Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Blog backup strategy

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

When the pedal is to the metal and your list of things to setup and configure is long, thinking about a backup strategy is the last thing on your mind. As anyone who has used any piece of IT hardware you know, sorry, you learned that you need to backup. It’s not for the if it happens, its for the when it happens.

Thinking about our use of wordpress and how we are extending its use beyond just a blog editor, it dawned on me that we really need some automated tools in place. For the themes, plugins, uploads and specifically to the database tables.

We regularly tweak something in the blog theme/setup and take that opportunity to make a backup to a dev machine, as for automated backups we have selected wordpress-backup by Blog Traffic Exchange to take care of the system files.You simply create a directory in the wp-content folder, set the permissions, set an interval for the backups to occur and an if your blog is small enough, set an email address to receive off-server backups.

We have a formal database backup strategy in place for the entire site, but to have an additional one just for the wordpress side sounded like a great idea. We selected WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko as a full featured solution. Once again create a directory on the server, they suggest the wp-content folder, set the permissions, set an interval for the backups to occur and where you would like the backups to be delivered. It can backup and download to you computer immediately, store of the server and also email the output.

Both of these are very simple to implement, cover all the important parts of our wordpres setup and we hope to set them and forget them, until that fateful day comes.

Crowdsourcing and the Sharks

Monday, January 5th, 2009

Is it an art, is it a science, well sorry to disappoint, I do not actually know, as I am still on the fence.

Let me explain, we are currently running the architecture competition for the web site and the way this works is that TopCoder members that would like to compete on the architecure competition have a window of time to register. Today the registration period ended.

The TopCoder web site is very transparant on the entire competitive process, we have 40 registrants for the current contest. In the scheme of things 40 is very good.

Breaking down the 40 shows that it is made up as 26 rated members and 14 non-rated. No offense to the 14, but we’ll focus on rated members for this post. These rated members pretty much guarantee the timeline. To be rated you need to have competed on a competition in the last 90 days and had a passing submission.

26 rated is fabulous,

So, have we attracted any sharks to the contest, because as we all know a shark is the most effective eater in the ocean. The answer is a resounding yes, we have attracted no less than 10.

Art – we probably have the money right.
Science – the amount of work looks to match the timeframe.

Well that is what I read into it.

Art or a Science – we’ll see in 48hrs when the submissions come in.

Take a look at the active contests to see for yourself.

Website Conceptualization

Friday, December 12th, 2008

We have been extremely busy in the ChumBonus war room, drawing screens and zeroing in on the requirements for Phase 1 of the System.

We are extremely excited to have launched a contest to assist us writing the business requirements. Sure we could think of everything, eventually, but let’s use the power of the crowd and partner with some of the best system architects in the world to define “everything” much faster.

Take a look at this brand new conceptualization concept and watch us collaborate directly with architects in the project forums to help identify, organize, and document our needs and ideas, and produce a high-level Business Requirements Document

24hrs is the way to go

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

What a difference a day makes, we just received 11 crack submissions to our storyboard contest. The next couple of days are going to be great reviewing the submissions and selecting the winners.

My personal top two are of course from consistent winners on TopCoder. Gotta love having access to such talent.

More Time Less Time

Monday, December 1st, 2008

Had an interesting “how best” call with the head of community at TopCoder today, we tried the five day competition for what we thought was a reasonable $100 a screen and received a tepid response and predictable design.

On the call we were told that More Money and using a technique called Rounds is one way to get more quality submissions and more interest with the ability to make changes mid-stream. Using rounds just seems to add more time, which may delay our timeline. What we need is something to keep us on schedule.

In the next breath we hear, Less Money and a 24hr contest is also working well, which sounds so counter intuitive. Normally faster and cheaper are not terms typically seen together, but I will take the bait.

Tonight at 5:30 et we will launch a 24hr contest,

Good luck to all,

Web Site Look and Feel

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

We just completed our first Storyboard competition with the help of Studio @ TopCoder, hummm, the output was not quite as snazzy as we were looking for, it was very fairly predictable. Maybe we provided too much info! Yeah that has to be it. Only two submissions though. So could it have been the prize money!

To get something really creative, I have been looking around at web site designs that I like, especially functional ones and something I use often is basecamp, if you have not seen or used it, it’s a very helpful site for collaboration for groups of people, in our case, for a dispersed team from different organizations!

Well -  we already really love the design on basecamp, and today I spotted a very detailed article and it reminded me of just how eye catching and functional basecamps’ design is.

So heads-up TopCoder community we are going to re-launch the UI storyboard on Monday this time trying to separate and differentiate ourselves from the growing number of competitions on the Studio @ TopCoder.

Take a look – and hopefully you’ll compete. We’ll even add some extra special referral bonus, so send to your designer friends, you’ll get something around $50 if they place.

Sharing Docs Shout-out

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Just had to post something on a great free tool we are using to collaborate and ideate the ChumBonus concept, DropBox, fabulous site, but this implementation is so simple.

I develop on a Mac and the fellow founders are on Windows. It just works, we put a doc on the share and it immediately, way faster than anything else that is free, shares the file with everyone. It also lets you know what is happening and shows you recently changed files. Very slick, 2gb is free!

Great job guys and gals at dropbox. I’ll be signing up for 10gb real soon, pinky for-reals promise.

Designing the Logo

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

With the soul of ChumBonus being the ability to leverage the power of your network and the ability to use a crowd of people to suggest and bubble something to the top. We want to live and breath these qualities even in the creation of the web site.

Today we took our first baby steps with the commissioning of our logo. We launched a competition to design our logo using the Studio @ TopCoder. This community of talented web designers has consistently proven their creative abilities for many fortune 500 companies. We are very excited to see what they can do from scratch for a startup.

The competition runs for six days and ends on Monday October 20th.