Blog

The All New Interstate!

awfy — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:42:00 -0700

Here’s what to expect from the brand spanking new version of Interstate.

Reworked Roadmaps

With roadmaps being our pride and joy it was about time they were made even greater. The new roadmap UI brings brand new ways to manage your roads and we’ve also added a few new features to help you organize your items even easier, such as item labels. We’ve also improved our support for attachments, roadmap sorting and pretty much everything else roadmap related!

Full-On Discuss

Discuss is a feature that has been around since our last major release but it’s never really lived up to its potential. Up until now, Discuss was just a simple tab on your roadmap which would allow you to discuss that roadmap with your colleagues. We noticed this wasn’t getting much use or at least wasn’t being utilized in the way that we initially planned.

In the new Interstate, we’ve changed Discuss to be a stand-alone feature, which will be accessed via your Interstate’s navigation. You will now have the option to discuss roadmaps, groups or roads, speak directly to a team mate or just setup a general chat for whatever you want. Within discussions about roads you can update their status and progress without even leaving the room. You can also attach files directly to the chat room for colleagues to see or even embed external services such as YouTube videos or Dribbble shots.

Search

You can now quickly navigate around your Interstate using our all-in-one search. Search for projects and people or if you’re viewing a roadmap use it to filter the roadmap’s contents. You can even input someone’s name to view items assigned to them. Search will only get more powerful as Interstate grows.

Enhanced Embedding

It’s certainly something which sets Interstate apart from its fellow project management applications. Embedding up until now has been simply allowing you to embed and share your entire roadmap, anywhere you want. That’s all well and good but we feel embedding has a greater potential than just providing a general overview of progress.

So instead of just being able to embed a full roadmap, you can now also embed groups or roads on their own - perfect for sharing progress of a single item with your colleagues or users outside of Interstate.

We’ve been wanting this feature for a while now ourselves to let us to explain feature development on our blog in more detail. Here’s a quick example of item embedding using only two lines of code!

We’ve also improved the look of the original two themes and added a brand new one which matches the new interface of Interstate. Hopefully they’ll all please your lovely eyes. Not forgetting of course, you can still design your own theme to fit in with your brand.

Interstate Goes Real-time

Overview has had a bit of an upgrade with our new real-time functionality. You will now see all the things happening on your Interstate, as they happen. On top of that, the new sidebar will now tell you exactly where your team are on Interstate (if they’re online), even telling you what they’re doing it as they’re doing it.

When managing your projects, you’ll now also see your colleagues changes right as they happen, providing an even better management experience.

Another cool addition is toast/growl notifications. These helpful little guys will tell you when a change you’ve made has been successful, when someone has updated a project and/or its contents and even alert you when you’re mentioned in a Discuss chat.

GitHub Integration, More Gitty

Up until now our only GitHub integration has been to pull in your commits and display them on your Overview. Somewhat handy but not at all want we’d like from GitHub integration. In the new Interstate you can attribute commits directly to roads with relative ease.

When posting a commit simply provide the road’s name or ID in two square brackets before your commit message and the commit message will be posted to the road as an update. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy!

[Archived Items] Just finished up some interface work.

There’s a whole lot more we won’t go into detail about on the blog, you should really try it out by visiting the new Interstate!

A Brand New Interstate

wakecodesleep — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:07:00 -0700

TL;DR: Sign up for the new Interstate BETA at http://interstateapp.com/beta/.

After months of radio silence from us here at Interstate, we’re very happy to finally announce the BETA of a brand new Interstate.

We decided to build a brand new Interstate simply because the product which we have today is very different to what it was when we first launched. The first release of Interstate was a very simple one-page app that just let you make a public roadmap. Since then Interstate has evolved in to a full-blown project management tool but we haven’t changed much of the UI or codebase. Whilst we’re happy and proud of the current product we have today, we’ve known that it could be much better if we had the chance to re-build it from a clean slate - so that’s exactly what we did and boy is it good.

The new version of Interstate is now ready for BETA testing and so we’re looking for users willing to try it out.

Simply go to http://interstateapp.com/beta/ and enter your email address to show your interest and we’ll shoot you an email when we’re ready for you!

