UTF-8 in documents now works

I’m embarassed that this didn’t work all along — we never actually tested this because it’s part of this big grey cloud of internationalization work that we have scheduled for the Milestone 3-4 time frame, but it was a surprise that simply putting UTF-8 text into the non-localized interface should fail. But it did.

Fortunately a minor set of schema changes and a configuration change set everything right and as of Sunday, we are now able to store and retrieve eastern characters. So if the urge strikes you to create a document in Japanese and send it to a bunch of friends, go for it.

Oopsie

We had an unplanned outage this afternoon because I removed something that I thought the system wasn’t using and in fact it was using it! Total downtime was less than a minute, no data was altered or lost, and I suspect that no users noticed…but I want to get in the habit of posting the oopsies here just because it’s a good practice.

M1B is in production.

If you find any funnies, please let us know at feedback at approver dot com.

Milestone 1b is in the birth canal

I'm trying to get one last thing polished up before I head over to Bar Camp this evening.

The big new feature in this one is going to be file uploads.

I also added polish to some of the stuff that we pushed last time (specifically, the location of the "My Documents" RSS feed will be a lot more obvious).

I'll post again when it's pushed.

Milestone 1A is out!

Just pushed Milestone 1A to production. New goodness:

• Set a deadline for approval
• Receive an email alert when someone approves one of your documents
• Receive an email alert when someone comments on one of your documents
• Subscribe to an RSS feed of data found on the My Documents page (thanks to Doug for the input on how best to do this)
• Ask questions or leave feedback through the feedback form.

In this release we also Ajaxified certain actions in the My Documents page for better responsiveness (the page no longer does a complete reload when you invite someone or leave a comment). We also fixed a bug with display of line breaks in non-editable documents and comments (thanks to Suw for catching this). Last but not least, we changed the email address we're using for alerts — if you're using whitelisting or inbox filtering, alerts -at- approver.com is the address you'll want to handle, since that's the address that all automatically-generated alerts will come from henceforth.

New milestone release coming tonight, probably

I felt really motivated to do a new Approver release this week so I got my act together, fixed some bugs, and added some new features. (I may have to revisit the way that I've divided up the features into milestones; there may be too much to do between each one and I think I'd prefer to release something new every other week from now on if I can.) Since this didn't contain everything I'd committed myself to in Milestone 2, let's call this one Milestone 1A.

The theme of M1A is alerting. I added a few new kinds of email alerts (to let you know when somebody commented on your document and when someone approves). In this milestone you can also track documents via RSS. I didn't include this feature initially because I wasn't sure how to do that in a way that was secure. After talking it through with Doug I think I have the answer. Let me know if you agree.

I'm going to have dinner with the fam and then come back and push. After I push, if everything goes well, I'm going to invite a few more people. (As always I'll post again here when the new build goes up.)

Milestone 1 is ready

I got Milestone 1 working on my crappy old server connected to DSL in my home office at about midnight last night. The final sticking point was email alerts — I'd forgotten that my ISP blocks port 25 by default as an anti-spam tactic, but fortunately they have a self-serve form to shut that off, so as soon as I remembered that I flipped the switch and the glorious email alerts started flowing.

At some point the plan is to move all of this to a commodity hosting provider; that should make things a little more peppy and hopefully will provide more reliable uptime.

I invited a few people to use the system last night but it's basically totally open for now. If you're reading this and you want to play, feel free to register and create a document. Email me (jeffrey at approver dot com) if you have any questions.

Progress Report

Approver.com Milestone 1 is coming along. I should have something to show people within the next week or so. I'm at that point where I have to resist the urge to add new features because I've got this list of bugs I need to get taken care of. I am the kind of programmer who hates finding/fixing bugs (which probably is a red flag that I am a mediocre programmer, I dunno). But we'll get there eventually — the bug list is not that long and this thing is still simple enough that I can keep a lot of the quirky bits in my brain without having to re-learn stuff I thought I'd finished a month ago.

I am writing this from Ritual Roasters in the Mission. I came here because I needed to get out of the house and get some stuff done this afternoon and because all the cool kids supposedly come here to work on their web sites. I have to say, though, other than the free wi-wi, I don't see the appeal of this joint. It's noisy here, and poorly ventilated (the fact that we're having a much-needed early summer warm snap in the city isn't helping). The part where they screw covers onto the electrical outlets on weekends to keep their deadbeat customers from sitting around and consuming valuable space/electricity was particularly off-putting. As soon the battery on my mac runs out, I am outta here.