Production push 31 July 2006

Last night Doug and I were having a conversation about what the My Documents page should be all about. He suggested that the page should give people a better sense of what they need to do, since after you get a few documents in your queue the amount of text gets to be a bit much (especially on my page, which has tons of test documents including a few that contain cleverly-simulated Japanese hijacked from .JP web sites).

After shooting a couple mockups back and forth, we agreed that it would make sense to add a couple of icons to the My Documents page to denote documents that need attention (you need to either review or approve them) or documents that can be safely removed from your queue (because you’ve either already viewed them or already approved them).

I don’t really “do” icons, not because I’m incapable of wrangling them, but because I see them used way too often. (One time in one of my previous jobs somebody asked for my opinion on what they should use for a “delete” icon on a web page, I think my choices were a big red slash or a big red X. I was like, “can’t you just use a hyperlink with the word “delete” on it?”)

But I think in this case, the icons are really helpful since they focus your attention on the documents in the queue you should be paying attention to, and their function is relatively self-explanatory.

So: here’s a new push of Approver.com, now with more iconic goodness.

Minor bug fix, 31 July 2006

Just pushed a fix to a bug that prevented you from downloading certain types of files that had been uploaded to Approver.com.

This only affected one person and no data was lost. Big thanks to Dave for reporting the bug with a detailed screenshot of what was going on.

Production push 30 July 2006

A rare Sunday push enables us to bestow the following goodness on Approver.com:

• The user’s full first and last name is now displayed in the list of a document’s reviewers/approvers. (Previously, only user names were being displayed, which made the list very hard to read.)
• User profiles! Each user has their own profile page located at profile.aspx. This is where you can view information about users (including yourself). For now this is just comprised of email addresses, so there’s some overlap between this page and the contacts page, but in the future this will contain more useful information.
• Added a link to your profile page from the bottom of every page on the site (the link only appears when you’re logged in).
• Added the ability for users to change their passwords. This form is located on the aforementioned profile page.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we’re eager to hear it.

Production push 29 July 2006

New goodies pushed to production today:

You can now give other users the ability to edit documents you’ve created in the browser. Do this by clicking the check box labeled “This person may edit this document” when you invite someone to review your document.

Added a list of contacts to the invite section of the document page to make it possible to invite someone to review a document without having to type in their name (just click on a contact in the list then click on the Invite button). In a future release, we’ll likely make it so that you can invite a whole bunch of people from your contacts list by control-clicking on this list.
People are now added to your contacts list when you invite them to review one of your documents as well as vice versa. (Previously contacts were only added when you invited someone; the converse was not true.)

Fixed a problem where user information such as name and email address wasn’t being updated in your contacts list when your contact converted from an invited user to a registered user.

Enhanced the look of the contacts page (contact.aspx) a bit and provided the ability to delete a contact.

Fixed an architectural flaw that would have caused bad things to happen if a user had uploaded two files with the same name (which no one ever has).

Got to the bottom of a weird problem having to do with updating the document view page that was driving me insane until I realized it wasn’t really my fault at all, it was due to a Firefox extension (the Cocomment extension) messing with Ajax postbacks on the page. I’m uninstalling Cocomment until they figure this one out (which is too back because I was really starting to like Cocomment).

Update: VC blogger Fred Wilson ran into a problem with some CoComment blog bling (it took down his blog for 36 hours). Ouch.

Simple document workflow is a pain-killer

John Scalzi went medieval on a PR rep after receiving an extremely poorly-targeted (and poorly-phrased) pitch in email.

The follow-up email he got from the CEO of the PR firm later in the week stated that the person who sent him the pitch did so in error, and that the person specifically hadn’t followed the firm’s standard procedure for approving documents. (That person now does not have a job.)
What do you want to bet that the firm’s standard procedure for document approval was to send a Word document around in email? What do you want to bet that the document actually did get circulated for approval, but that the key approver didn’t look at the document, or didn’t get to it in time, or it got eaten by somebody’s spam filter (etc.)?

Avoiding this kind of problem is one of the reasons why Approver.com was created. As I’ve talked to people about Approver, some have raised the old VC canard “is this product a pain-killer or is this a vitamin?” I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy for a couple of reasons:

• “Painkiller vs. vitamin” isn’t an either-or proposition, it’s a continuum. Does your product provide value or not? Is it more valuable, or cheaper, or faster than the alternatives? If so, it’s a pain-killer.
• Whether your business is a painkiller or a vitamin really depends on how you evaluate it subjectively.
• There are plenty of terrific businesses that are really just “vitamins”. At the end of the day, most technology businesses can be thought of as vitamins if you just close your eyes and think hard enough about how little the world would change if they suddenly winked out of existence.

Setting all that aside, the Scalzi episode is a terrific example of how having a simple, effective system for doing document approval is definitely a pain-killer.