We are really looking forward to launching the new Interstate, it’s certainly both our most exciting and our most advanced release to date and we think you’re going to love it. We know that we do.

The Fuel of Interstate: One Year Later

wakecodesleep — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:21:00 -0700

One year ago, we wrote a blog post explaining Interstate’s stack and architecture after we were just two months in to development. Since then a lot has changed on both the product and business sides of Interstate (we’ve released 3 new major versions since then and we recently took part in the Summer 2011 cycle of Y Combinator) and so I thought this would be a good time to explain what’s changed in the past year in terms of our stack.

Hosting

At the time of our last post, we were running Interstate on a single server from the guys at MediaTemple. Whilst MediaTemple were a great host, they didn’t really support our expansion plans as well as other hosts could. Because of this, we moved our web app over to Amazon Web Services in June/July 2011. At the current moment in time, we’re running just one large (7.5GBs memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units) 64bit EC2 instance (with CentOS) in the US East (Virginia) availability zone. Over the next few weeks/months we’ll be looking to spread Interstate across more EC2 instances and availability zones.

Database

At Interstate, we use MongoDB as our primary data store and before our switch to EC2, we managed our own MongoDB instance. Due to Interstate’s growth though, it was becoming a large effort to keep monitoring our MongoDB setup whilst still building our product. The main issue being that for the better part of a year, we hosted our MongoDB instance on the same server as our web app. This quickly became an issue as our Mongo instance was using too much of our server’s resources and so our web app quickly began to suffer.

Because of this, we made the decision to move our database to a group of guys who know a lot more about hosting MongoDB than we did, those guys being MongoHQ. We moved to MongoHQ around March 2011 and since then the experience has been pretty great.

HTTP

Just as we were a year ago - we’re still using NGiNX to handle all of our requests and to serve our content. Here’s what we said in our original post regarding our choice of NGiNX..

We have decided to use nginx to serve all HTTP requests over the other popular alternatives such as Apache. We chose to use nginx after benchmarking other sites of ours that run on the same PHP framework but use Apache as the HTTP server. Both the speed difference and usage of system resources (e.g. memory) between powering these sites on nginx rather than Apache made it an easy decision for us to use nginx.

Programming

The language which Interstate is written in is pretty much always a surprise and shock for people. When we were originally meeting the other founders in our Y Combinator class, we often showed them what we were working on and 99% of the time, their first reaction was: “So what did you write this in? Rails, right?”. As we told them what language we actually used, letter by letter their face turned from interested to surprised, shocked and then somewhat horrified.

As you may have guessed (or previously read), we primarily use PHP to build Interstate. The reason behind this is not really all that strange, we’ve simply built a lot of PHP powered apps in the past and know how to build clean and efficient apps in the language. We believe you can write ugly and bad code in any language and so just because PHP has a history of badly written code doesn’t make it an inherently bad language. Yes, there are a lot of silly problems with the language itself (such as the infamous namespace separator) but most of the problems don’t really affect you (or at least they don’t affect me) day-to-day.

All that aside, the main Interstate app runs on PHP 5.3.6 using a custom (MVC) framework, which we hope to open-source in full at some point. To handle our PHP processes with NGiNX we’re still using PHP-FPM (which is now bundled with PHP as of v5.3.3).

Node.js

As of recently, we’ve also began to start experimenting with Node.js for some new and exciting real-time features. Most notably, our new Streaming API (which will be opened up to developers soon) which powers pretty much all real-time updates within Interstate (such as our new Growl/Toast-esque notifications) and soon our Mac App. Our second biggest use of Node.js is our upcoming real-time team chat system, called Discuss - which Node.js has been particularly great for.

When developing apps using Node.js, we often use a mix of open-source modules made by other great developers. These modules generally include: Socket.io, node-mongodb-native, node-memcached and node-redis to name just a few.

To manage our Node apps we also use forever.

Caching

We still use APC for PHP bytecode caching and Memcached for all in-memory caching. Our use of Redis for caching has somewhat reduced and we’re now using Memcached a lot more aggressively than we were a year ago.

Redis

As said above, our usage of Redis as a cache has reduced and our main use case has shifted from caching to instead using it as a pub/sub backend for our Streaming API. So far Redis has been working really well for this use case. Once the Streaming API is made public, we’ll try and take some time to write about how the stream works in more detail.

