Stackd

Big Customers? Who Needs 'Em!

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:59:56 -0500

But doesn’t the simple strategy we’ve chosen at 37signals leave money on the table? Why turn down someone who wants to pay you thousands of dollars a month? Good questions. We’re probably leaving money on the table. But we’re also leaving complexity on the table.

Every decision has unseen costs + benefits.

Stackd, Technology Association of Iowa 2012 Student...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:23:32 -0500

Stackd, Technology Association of Iowa 2012 Student Innovation of the Year. We did it thanks to you: our awesome customers, family, and friends.

Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped | TechCrunch

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:37:47 -0600

Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped | TechCrunch

Stackd: 2012 Prometheus Award Finalist, Student Innovation of the Year

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:48:27 -0600

Stackd: 2012 Prometheus Award Finalist, Student Innovation of the Year:

We’re extremely excited to be a Technology Association of Iowa, 2012 Prometheus Award finalist for Student Innovation of the Year and honored to be mentioned amongst other great companies and individuals. To our loyal customers and friends for supporting and driving us, thank you.

Apple to disrupt notebook space with radically redesigned MacBook Pros

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:01:30 -0600

Apple to disrupt notebook space with radically redesigned MacBook Pros

Amazon assembling creative staff to produce original series programming

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:57:13 -0600

Amazon assembling creative staff to produce original series programming

CSS "-x-" prefix

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:31:57 -0600

Why not have:

-x-border-radius: 5px;

instead of:

-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
-ms-border-radius: 5px;
-o-border-radius: 5px;

Making WordPress dynamic, Thematic PJAX

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:48:00 -0600

WordPress

It’s no secret that WordPress is very popular, an incredible “14.7% of the top million websites in the world use it” and “22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress” (August 2011). Here at Stackd we host a lot of WordPress websites (most of our customers have at least one). Just like our customers that use WordPress, we’ve done our fair share of WordPress development.

Building “fluid dynamic” websites

WordPress is great, but out of the box it doesn’t (easily) allow for an emerging web development paradigm: the “fluid dynamic” website. Wait, “fluid dynamic” what?! So we might have made that one up, but you know it when you see it (or rather, feel it). It’s also known as SPA (Single Page Application), SPI (Single Page Interface), and the concept has been talked about as early as 2003. Basically, these websites strive to be like dynamic applications (ala desktop/native apps) with different “states” as opposed to the traditional “pages” of a document.

There is typically a perceivable transitional jolt from one page to the next. The next page’s data is retrieved from the server, the old page is unloaded, and the new page is rendered to screen.
Stable UI affordances, such as toolbars, navigation elements, database query results and so forth, continually disappear and reappear.

For example, Twitter feels lightweight and intuitive. Click around: panels, functionality, and information display and hide dynamically, minimizing full page refreshes to break our flow of attention.

Old “new” Twitter

Hype Machine is a nifty music aggregator that helps you discover new music.

Browse while you listen, Hype Machine

The Hype Machine keeps track of what music bloggers write about. We handpick a set of kickass music blogs and then present what they discuss for easy analysis, consumption and discovery. This way, your odds of stumbling into awesome music or awesome blogs are high.

Listening to music on Hype Machine doesn’t stop or get interrupted as you click from page to page, entry to entry. Pretty cool right?

AJAX and HTML5 PushState

The difference between these two websites is in the (implementation) details. To be able to bookmark and have a working back button, Twitter uses what’s called a hashbang !#, a Google indexable “state identifier.” Essentially, Twitter looks at the resource after the !# and delivers the appropriate content.

Hype Machine takes advantage of a new capability, HTML5 PushState in addition to AJAX (PJAX), to achieve its dynamism. Best of all, if JavaScript isn’t enabled or a web browser doesn’t support PushState, it degrades to a good ole full page load.

Extending WordPress and Thematic

Right now, trying to turn a WordPress website into an intuitive, single page interface is daunting. Some plugins exist, but require pain and suffering (eg. redefining templates and layouts) to make pages look the same, regardless of dynamic or full page loads.

However, many WordPress websites are powered by one WordPress project in particular, Thematic, a go to CMS/theme framework. We could go on and on why it’s great, but don’t take our word for it. Lead developers Ian Stewart, Chris Gossmann, and Gene Robinson have done an awesome job in creating a powerful and extensible starting point for any WordPress project.

I’m proud to introduce Thematic PJAX, a WordPress Thematic child theme that makes a “fluid dynamic” WordPress possible. It stands on the shoulders of giants to be the easiest way so far to create a SPI. It builds on everything awesome about Thematic (SEO, extensibility, infinite customizability, bulletproof layouts, open-source) and transforms WordPress into a platform as sophisticated as other PJAX/SPI websites.

Design philosophy

Thematic PJAX, ensures consistency by adopting Thematic as a foundation. Sites built with normal Thematic should just work, and different layout types (Archive, Links, Full width) all dynamically change and properly display. By default, clicking on the navigation element loads content asynchronously without a full page reload. Finally, widget areas and theme hooks all work as expected.

Getting started

Building your next WordPress project with Thematic PJAX is easy.