“You can help put an end to Word attachments”

Just ran across this and all I have to say is wow. This guy clearly has some hostility toward Word (and his proposed solutions betray a, um, geekish perspective), but he also has a few excellent points.

Production push 15. July 2006

Big new push this morning. This is our first big production push since moving to the new datacenter, so there were a few rough edges to sand down, but nothing terrible and everything went more or less as planned.

We added a very big feature today: wiki markup for documents. This gives you the ability to add formatting to documents you create in the browser. Thanks to Suw for suggesting the feature and thanks to the authors of Markdown and Markdown.NET for the code to make implementing this easy.

Other new features include:

• Fixed a long-standing bug associated with inviting a user to review a document via email. If someone (probably me) sent you an email invitation to review a document and you found the registration flow to be dodgy, this is fixed now.
• Revised the home page. Made it possible to log in from the home page.
• Performed some back-end work to make it possible to accept PayPal payments in a future release.
• Applied limitations on number of documents a new/unpaid user can create.
  Extensive refactoring of the document view page. Added more ajax to this page (thereby increasing performance and responsiveness).
• Simplified display of dates and deadlines on My Documents and document view pages.
• Provided a contacts page. This shows a list of everyone you’ve ever invited to review a document to make it easier to invite them to review other documents. In the future we’ll expand this to make it easier to add contacts to review your documents.
• Created a SOAP web service (undocumented for now) that enables clients to retrieve contacts.
• The system can now store documents and comments written in any international language (UTF-8 support).
• Added more consistent alert boxes throughout the application; added alert boxes that give feedback to the user when they successfully approve a document and delete a document (thanks Dave for suggesting that).
• You can now remove a reviewer from the list of reviewers.
• You can now remove a document from your My Documents queue after you’ve reviewed or approved it. This has no effect on the document itself, it only removes it from your queue.
• Extended user sessions to be a seven-day sliding window, so if you use Approver once a week or more, you’ll never have to log in again.

Data center migration, 9. Jul 2006

I spent much of the weekend packing up Approver.com and migrating it onto more impressive hardware in a real data center. Most of the work went swimmingly but it also reminded me of the fact that hell is system administration. I can do the work just fine, but man, is it unsatisfying.

Until today, Approver has been running on a six year old server off a DSL line in my office at home in San Francisco. Performance has been fine, but then again, I’m fairly sure we weren’t servicing more than one request every five minutes at times of maximum load. (Come to think of it, we probably could have run the site off of a six-year-old cel phone and nobody would have noticed.)

I wasn’t going to do this move for another 3-4 weeks but we have some workers doing upgrades to our back yard this week; the downstairs part of our house (where my office is and where our servers live) is going to be dismantled starting on Monday, so I needed to take the old server out of service a little sooner than I’d planned.

Because we have a bunch more capacity now, the new hardware will give us the ability to start talking about Approver more openly and promoting it, which I expect we’ll start doing in a month or so. If we get a hundred or more preview users between now and the end of August, that would not be such a bad thing.
Total downtime this evening was about three minutes. I did some end-to-end testing after all the code and data flew across the wire and everything looks copacetic, but feel free to post here or leave feedback if you run into any funnies.

Production push 1 July 2006

Did a minor push today to fix some bugs. Not a lot of new feature functionality in this release because the major things we’re working on are either not done yet or only exist behind the scenes. Here are the details:

• Fixed a couple bugs having to do with storage of UTF-8 text (as of last week it was possible to store UTF-8 documents; that feature is now 100% functional)
• Added a document creation scriptlet and added a tools page that explains how to use it. If you use the scriptlet, you can create a document on Approver.com with a single click if you’re logged in.
• Provided the ability to remove a document from your My Documents queue once you’ve viewed and/or approved it.
• Added polish to the list of reviewers/approvers that appears in My Documents.
• Added polish to the list of uploaded files in My Documents (specifically, added colored icons for uploaded files).
• Fixed an bogus error message that was occurring when you deleted a document.
• Removed “Add to My Yahoo” as a syndication option because it wasn’t working. If anyone is really passionate about getting My Yahoo integration working, post a comment here or leave feedback and we’ll try to find time to work on it, but it’ll likely be deprioritized for this milestone since there are other readers that we know our RSS works with such as NetNewsWire and NetVibes (i.e., it seems likely like this bug is My Yahoo’s fault).
• Improvements to internal usage reporting and error tracking to help us see how people are actually using the system.

We are looking into using TypeKey as an alternate authentication mechanism for Approver.com in hopes of making Approver.com more compelling for the corporate blogging use case. The rationale for doing this would be to make it easier for those who were already using Typepad to use Approver for the collaboration/workflow part. If this use case applies to you, we’d love to get your feedback on how it should work and whether it would be meaningful to you.