3rd Party Services

To help us build Interstate we also use several third party web services..

Version Control

At Interstate, we use git for version control. For our git hosting we tried out several popular services but we eventually settled for the most popular choice, GitHub. We chose GitHub simply because all of our open source and public projects are already hosted there and so to host our private repositories there as well just made things easier.

Email Delivery

For the small bits of email marketing (newsletters) which we do, we have started using Mailchimp. We’ve only sent out one campaign so far but the service has been great.

For transactional email delivery (e.g. forgotten password emails, notifications, etc) we still use Postmark. Postmark makes transactional email delivery super easy (just as it should be), they provide great and simple analytics and an easy (and pretty cheap!) pay-per-email pricing model. We’re more than happy to keep giving these guys our money.

Software

Finally, to build Interstate we use a bunch of great apps, including..

Coda to write all code for the web app.
Photoshop CS5 for all the UI.
Xcode to build the Mac App.
MongoHub for quick querying of our database.
Spotify for the great tunes.
Dribbble and Forrst (Simon / Greg) to share tidbits of stuff we’re working on.
Gaug.es for web analytics.
Interstate for project management ;)

If you have any questions about our particular use of any software in our stack or anything else, please just write a comment and we’d be happy to answer.

TL;DR: We’re hosted on Amazon EC2, running CentOS, NGiNX, PHP (+ PHP-FPM) and Node.js. We use Mongodb as our data store, Memcached for memory caching and Redis as a pub/sub backend.

Interstate-CLI

asloman — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:01:00 -0700

Interstate CLI began on a whim, starting with my (Alec’s) recent conversion to Git from SVN. As you do, I started using Terminal so often that I couldn’t help but consider other tasks and ask whether they could be reasonably accomplished from the command line. This is not a new story, so I’ve gathered: this is why libraries like Thor, purpose-built for crafting shell scripts, exist in the first place.

We have happily discovered that, in fact, Interstate lends itself quite well to the command line. The Roadmap > Route > Road pathway is easily traversed with simple commands, and providing method options feels as natural here as it does in Git.

Some aspects, however, needed reconsidering. For example, we made the choice to remove Interstates as the point of departure. In terms of navigating to a road, this works perfectly well with a mouse, but is slightly fatiguing on a keyboard. Instead, we’ve made roadmaps top-level, whereby typing “interstate maps” presents you with a list of roadmaps.

The second big thing was that we didn’t want to type either a 22 character identifier or the full title of whatever we were navigating to. The API doesn’t provide shortcodes, so we generate them locally. We’ve kept them short and easy to read: just one letter and two numbers. Finding what you want in a list is easy and the shortcode seems to stick in your mind quite easily.

Without further ado, here is what interstate-cli 0.0.4 can do so far:

interstate help

Show a list of tasks

interstate maps

Show a list of roadmaps associated with your API key

interstate map x##

Switch to a roadmap

interstate roads -r

Show a list of roads for the current roadmap. Because we have to cache the roads locally, occasionally run it with -r to see if you’ve got latest.

interstate road x##

Show a detail view of a road

interstate update x## -m -s

Update a road with optional —message (-m) and —status (-s) parameters. Note: the status parameter can take either a status code (1-14), the human readable status (e.g. “10%”, or “Started”), or if left blank, you’ll see a table of options and are prompted at that point.

interstate add -t -d

Add a road to the current roadmap with required —title (-t) and —description (-d) parameters.

interstate delete x##

Delete a road

interstate log

Display a log of recent activity for the current roadmap

interstate reset

Resets all interstate-cli local config

Interstate-cli requires at least Ruby 1.87 and a reasonably current version of Rubygems.

Install it with

sudo gem install interstate

You may need to install Apple’s developer tools on certain machines, although this issue is not currently reproducable and I haven’t had time to look into it in any depth. Also, some machines experience write permissions with certain interstate-cli config files. We are also looking into that.

For now, if you have problems setting it up, please email alec@bakedcode.com

Interstate-cli is by no means a finished product. If you like the concept and want to see it mature into a more useful, fully-rounded tool, please send us feedback! We see this as an experiment for now, but if it evolves into something bigger, that’s cool too!

