), is that it’s going quite well. We have a good many users within the construction industry who are using it every day for live construction projects. Growth has been steady and viral, despite the economic conditions in the construction industry, from 50 or so users 10 months ago, when we launched the first kernel of functionality, to over 2000 today, almost all of it through invitations by our users themselves.

That’s all very, very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to the next year, as we grow to profitability and help many more architects with their projects.

The only other thing I’d add about Woobius is that, like every start-up, it could use more publicity. If you know some people who work in the construction industry, let them know — not because I ask you to, but because it is genuinely useful (our users tell us that!).

And if Woobius sounds useful to you and you don’t work in the construction industry, don’t let that stop you from giving it a try. It’s a really handy tool, and although it was designed with specific users in mind, I would be the first one to be surprised if it wasn’t useful to many others too.

What is Woobius Scribbles?

Scribbles is simple the company blog for Woobius. I write there regularly, about business and technology related topics, so if you like what I’ve written here in the past, I encourage you to check it out and, maybe, subscribe. It’s got a strong architecture slant, so not everything will be of interest to non-architects, but since I myself am not an architect, and I like to write things that I find interesting, there will be many posts there which will not be related to architecture.

That’s it for this meta-announcement. There will be another one like it after the hyperbrain series is complete, about the future of this blog. Thanks for reading!

Broken comments - fixed

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:21:00 +0000

Dear readers,

I’m very sorry, but for some time the commenting system was utterly and totally broken. And in a very frustrating way, too, giving no useful feedback to the commenter.

I’ve now fixed this, and I recovered what comments I could from the logs, so they’re now up (although it looks as if they were all posted at the same time) - and it is now possible to add comments without tearing your hair out!

Thanks for your support!

Public Service Announcement

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:50:00 +0000

Ok.

So I’ve been a bit sparse on the posts lately.

Well, that’s all going to change. I intend to start posting a bit more often from now on, with shorter posts most of the time (although the odd big post will still come up every once in a while). I’ve been terribly busy with my start-up, and, well, I know it’s not an excuse, but hey, that’s life. I’ll probably be terribly busy in the future too, but I’ll make more of an effort on the blog.

In other news, I’ve actually published a couple of articles in the meantime, which you may be interested in reading. They appeared on Sitepoint, and are titled Why You Should Fire Your Clients And Launch A Product and Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them. If you like my usual start-up oriented articles, those should be of interest.

In any case, thanks for reading this blog, and I hope the new publishing regimen works out for both you and me.

New blog design, new blog engine

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:02:00 +0000

I can never leave well enough alone. After my article blasting perfectionism, I guess it was inevitable that I should engage in a bout of it myself :-)

Not that the blog is perfect now, by any means.

Anyway, so I’ve moved over to a new blog engine, from Wordpress to Typo. Typo is written in Rails, and supports all the key features I want on my blog (e.g. Trackbacks). This means I can extend and reprogram it as I want, something I could not do with Wordpress and its mountains of spaghetti code. I’m planning to add a few cool features now that I’ve got full control over the code. Keep your eyes peeled for funky things like hit counts on posts, and other things you probably don’t care much about but which will make me feel happier :-)

As you can see, there’s also been a redesign! I have my friend Kelvin Koh to thank for the lovely new header, which not only looks 20 times cooler, but also only takes 19 kilobytes (as opposed to the humongous 75k of the previous one!). Here’s the old one one last time so we can all say good bye to it.

Looking forward to posting many more interesting articles for your reading pleasure.

Ciao,

Daniel

PS: If you love or hate the new design (or if you find anything broken anywhere), please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments below!

Put Things Off

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:28:04 +0000

While looking for reviews of productivity tools (task tracking tools, specifically), I stumbled on a great new blog called Put Things Off. I liked the articles - they’re all well written, interesting, and exquisitely illustrated (seriously, I’m not kidding), and since their topic is somewhat related to some of my posts, and they only launched in mid-January this year, I thought I might as well share this discovery.