Install Thematic.
Download and extract thematic-pjax in the WordPress themes folder.
Add custom functionality in functions.php and style to taste within style.css.
PJAX functionality is controlled by the Thematic navigation menu. To override this behavior, modify thematic-pjax.js.
Activate the Thematic PJAX theme in the WordPress Dashboard.

If you’d like to try the Thematic PJAX difference for yourself or get more information, be sure to visit the project website. To contribute to the project or report bugs, check out the code on GitHub.

We’re hard at work on version 2 of Stackd! Take a sneak...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:10:00 -0600

We’re hard at work on version 2 of Stackd! Take a sneak peek at the new design.

Teaching Entrepreneurship

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:08:30 -0600

It is often asserted that the poor man’s failure in the competition of the market is caused by his lack of education. Equality of opportunity, it is said, could be provided only by making education at every level accessible to all. There prevails today the tendency to reduce all differences among various peoples to their education and to deny the existence of inborn inequalities in intellect, will power, and character. It is not generally realized that education can never be more than indoctrination with theories and ideas already developed. Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.

In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes an entrepreneur in seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy. The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.

Ludwig von Mises - Human Action

Protect The Internet

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:54:03 -0600

Protect The Internet:

We support American Censorship Day. We’ve written to our representatives, you should too.

usesthis-sp: Fredrick Galoso Co-founder, Stackd Who are you,...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:38:58 -0500

usesthis-sp:

Fredrick Galoso

Co-founder, Stackd

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, I’m Fred, Co-founder of Stackd, a web services company. We help everyday individuals and businesses collaborate and run their web infrastructure on what the big guys are using, but without the learning curve or hassle. We also use and write a lot of open source software. I wear many hats including polyglot developer, operations engineer, salesman, statistician, and guitarist.

I also work part time at Bridgestone where I’m a developer and system administrator. I’m currently working on QA, analytics, Big data and geolocation projects.

Finally, I’m currently a University of Iowa student, double majoring in Management Information Systems and Computer Science.

What hardware are you using?

I have a Late 2008 (unibody) 15” MacBook Pro as my primary computer. I’m a feverish multitasker so a 27” Samsung external monitor is usually attached to it when I’m at home and a 19” Samsung at work. A Mighty Mouse helps with the pointing and clicking.

For more intensive computing tasks I have a white box quad core server that I fire up from time to time; particularly useful for testing, continuous integration, number crunching, and virtually modeling our infrastructure at Stackd. We use Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SES) for our production stack.

An iPhone 3G, soon to be 4S, helps me keep on top of email and work on the go.

Photography and video is with a Canon EOS 7D, 28-135mm USM lens, Azden SMX-10 Stereo Condenser Microphone.

Primary musical setup consists of a Fender ‘65 Mustang Reissue electric guitar, Ovation CC44 Acoustic-Electric guitar, Vox AC15C1 tube amp, Dr. Z Brake Lite Attenuator, TC Electronic G-Sharp preamp & effects processor, various pedals.

Uni-ball Roller pens, Quad Ruled Notebooks.

And what software?

Mac OS X Lion is my day to day OS and I use VirtualBox to run Ubuntu LTS Server, and occasionally Windows for testing or .NET development. Upgrading VirtualBox can be a little monotonous (and those annoying prompts) so I use a handy install/update script.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 is more than enough for everything design related, Adobe Lightroom for processing RAW, Final Cut Pro for video editing, Magic Bullet Looks for color grading.

Text editing is with Sublime Text 2 and Vim; I use the alloy/MacVim fork which bundles a polished native file browser for OS X with the excellent Janus Vim distro as my base configuration.

Code management is with git, GitNub to visualize commits and contributors.

Programming (language) toolkit:

Python 2.7.x with a constant eye towards 3.x; PyPy is my runtime of choice, it’s insanely fast and has reached a level of maturity that I can use it for most things. In general, Python is my *nix systems programming language of choice; it allows for rapid development, wraps POSIX, and has a large stdlib + community, all without having to touch C.

RVM to install and manage Ruby versions, Bundler for dependency management, Rails for general purpose web development.

As of late I’ve been using Node.JS a lot and it has given me a new found appreciation for JavaScript. It’s my go to for middleware development and even data analysis. All my data visualization is with JavaScript browser libraries dygraphs and D3, so number crunching with Node is a natural fit and quite fast.

Scala is the new comer of the bunch; if I need to target the JVM it’s great. It has a beautiful syntax and elegantly combines many paradigms including scratching my functional programming itch. Working with Spark, a UC Berkley/Apache Incubator project is a “lightning fast […] open source cluster computing system”, is built on Scala and is my latest data analytics experiment.

For other statistical computing I use R, but lately my data sets have been far too large. It’s still great for most things and RStudio helps me get the most out of R.

What would be your dream setup?

For computing, an iPad with proper multitasking, greater performance, infinite battery life, and Terminal. A full frame Canon SLR with a ton of L lenses would round out my photography needs. My dream axe, a Gibson Custom Les Paul, with all the tone, sans the 10+ lb. weight.