It appears as though America has stolen our logo. We want one of...

wakecodesleep — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:49:26 -0700

It appears as though America has stolen our logo. We want one of these!

Major Roadworks on Interstate

wakecodesleep — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 08:32:00 -0700

Just over a month ago we pushed out a minor update to Interstate which included a few important features such as file sharing and roadmap exporting, which we hope you loved. “Yeah, that was cool but what have you guys been doing since then?”, I hear you ask. Well, I can sure promise you that we haven’t just been sitting around watching Reno 911 and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia all day.. Well, O.K., maybe we have, but we’ve also been hard at work working on the next Interstate release! Which by the way, has just been launched!

Routes

This one’s a biggy. Ever since we shipped the original Interstate BETA, back in August 2010, there has been one feature which almost everyone has asked for: sub-roads. You lovely BETA testers have been telling us that you’d like a way to add roads inside of roads (I N T E R C E P T I O N) so that you can add many tasks to one individual feature or group lots of small features together. Well if you were someone who wanted this functionality, today is your lucky day. We have just released our implementation of sub-roads which we’re calling “Routes”.

Routes allow you to create a parent road (which can have a title and description only) which you can then assign roads to. A route’s progress is completely based off its sub-roads. For example, if you had a route which let’s say had two sub-roads, with one set to “10% complete” and another set to “50% complete”, the route itself would be set to “30% complete”. This means you can see, at a glance, how far along each individual task is and how far away the feature in general is from shipping. Handy, huh?!

We’ve tried to keep our implementation as simple as possible (without losing important functionality) so that it should meet everyone’s needs and can be used in almost any situation.

New Frontend

For some time now we’ve felt as though our frontend site didn’t really show off what exactly Interstate offers. For a company that’s charging for its product and relies on revenue to keep its service afloat, having a descriptive homepage is something that is majorly important. But as you know, we here at Interstate do not yet charge for our service as we’re in a BETA testing phase and so this hasn’t been something that we have had to rush to fix.

But as we’re getting ever closer to a full release of Interstate that we’re both 100% happy with and willing to charge for, we thought it was a good time to come up with a new frontend site and so we did just that.

The new frontend, which was launched today has a brand new design, improved tour page, re-designed roadmap page and lots more. Hopefully this’ll make things easier when explaining what exactly Interstate offers to your colleagues, etc.

Roadmap Sharing

Since the second release of Interstate we’ve had the simple functionality of allowing you to have a public-facing roadmap using our http://roadma.ps/ URL. Well, since we originally released this feature we’ve had some feedback on how to improve it.

The main comment we received regarding this feature was making the short URL actually a short URL. You see, up until now every roadma.ps link looked something like this: http://roadma.ps/4c2d3b5f8ead0ec070010000. Which, well, isn’t very short. For this release of Interstate we went back to the drawing board and we were able to make our short URLs well and truly short and look something like this: http://roadma.ps/8d. Much better, no?

The second idea we often received was to add more privacy settings to public roadmaps. We listened to this feedback and in the new release of Interstate, you are now able to set your public roadmaps to be password protected. This means you are now able to add an extra step of security to your public roadmaps by adding a password which people must first enter before they can see your roads.

The next feature is something which hasn’t been suggested that often but we feel as though some of our users will find it useful. Even if you’re using the roadma.ps short URL to share your roadmaps (instead of embedding them on your website), you may still want to link back to your website or provide a way for your users to get in touch regarding a road on your roadmap. Because of this we’ve added three new roadmap settings:

Homepage URL
This input lets you link back to your website so that people viewing your roadmap know its source.
Support URL
This URL is a way for your users to get in touch with you. We generally recommend to fill this input with an email or a Get Satisfaction page (or something similar).
Welcome Message
If you’d like to give a quick update/message to people viewing your roadmap or just link to some other places (such as your Twitter, Facebook page, etc), you can now do so by entering a message which will appear at the top of your roadma.ps page.

Share to Twitter

From using Interstate ourselves, we know that when you set a road to “Launched”, you often want to share this change with your users to let them know the feature is now available. In our case, we do this via Twitter. So we thought to ourselves, why not make things easier for everyone else who works like this?