From their own description: ”PTO helps freelancers, entrepreneurs and busy people work smarter, play harder, and live the lives they love.”

Enjoy!

Adsense, feeds, etc.

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 14:30:46 +0000

Great news for everyone who likes to follow this blog. First of all, I’ve hacked my way around wordpress to enable full-text feeds for people using RSS readers. You will now be able to read my posts without having to click on to the site. In a sense, this kinda sucks for me, because I love to see the hits rise up after a good article is posted, but I’ve had some feedback from several people that they’d much prefer full-text feeds, and so I’ve given in to that.

Another thing is, I added AdSense recently, after the slashdotting, to test it out. Turns out that AdSense is really not that great at the moment. I’ve made a whopping $4.56 over the last week. So I’ve made some tweaks to make it less prominent, following this article. Namely, I’ve made it so articles newer than one week won’t get ads at all. I’m also going to make some further tweaks so that people coming from Digg and all those sites won’t see ads either, since they’re unlikely to click on them anyway - but that’s not done yet. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.

Oh, and there were about 15 minutes of downtime this morning. That’s because the VM that Inter-sections runs on got moved to a new machine about 10x more powerful. Hurray for that :-)

Thanks for reading!

Migration complete!

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:32:00 +0000

Phew, what a weekend!

Two of my posts got featured on Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and a variety of other sites such as YCombinator News, DZone, and, strangely enough, Monitor.hr (yep, that’s a croatian technology news site…). The result? Well, before this happened, I had built up traffic to about 3000-4000 hits per month. Over the weekend, I got about 150 thousand hits, with over 80 thousand on Saturday alone.

Needless to say, I’m very happy about this! However, my host (DreamHost) were less than pleased with the result, particularly since I wasn’t expecting this at all and so didn’t have any caching. So they took down my site temporarily. Now, I can totally understand why they did this, but ultimately, I can’t accept that someone else can turn off my site. Therefore, I’ve decided it’s now time to migrate to a private server. Before that, I didn’t want the overhead, because I just want to write a blog, not administer a blog. However, with this kind of traffic possible, it’s becoming worthwhile to host this on my own server so that I can ensure that it never gets taken down during a traffic spike again.

So, anyway - by the time you see this post, it’ll mean that you’re accessing the new server, which is based in the Netherlands - so it’ll be a tad slower for US folks, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Welcome to all the people who subscribed to the RSS feed after the weekend, too. Have a nice week everyone!

FeedBurner installed!

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:54:44 +0000

I’ve finally given in and installed FeedBurner on Inter-sections. The main reason for that was that WordPress didn’t allow me to specify how big the RSS summaries were going to be. Now, I don’t want the RSS Summaries to contain whole articles, because I kind of like to see hits arriving here, but at the same time, the puny line-and-a-half that WordPress was willing to put out was just too miserable.

So good news. FeedBurner is now installed. It should be transparent for everyone - I’ve installed a WordPress plugin that magically fixes up all the WordPress RSS URL’s to point to FeedBurner instead. I’m still tweaking some settings on the feed, but it should all be finished sometime today.

Thanks for reading this blog!

Redesign, wee!

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:48:33 +0000

I’ve redesigned the blog a little. Thought I’d add a little more colour and contrast. I’ve also got a fairly cool couple of articles coming, about optimisation (particularly the premature kind). Watch this space! They’ll be coming in the next few days.

I haven’t forgotten about the blog

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 15:15:18 +0000

Just a quick note - I haven’t forgotten about this blog, and there are updates pending (in fact, I have a whole series of articles I’ve already written, that I simply need to put onto the blog). I’ve just been both busy and feeling unwell for the last week or two, so have had to prioritise very harshly, which has meant I haven’t even had the time to post these articles to the blog!

One of them is on the way today, and after this point (since I’m feeling somewhat better, though not 100% yet), I’ll try to keep them more regular!