1. Busywith Gets Press!

    Hello everyone,

    I thought I’d let you know about a couple of places that busywith has had some press recently.

    Firstly I submitted busywith to feedmyapp.com. It’s a site I read every so often and I thought it would be interesting to see how much traffic it generated.

    You can see the submission here http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/busywith-what-s-your-team-doing/16010

    Then it seems we got picked up by killerstartups.com. This site seems to have an actual human reviewing the sites which is nice, you can read it here: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/busywith-com-project-management-made-simple

    I’m not sure about the visitor numbers yet but it definitely increased the number of sign-ups! I’ll update once I have some firmer numbers!

    Happy Easter everyone.

  2. First New Feature

    Right, well it’s not been that long since I went live with busywith, but I thought I’d release something that I almost put in the release version but realised it was something that could wait until later.

    Now when adding a status, if the length of the update is too long then we cut it off and display a little icon. If you hover over the icon the tooltip will show you the rest of the status.

    This helps keeps all of the status boxes the same size whilst still allowing you to enter pretty much as big an update as you like (currently 1000 characters max!).

    Let me know what you think!

  3. Launch!

    Well, the day has finally arrived. Late Thursday night I hit the button to release busywith onto the live servers!

    It’s an exciting day here, I’m planning on organically growing the site for a couple of weeks without doing any major announcement just to make sure everything is running ok, then we’ll ramp things up!

    So if anyone is reading this, head to http://busywith.com and sign up now!

  4. Nearly There

    I know it’s been a long time since I updated the blog but I have been feaverishly working on the site and I think we’re about ready to launch!

    Keep an eye out in the coming few days for the announcement!

  5. New Landing Page

    Right, I think things are starting to look a bit more professional now. I’ve been scanning other landing pages and reading books on optimising them and finally think I’ve come up with something worth looking at.

    It has a nice big ‘call to action’ (the big red button) and some nice icons from IconEden too!

    I think I can finally get back to looking at finishing off the rest of the code before I launch. I’m lucky enough to have a friend testing what’s currently there which is providing to be a great source of motivation to actually get this done and released!

    I can’t wait until I can replace that ‘notify me’ button with a ‘sign up now’ button!

  6. Design Design Design

    I just wish I had one small design bone in my body… but I don’t so I’m having to make use of my distinctly uncreative brain for the time being to make the site at least passable.

    Anyway, here’s a sneak peak of the ‘update your status’ page…

  7. We have a winner!

    Well, I changed my mind at the last minute and chose the logo below. Phew.

    It was a great process, I think perhaps I should have let the designers just do what they want rather than give them such a strict brief, but I’m happy with the outcome.

    So, what do you think?

  8. Logo Design

    Well if we’re going to have a Web 2.0 website then we need both a decent colour scheme and a decent logo don’t we!

    For the logo I went with 99designs. For those of you who don’t know how it works, basically you submit your ‘design brief’ and how much money you’re willing to spend ($300 in this case!) and then you get submissions from various people. At the end of a week you pick the one you like, they get the money and you get the logo!

    The competition link is here: http://99designs.com/contests/28333

    I’ll post the winning logo next week when the competition is over! I can’t wait, it’s only been up since Sunday and there are some great designs already!

  9. It’s Alive! Kind of…

    Finally, busywith.com actually links to something now. Alright, it’s a very, very sparse landing page but still it’s better than nothing!

    I’m not going to actively promote the site for the moment, there’s still too many things left to do behind the scenes but I’m happy that there’s actually something there now.

    I’ve also fallen in love with the Arial Rounded font that I’ve used, it’s just so friendly! :) It even looks good on the iPhone.

    I’ve included a screenshot for, what I hope will be posterity. One day (from my hammock on the beach somewhere tropical) I’ll look back on today and say ‘That’s how it all started’… or something like that…

    Onwards and upwards…

  10. Rails Validations

    So today I was making the invitation form (for new team members) all ajaxy. I thought it would take a few minutes, I’ve done a simliar thing in a few other places and it went without a hitch.

    However, in this case, it didn’t. For some reason it was letting me put in a blank email and would validate it… Even though the sign up form, which is the same user model, was validating fine.

    I was checking for errors.on(:email) and it was coming back with nothing, which was really infuriating. Then after about an hour I realised that RAILS ONLY ADDS THE ERRORS WHEN YOU CALL valid? ON THE MODEL.

    There, I won’t forget that again…

    (I won’t even mention that half an hour was taken up by me not understanding why my model didn’t have a vaild? method… damned pedantic if you ask me…)