In the new release of Interstate you are now able to connect with a Twitter account (1 per roadmap) and as you set roads to “Launched”, you will be asked (unobtrusively of course) if you’d like to tweet this change. You don’t have to tweet the change straight away and as you continue to change more roads to “Launched”, the pre-generated Tweet will change also, to include the newly launched roads.

Export Redesign

Roadmap exporting is a feature which was added in the last release of Interstate and whilst the feature works as we’d like it to, the design used when exporting roadmaps wasn’t, in our opinion, the best it could be.

Because of this we decided to redesign the PDF version of roadmaps to look a little simpler, show a lot more data and look more like the regular roadmaps view on Interstate.

Overview

It’s an important part of Interstate yet it just didn’t seem to live up to its job. We originally wanted overview to provide you with a great experience for getting a general idea of what’s been going on. Unfortunately, it just didn’t seem to live up to this requirement. It was rather dull and lacking on the descriptive front.

To rectify this we’ve improved the overall look of the feeds which includes display people’s avatars and including a more detailed view when a road is updated.

On top of that we’ve included a little section to see who is currently active or when they were last active. This should allow you to work more closely with other people on your team, even when you are on different sides of the world.

Most importantly though, commenting has arrived. A lot of people had questioned whether road updates were truly the best way to allow a team of people to communicate what’s happening with a particular road. Commenting was something which was asked for however we always said it just wouldn’t fit into the requirements we set out for Interstate a long time ago. This meant we needed a clever way to allow interaction without over complicating roadmaps, activity commenting was the way to go. What this means is when you are actively working on a road with someone you can spark a discussion based on what has actually happen rather than what you think has happened or plan to do. Time will tell if we’ve got this one right!

People

The people section of Interstate has always seemed like the lost child. I didn’t get much attention on the original release of Interstate and was neglected ever since. We’ve had a little refresh of the page to make it more appealing as well as bring some important features to the foreground. Previously you were required to visit a rather empty page in order to see who has requested access to your Interstate, this now appears to the right hand side on the main page. Why make it more difficult or time consuming than it needs to be?

Adverts

Over the past few months we have been part of the Yoggrt advertising network, this was to try and provide us with funds whilst we built Interstate. The income from the adverts helped somewhat towards the running costs. We’re grateful to have been accepted onto the Yoggrt network and wish the network luck for the future. Moving onwards we will now be displaying adverts courtesy of Carbon, an advertising network aimed at various circles of development and culture. We look forward to a happy relationship with Carbon and it’s team.

Prototype → jQuery

Up until this release of Interstate, all of our Javascript was based on the prototype.js Javascript framework. Whilst we’re big fans of Prototype, we felt it was time to switch to jQuery for several reasons, mainly because benchmarks we ran showed jQuery to be faster for our use cases and also the community which jQuery has. Literally everything we required for Interstate (that we didn’t really want to code ourselves) was available as a well-documented and good looking plugin (such as colour and date pickers).

Whilst this won’t have too much effect on your experience using Interstate it should make the UI feel a little more responsive and it’ll also help us get releases that rely on Javascript functionality out faster.

Calling all commuters! We’re looking for some interesting...

wakecodesleep — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 23:19:00 -0700

Calling all commuters! We’re looking for some interesting companies to be featured on our upcoming homepage redesign. If you’d like us to feature your site then just post a reply to this blog post with a link to your public roadmap or email the link to us at getfeatured@interstateapp.com.

If you don’t currently have a public roadmap then what are you waiting for? It’s easy! Just head over to our developers portal, grab our example Javascript code, paste that sucker on your website, replace a few bits and bobs (it’s all explained on the page) and you’re good to go! Plus, if you have any trouble you can just get in touch either via our Get Satisfaction or by dropping an email to us at help@interstateapp.com. We really have you guys and gals covered.

Philip Rosedale (SecondLife Founder) talks about being open when...

awfy — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 08:25:45 -0800

Philip Rosedale (SecondLife Founder) talks about being open when running your company. What better way to do this than sharing your development roadmaps with the world?

Before and after… We’ve just updated our logo. The...

awfy — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:54:58 -0800

Before and after…

We’ve just updated our logo. The updated logo was designed by Joachim Löfstedt.

