Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 - 1 Comment
So Tickets has been online for one week today and so far it’s been pretty successful. I’ve been adding to it almost every day, tweaking the design and implementing some of the most requested features whilst being careful to ensure it remains simple and lightweight.
Here is a highlight of some of the stuff I’ve added:
HTML embedding, you can put in ‘img’ and ‘a’ tags into your tickets and they do as expected, if you put in a giant image it even shrinks it down (with css) so as not to break the layout, although it will take longer to load if you put in a massive pic!
Autolinking, if you put in http://something.com or www.teabass.com without any ‘a’ tags then tickets now automatically will see them and link them up for you.
Awesome Error pages, can’t get enough lolcatz, check out the 404 and 500 error pages.
User Icons, the user icons now show up all over the place, where ever you create a ticket and it’s really easy to change your photo, plus if you don’t upload a photo there is a nice default one instead.
More persistent navigation, I’ve added a navigation bar to the top of tickets so you can always get home, to your settings and back to the index page.
Better emailing, no more waiting for the emails to send before you get redirected to the next page, everything is done with observers now to speed emailing up considerably.
Recently Posted Tickets, have a look at http://ticketapp.com/tickets
you can see the last 10 public tickets posted, awesome 
Private and public tickets, one of the most requested features was the ability to make private tickets so I added that one in, you can also set you default privacy level to save a few mouse clicks if you want all your tickets to be private.
Funky javascript tooltips, on most text fields now if you hover over them you get a little floating tooltip that describes each field a little better, plus it degrades nicely if you don’t have javascript too.
Reply to a ticket, I just put this feature in yesterday, you can now reply to any ticket with another ticket, i’m still rounding off the corners on this one but it seems pretty nice.
and it even seems to work in IE6!
It’s come a long way in just a week, and I’m going to continue developing, adding and optimizing it, the next features i want to add include: RSS feeds, friends, custom backgrounds and having your username in the url (http://ticketapp.com/andrew)
If you have any feedback or ideas send it to: http://ticketapp.com/feedback
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 - 2 Comments
It’s been about 3 months coming, but Tickets is back online!
What in the heck is tickets?!
Tickets is kinda like twitter but more for notes than personality spam, it started life as a note taking, todo list making, bastard child of twitter and trac. Something that i could drop ideas and note broken bits of an app into that i could share with my dev team.
It was also the first full-on ruby on rails app the I built and deployed myself.
You might remember this post: http://teabass.com/tickets-launched/
When I first deployed tickets, and then it was gone again about 3 days later! Things have come along way since then!
What’s new?
I have completely rewrote tickets from the ground up, it’s on Rails 1.2.3 and fully restful now, much more stable than last time too!
I’ve also added user photos and a semi-proper invites system too. You can also embed a few html elements too (links and images)
Tickets is still under heavy development, I’m adding and improving it all the time, it’s reached a good stable point now so I thought I would put it out to stud and get some user feedback on it and see what everything thinks.
What can you use it for?
Anything and everything!
Go wild, I’m not limiting much at the moment apart from escaping nearly all the HTML for security reasons.
You can see how I’m using it here on my profile and see what everyone else is doing here: http://ticketapp.com/users
There are so many different directions in which I could take this: tumblog, del.icio.us, twitter, pownce, campfire, stikkit, it could mold into one of those pretty easily (three of those apps are on rails!) and but for the moment just do what you like and make suggests on how you would like to use it and we’ll see where it goes.
What’s next?
Along with a bug fixes and performance improvements here are some of the things I’m thinking of adding:
- Friends and fans
- OpenID login and signup
Private and public posts/accounts (added)- RSS feeds
- Custom styles/templates
- More user profile
- Some more magic to pick up urls and images and wrap them in the correct html
Any other suggestions are very well, leave them at the feedback page
Thursday, July 19th, 2007 - No Comments
Peter, over at Tastydiff.com has created a very tasty capistrano task to make managing your production rails sites even easier, and he’s rolled in a terminal cheatsheet too.
Capistrano is an automated deployment tool, it works great with rails and a plugin called Deprec which makes it even more powerful, allowing you to set up a server with a full rails stack in as little as 8 commands (see this blogpost).
To use peter’s task you need to go over to this blog post: Tastydiff.com/2007/7/15/capistrano_mini_cheatsheet and copy the whole section of code into the bottom of your deploy.rb file in the config directory of your rails app.
Then in the terminal just hit:
cap cheat
And you’ll get a mini cheat sheet with all the most useful commands plus a extras added by peter, awesome!
Friday, July 13th, 2007 - 5 Comments
We at Greenvoice.com have just finished moving offices this week to the very center of London, Piccadilly Circus.
The view is not quite so amazing as the previous office but the location is amazing, there are at least five Starbucks within 200 meters off the office as well as an EAT sandwich shop and of course being at the end of Regent Street the Apple store is only 3 minutes walk away!
The best thing about the new office is that it’s so quiet and relaxed in work, everyone is more productive and stress-free too.
The picture above is take from the roof of the building, you can see loads more photos on my flickr account.
Thursday, July 12th, 2007 - 1 Comment
That is one gorgeous looking app! Via MyDreamApp.com