Encouraging UI students aspiring to be entrepreneurs

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:22:50 -0500

Encouraging UI students aspiring to be entrepreneurs

Spotlight: Tyler Finchum, Founder of Farm Manuals Fast

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:24:00 -0500

Spotlight: Tyler Finchum, Founder of Farm Manuals Fast:

We’re excited to have Tyler Finchum, founder of Farm Manuals Fast on our show today. He’s only a college freshman, but his company, which provides electronic documentation for farm equipment, manuals previously difficult to acquire, has already “had over 2,000 sales across 6 continents, 25 countries, and 50 states”. We’re going to pick his brain about the agriculture market, his strategies, and how he uses technology to already operate a successful business.

Sponsoring Startup Weekend Iowa City

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 12:49:53 -0500

Sponsoring Startup Weekend Iowa City:

We’re proud to be a Startup Weekend Iowa City sponsor. Stackd is also giving away two student scholarships, a unique opportunity to learn from serial entrepreneurs and turn their idea into a reality. Details of the contest are here.

The Stackd Show - Tuesdays at 4PM

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:36:00 -0500

We’re back! - Our weekly radio show on University of Iowa’s KRUI 89.7FM is returning this fall, every Tuesday at 4PM. Each week we’ll cover the latest and greatest in technology, business, and entrepreneurship, whether it’s here in the Silicon Prairie or abroad. If there are specific topics or questions you may have, shoot us an email or contact us via Twitter. To listen, just tune in to 89.7FM in Iowa City, or online here.

Behind the Technology: Managing Sessions w/ “Ghost” objects

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:15:55 -0500

Here at Stackd we use Ruby on Rails and CouchDB to serve our main application. One problem we ran into was managing user sessions. Initially, we had session[:user] set equal to a Seat::Record (see seat-rb, our Ruby CouchDB driver) object as such…

https://gist.github.com/945914

This works pretty well, but keeping the session variable up to date can be a pain. By storing the entire object in the session, we have to update the session object every time we update the database record for the logged in user. Even worse, if saving the object fails, your session object could show values different than those in the database. You may also run into problems if your web application is not the only thing updating database records. This is especially important when using CouchDB. In order to update a document, we need to have the entire contents of the most recent revision of that document.

Our initial solution was setting session[:user] equal to the logged in user’s username, and on each page load fetch that user’s document from CouchDB. Then, we set an instance variable equal to that document (in a before_filter called “all”).

https://gist.github.com/956605

This solved our initial problems, but in many cases it wasn’t necessary to load the entire document. Many pages simply needed to check whether a user was logged in, or display the logged in user’s username. This information is available to us w/o the need to fetch anything from CouchDB.

So what is the best way to go about only fetching the document from the database only when it is needed? One solution is to not have a @user instance variable defined on all pages. Then, we could load the entire document on a per action basis when needed. This would work, but would clutter up our actions and is not very DRY.

Instead, we decided to make a minor modification to the previous example. Instead of setting @user equal to a Seat::Record, we set it equal to a “Ghost” class. This “Ghost” class acts like a Seat::Record object type, but does not fetch the entire document from CouchDB unless it is needed.

https://gist.github.com/956620

The UserGhost class allows us to call @user.username without fetching the entire document from the database. If we try to get @user.email or any attribute other than the username, our UserGhost class will fetch the entire document from the database and behave just as an instance of User would.

Getting Better At Blogging

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:59:00 -0500

Getting Better At Blogging:

We’ve been so hard at work these first couple months that we’ve done a terrible job of letting everyone know how we’re doing and what working on. That’s changing, and we’d like to welcome you to the new home of our blog.

What is Stackd?

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 23:10:00 -0500

Since we began work on Stackd six months ago, the most common question we’ve received has (unsurprisingly) been “What is Stackd?”. We didn’t set out to be a “stealth” startup, however we didn’t want to hype up an unfinished product. Over the past few weeks, Stackd has finally reached a point where we’re ready to share what Stackd is and why we built it.

Stackd is Collaborative Web Hosting

The hosting space as a whole has evolved a lot in the past few years. Sites like Squarespace, Doodlekit, and others have made it incredibly easy for newcomers to create and publish content online. In addition, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon, Linode, and Rackspace have simplified the deployment of highly scalable web services, but require deep technical knowledge.

Despite these innovations, many web site owners haven’t reaped the benefits. Many users want more control over their website, but don’t have the technical knowledge or time to manage a web service with an IaaS provider. These users have been confined to middle tier hosting. This space has been largely ignored by hosting providers, and has become a commoditized nightmare:

Obtrusive administration panels
Difficult to collaborate
FTP (File Transfer Pain)
Everything “unlimited”, except performance
Oversold, “shared” architecture

Where does Stackd fit in?

With Stackd, we set out to build collaborative hosting with:

Ease of Squarespace and Doodlekit
Creative control provided by middle tier hosting
Power provided by IaaS providers like Amazon, Rackspace, and Linode

Where we are now

Stackd is nearing completion, and we expect to launch by the end of the month. In the coming weeks we’ll share updates and dive into more specific features, so keep an eye on the blog and follow us on Twitter!

hidama: 10 years (by brett jordan)

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:59:05 -0500

hidama:

10 years (by brett jordan)