Work has begun on a mobile version of Interstate. First up is...

awfy — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:13:00 -0800

Work has begun on a mobile version of Interstate. First up is the iPhone (which is a favourite here at BakedCode) and if you visit your Interstate via Safari on your iPhone you will see it in action.

It is still in the early stages as it was more of a test of user experience using our current code. The entire design was merely done by defining iPhone CSS files, we aim to make a more native mobile site in the future. At the moment various pages aren’t available by navigation such as theme, config and the various pages related to roadmaps.

We’d love to hear your feedback!

We’ve just pushed out an update to those BETA testing the...

wakecodesleep — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:14:00 -0800

We’ve just pushed out an update to those BETA testing the third release of Interstate! The update includes most notably file sharing and roadmap exporting - two features which have been highly requested since we launched our original BETA last year. If you’re using the latest version of Interstate, go ahead - try out these new features now! (If you’re not using the new version then tweet us at @interstateapp with your Interstate subdomain and we’ll hook you up!). Check out the above video for a preview of how file sharing works within Interstate.

NB: File sharing currently requires a modern browser (such as Chrome or Firefox) with HTML5 Drag and Drop capabilities. To share a file, simply drag a file from your desktop and drop it on the road of your choice. The file will then be uploaded to Amazon S3 and attached to the road for your colleagues to see (they will also receive an email notification if they have chosen to).

Once this feature is out of BETA testing we will begin to add backwards compatibility by also offering a simple file upload form for those folks using older browsers (if that’s you, come on - upgrade! It’s easy!).

The Fuel of Interstate

wakecodesleep — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:52:00 -0700

Interstate has been in full-on development for just around 2 months now (and in private BETA for just over 1 month) and in that small amount of time we’ve had to make some pretty quick yet equally important choices when it comes to our site’s technical setup.

We’ve had to decide things from simply where to host our servers to questions like which HTTP server we should use. The great thing about the Interstate project is that because we’re just 2 guys building something we love to both make and use, we get to make some pretty interesting choices when it comes to the site’s architecture.

Because of this I’ve decided to do a post explaining what we use to power and build Interstate. So, without further ado, here we go!

Development

To develop Interstate, Greg and I both use Apple Macbooks and take advantage of some pretty sweet Mac software. The software we find ourselves using on a daily basis is:

Adobe Photoshop CS5 (Greg uses this bad boy to create the fantastic design you lucky BETA testers get to use)
Coda by Panic (We both use this amazing IDE to code both the frontend and the backend of Interstate)
Transmit by Panic (Greg uses this to upload the bulk of the site’s static files such as images, etc)
Terminal (Simon uses this to keep control of Interstate’s server)
Spotify (What is website development without some kick ass music in the background?)
Google Chrome (Possibly the best browser out there at the moment)
MongoHub (Simon uses this to monitor MongoDB)
Forrst (O.K., this isn’t exactly software but it’s an awesome community where we try and share as much stuff as we can whilst we build Interstate).

Hardware

Up until the latest release of Interstate (“Frank”) both the frontend and the backend was hosted on a single RapidSwitch server which also hosted about 7 other websites of ours as well. This really did not help when it came to making the site as fast as it could be. At this point we also hosted our databases on a separate server over at MediaTemple. This really did not help as it meant we had to make thousands of requests to a server that was on a completely different network to the backend.

With the latest release of Interstate we decided that we needed to fix this right away. As of writing this post we are currently hosted on a single (MediaTemple based) dedicated server with around 2GB of RAM (more spec details can be found on MediaTemple’s website). We are looking to separate our backend from our database in the very near future (both in to individual MediaTemple (ve) servers).

Software

Interstate uses PHP (PHP 5.3.3 to be exact) and it runs on its own custom framework. We have decided to skip the conventional route of using MySQL for our primary datastore and we have instead opted to use MongoDB and so far it is performing extremely well. We also use a combination of Redis and Memcached for our currently rather small caching layer that will most probably be used a lot more in the near future.

We have decided to use nginx to serve all HTTP requests (and PHP-FPM as the PHP process manger) over the other alternatives such as Apache. We chose to use nginx after benchmarking other sites of ours that run on the same PHP framework but use Apache as the HTTP server. The speed difference between powering these sites on nginx rather than Apache made it an easy decision for us to use nginx.

