J-dee.com

AmpliFeeder Hits 50000 Installs.

Just a quick note to say that AmpliFeeder, my open source lifestream platform has had over 50,000 verified installs worldwide! My target was only ever to get around 5,000 so to reach 10 times that is just incredible. Thanks to all of the people who downloaded it, and said or wrote nice things about it. It’s much appreciated. Also, even though I have not posted here over the summer, my readership continues to climb. I’m getting around 7000 unique hits and 100 emails a day. I’m glad people find what I write of use. If you need to get in touch, you can get me via the contact page or Twitter.

At the moment I’m working on a little iPhone game as well as several new web apps. The switch to working on the Mac has been an interesting one too, and I plan to make a few posts here documenting it. Stay tuned!

AmpliFeeder 1.0 Released

I finally got around to releasing my open source lifestream platform AmpliFeeder and the initial response has been very good indeed. I’d like to take the time to say thanks to all the cool people who helped me get it out the door, including:

Super-devs Paul Rawlings and Paul Kinlan for the encouragement, beer and laughs
Mark Krynsky and Trae Blain for the advice and expertise they have in the lifestream arena
Jake and Mai-lan from Microsoft who are currently helping get AmpliFeeder into the awesome Windows Web App Gallery
WooThemes for letting me port one of the amazing themes they create
The users of StackOverflow who offered solutions to technical bits I was stuck on
The kind people who gave their time to debug and offer suggestions as part of the AmpliFeeder private beta
Everyone at jQuery for creating such an amazing framework
Everyone who is currently Twittering like mad about AmpliFeeder
All the people who have said nice things, downloaded or enjoyed the app.
All the nice press people who have reviewed AmpliFeeder.
Lynne and Kitty for being the coolest of all.

It’s been a fantastic project to work on, I learned so much in the process and gone a long way towards my goal of becoming a wiz at jQuery. I plan to share a lot of my findings over the next few weeks now that I have time to get back to blogging. Finally, you can see my amplifeeder here. Why not get your own?

AmpliFeeder Private Beta

AmpliFeeder is entering private beta and I have a handful of spaces left to people who are interested in trying the service out. Testers will be running on the hosted platform so there is nothing to download or install. If you want to get a sneak preview and are prepared to report any bugs you find, get in touch via the contact form on this site. Active FriendFeed users are preferred but not essential. If you don’t know what AmpliFeeder is, you can see it in action in the video here.

Update: Sorry, all invites for the private beta are gone! Thanks to everyone who applied, sorry I couldn’t let everyone on. There were simply too many requests for me to be able to handle. Subscribe here or follow me on twitter @jonpauldavies to be first to know when it goes public beta ( within the month I hope).

AmpliFeeder Preview Video

AmpliFeeder Preview

Mark Krynksy over at lifestreamblog.com has written a fantastic preview of my new open source lifestreaming platform: AmpliFeeder  that pretty much sums the project up entirely. The plan is to get the self hosted version to release a quickly as possible with the other versions ( including the hosted version ) rolling out towards the summer.

Mark provided me with some invaluable feedback that has pushed the release back a little, but the app will be so much better for it. From a technical point of view, the initial release is 90% jQuery and only 10% ASP.NET so knocking out alternate platform versions will be a breeze. I’ll keep this site updated with developments as they break but if you want to contact me instantly I’m always on Twitter @jonpauldavies. Here are a few more exclusive screen shots of what is to come.

Dabbling With Ruby on Rails 2.0 + Other News

I did a massive amount of Ruby on Rails development when the first wave of Rails hype hit about 4 years ago for a project that required it. I enjoyed working with the framework but to be honest it didn’t knock me out. I’ve been toying with learning Django recently and thought I’d check out how it compared with Rails. The interesting thing that came out of my investigations is how much Rails and it’s ecosystem has changed.
Rails 2.0 is quite a different beast to the original rails and the amount of plugins and gems now available is simply amazing. It looks so good that it’s put me off Django and I’m investing quite a bit of time picking up rails again. Windows Rails used to be rubbish, but now we have E-Text Editor, a perfect clone of the popular Mac only TextMate – the Rails dev weapon of choice. I’ve also invested in the PeepCode library and can recommend it highly.

I’ve not been blogging much as I’ve been working hard on my new application, AmpliFeeder that I’m going to release as open source in the coming weeks.

This blog is moving too. I’m getting rid of Mosso as a hosting provider as the exchange rate and reliability problems are just making it impossible to continue with them. Mosso is cool in principal but has always failed to live up to expectations in my opinion. I’m moving it to Clook a host that seems to be highly regarded in the Wordpress arena. I’ll let you know how it pans out.