InVisible

Well this is my first post since joining Jens-Christian and Daniela here at InVisible, but the topic is an old one. About a year ago I released the Paperclipped Assets manager for Radiant, which started rather slowly, but has recently taken off and become quite popular. Thanks to the magic of github, I have received numerous patches and improvements and it has begun to take shape. With last week’s announcement of pricing by Heroku and their recent blog about installing Radiant, I decided to give it a try. And, much to my surprise it works really well. Getting used to the read-only file system is certainly something new, but it is surprisely easy and very fast. I love being able to push and pull the database at will, which for small sites in Radiant is a real must to keep everything in sync. ...

twu.li starts to grow. We track almost 8000 twitterers for their updates and collect the URLs. This takes more and more time (there is quite some potential for optimizing it by requesting things in parallel). Right now, that’s about 3 hours to do a full scan (and it will get worse). New URLs can therfore show up with quite a delay. To alleviate that, we implemented a simple priority queue system. The result? The more URLs someone tweets, the more often we will read your timeline. Tweeting less drops the priority for this user and we will use longer intervals. So twitterers like timoreilly will get scanned more often than the huge bulk, that doesn’t tweet as often. ...

I haven’t written the last week, and I guess the suspense is killing all 3 of you, that read this blog. On day 4 (the day before [Cruise](https://twur.li>twur.li was going to be written) I set up the continuous integration and deployment server. My goal was to use <a href=) instead of cc.rb, but after much fiddling with XML configuration files and Rake tasks, I gave up and returned to cc.rb. It works, is relatively easy to set up and suits our needs fine. Why bother? ...

Today was spent setting up infrastructure. Part of this sprint is to learn new things, so we took the opportunity to play around with some of the new features of Rails 2.3. The best thing so far is the templating system, that allows you to define which gems, plugins and other files for your rails app. See below for the template we developed. It’s based on the Rails Template Post by Pratik Naik. ...

Not much news today. Most of the day was spent on client work. I had the fun task of calming down everyones nerves - there are still two deadlines to meet this week, before we can fully embark on building the Twitter app that I need for my day to day work. I thought about features and design while on the train today and had tons of ideas. I think I have pared them down enough to actually being able to deliver something on friday. This turns out to be a really difficult task, there is so much that we “could” do (and things that would make the app really shine). I have decided on the bare minimum of features (with an eye towards extending them) ...

A new web site, that we developed launched today: ZermattSoundz.ch, the companion site to Europe’s highest open-air concert, April 18/19. It features Eisblume, Ich + Ich, Materia and Die Fantastischen 4. It was designed by our partners Création and developed with Radiant on Ruby on Rails. Well done, team!