To make sure Interstate is always performing as well as it should be, we use a great piece of server monitoring software called munin.

When it comes to 3rd party web services we currently only use one: Postmark (aka Postmarkapp). We use Postmark to simply deliver all on-site emails (such as invite codes, notifications, etc) and we really can’t recommend it enough.

I hope this gives you a little better idea of how the site works. If you have any specific questions regarding Interstate’s development/architecture feel free to send me an email via simon@interstateapp.com.

Something we haven’t spoken about yet is the new logo we...

awfy — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 09:15:45 -0700

Something we haven’t spoken about yet is the new logo we had designed by Prekesh Chavda. We asked him to take the logo we were using and replicate it but with far more awesomeness. We hope you like it!

Frankly, It's New

awfy — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:40:00 -0700

It’s been a while since we last posted about Interstate and it’s been long overdue. We launched the site to 44 individuals/companies on 9th August and since then have been working with them to improve the site.

We decided we wanted to redo the entire site after the feedback to make it more “app-like”. With the previous website we just couldn’t see it progressing beyond a fun little idea.

So, let us introduce the latest release titled “Frank”. A couple of major things have changed which you may have noticed. Let’s run through them;

Redesign

All the internals have had a makeover to give the content a much larger presence. We just felt the previous look was a bit too thin. Another point was to improve the usability because it was a tad too difficult to use. Not to forget we’ve overhauled our own homepage to include our very own roadmap!

Notifications

Boy, they were annoying! One of the biggest complaints was the lack of options on why you received emails from Interstate. This time around we’ve given you a couple of options to choose from.

Quick Progress Changes

Previously it was a bit clumsy trying to update the progress of any road. This time round you can change it in seconds when you post activity updates. Hint: You can even leave the activity update blank and it will only update the progress, handy.

Public/Private Roadmaps

This was a rather sought after feature to allow people to share direct links to roadmaps with people who don’t have a BakedCode ID or weren’t part of the Interstate account. We have a few more things to do before this is fully available but it’s close!

Easier Road Reordering

It was a bit cumbersome before to reorder roads within a roadmap. This time it’s a simply drag-n-drop senario, what more is there to say?

App Customisation

In order to make Interstate more yours than ours we’ve brought recolouring to the table. This only allows you to edit your header and link colours but will expand in the future to support more customisation. It’s a start!

Due Dates

Ah deadlines, some people love them, some people hate them. Essentially they are like Marmite but they have been added to all roads. You can have no due date or pick a date from the lovely popup calendar.

Bug Fixes

There were one or two niggly bugs that we had to deal with but they seemed to have ironed out rather well. As always if you spot any send us an email bugs@interstateapp.com.

Optimisation

We’ve upped the tempo on the site to give you that slightly better experience. Not only have we improved vasts amount of code but we have migrated the entire site from a dedicated server it was sharing with various other sites we have built. It now sits on its very own dedicated server to make sure it gets all the attention.

So that really sums up this whole new version of Interstate, as always we plan to develop it further with your help as BETA testers. If you’re interested in being part of the BETA go to Interstate and click “Get An Invite”. We are sending a lovely-bunch-of-invites out in the next couple of days, better get your name on the list!

Start Your Engines!

awfy — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:00:44 -0700

We’ve had a brilliant response to the invite applications we released two weeks ago with a couple of big names getting in on the act. This has spurred on development because it originally began as a fun idea whilst we had nothing else to do. We now see the potential of the product and hope that we can achieve great things with it.

Everyone who applies for an invite won’t necessarily get an invite unfortunately. The aim of being invite only is to provide us with a great testing ground and for it to be a great testing ground we need to have websites actively using the product. Websites such as blogs or profiles on 3rd party websites won’t receive invites due to the lack of need.

Over the course of the next few months we will have on-going closed BETA testing, after that we will be launching for everyone to use. On launch we will have a selection of packages to choose from depending on your requirements. There will always be a free option, who doesn’t love a freebie? We will be announcing at a later date the packages and prices but we’ll be sure to make them worth it.

On a side note, we’re currently looking for a logo designer to improve our current logo. If you feel you’re up to the incredibly easy task shoot us over an email to hi@interstateapp.com.