Posted by Joshua Warchol on December 31, 2009
This being my first post to the Fanzter blog, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Joshua Warchol and I am a Senior Software Engineer at our Collinsville, CT office. I joined Fanzter in December 2008, making 2009 my first full year with the team. I’d like to look back on 2009 from a technology perspective and see what Fanzter has been up to “under the covers.” The past year has been terrific for Coolspotters with raw growth that I’m very proud of and a ton of very active new users spotting away. We’ve been doing a few things on the tech side to keep that going smoothly.
All of our sites are hosted “in the cloud” on Amazon’s EC2 service. Because of that we’ve been able to grow our network organically as needed. Early in the year we decided a dedicated caching server (memcache) was needed, and within hours it was up and running. Coolspotters depends heavily on our search server running the Apache Solr search engine. Mid-year we found it needed a little more juice, so without much more than a reboot we more than doubled that server’s available resources. These flexibility and agile tools have allowed us to grow and improve the servers without needing to dedicate full-time resources to it. More time to develop cool new features!
We’re working on a number of new projects, some of which you may have heard about in earlier blog posts, others you really should check back to hear about soon. An interesting part of that has been the opportunity to explore technologies more deeply. Coolspotters has always used software libraries to resize photos our members post so they fit in all the different places photos are shown on the site. Up until the summer of 2009 that work was largely done with just a few configuration settings on some stock open source software (attachment_fu, rmagick). But more discrete requirements made it worthwhile for us to go deeper into the tools and make our use of them more flexible. We developed custom recipes for manipulating images to optimize them for the platforms they’ll be seen on, and to make beautiful composites for use in our publishing tools. It took a team effort to hunt down tricky little problems along the way and teamwork like that is what I love about our crew.
One other big push in 2009 was to start making the awesome spots by our community available on other social media sites. As they say, “Go big or go home”, so we started with publishing to Facebook and Twitter. We’ve added associations within our data to link profiles of celebrities and brands to their social media identities (Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, etc) and are able to intelligently mention who a post refers to in context, with a link back to the spot for more details. It was a trying process to learn the ins and outs of several very different publishing interfaces simultaneously, but the results are proving it worthwhile. Most of our posts to these social networking sites are part of our automated publishing tools, with editorial involvement to ensure we’re posting what many followers are interested in. Our work so far has only scratched the surface of what’s possible, so definitely become a fan of Coolspotters on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@coolspotters) to see what comes next.
2009 brought new faces to the team, while some shook hands and bid farewell, and all the while Coolspotters grew and grew. Some of the days were very long, but the year flew by. It’s hard to believe 2010 is tomorrow, but I know the best is yet to come.
Joshua Warchol
Senior Software Engineer
joshua@fanzter.com
Posted by Aaron LaBerge on December 24, 2009
Happy Holidays from your friends at Fanzter!
Aaron LaBerge
CEO & Co-founder
aaron@fanzter.com
Posted by Aaron LaBerge on December 17, 2009
It’s been several months since we acquired Mustache, Inc. and their great suite of applications. The acquisition is complete, so over the last few months we’ve been focusing on developing new products, as well as also upgrading some of our existing products — and Streaks is one of them.
Streaks is a motivational calendar for your iPhone and iPod Touch. It is a simple, smart way for anyone to track the consecutive days it takes to reach a certain goal. For each day that you accomplish your task, you mark it on the Streaks calendar, motivating yourself to keep the streak going. In our integration of Mustache into Fanzter, there have been a few hoops in re-publishing the application through the App Store. During this time we’ve appreciated all of the requests for Streaks’ return, and we’ve been moving quickly to respond.
So today, we’re happy to say that Streaks is available once again. It is now optimized for the 3.0 OS and has many other performance enhancements as well.
Download Streaks now or visit our product page to find out more.
We hope you enjoy!
Aaron LaBerge
CEO & Co-founder
aaron@fanzter.com
Posted by Aaron LaBerge on December 16, 2009
Last week Coolspotters launched a new partnership program aimed at celeb-savvy brands who want to reach the perfect audience.
You can read more about it here:
http://coolspotters.com/blog/2009/12/16/coolspotters-rolls-out-new-e-commerce-partnership-program
Aaron LaBerge
CEO & Co-founder
aaron@fanzter.com
Posted by Jon Maddox on December 14, 2009
It’s been a busy 6 months since I joined Fanzter. Things aren’t slowing down, so I thought I’d finally take a second to introduce myself.
Who Am I?
My name is Jon Maddox, I live in Richmond, Va. I’m a software developer that loves building great products. You can find a little more about me here, you can Google me, or follow me at Twitter and GitHub. For now, lets talk about something that’s actually interesting….like why I’m at Fanzter and what I’ll be doing.
Why Am I Here?
I am currently the VP of Technology and Product Development for Fanzter. I joined Fanzter through the acquisition of my previous company, Mustache, Inc. So why am I here? Well, in all my years of using/playing with/developing technology, I’ve come to have pretty high standards and taste. I know what’s good and I know what’s not-so-good. In a nutshell, I know what sucks. And the inverse of that, I know what’s awesome — the work Fanzter is doing is AWESOME. So my role here is to help them finish their current product roadmaps and help invent future products. So while I’ll still be developing, I’ll also be making some pretty crucial decisions on our product roadmaps.
Coolspotters.com was already a really amazing product before I joined the team. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. But, the beauty of Coolspotters is, that it’s a rooted product that has the ability to scale out in a million different directions. The hardest part is to control those directions. So one thing I’ll be doing is helping to determine which of those directions we actually act on, and in what order. All of those decisions will be based on 3 things:
- Time to Develop / Value – The old ‘low hanging fruit’ plan. Being a small team, we have to pick and choose our next gen features wisely. The last thing we want to do is spend months on a feature that lends nothing to the entire site. It’s important that we we balance how awesome a feature will be for users with the length of time it will take to develop.
- Does it make Coolspotters easier to use? – Coolspotters is a pretty massive site. If time isn’t taken to examine a feature closely, it’d be super easy to junk it up. It’s important to make sure each new feature fits into the flow of Coolspotters easily. Anyone can add feature after feature. But without a clear understanding and fit for that feature, you end up with super bloat. We want to make Coolspotters as user friendly to browse as we can.
- Does it make Coolspotters’ data more expressive? – Coolspotters hosts an enormous amount of data. Awesome data. This has the potential to get you lost pretty easily. It’s important for us that Coolspotters data is understandable and obvious. Any new feature has to improve this usability, not make it more hectic.
Etc.
During all of this, I’m also working on some pretty awesome internal tools, and a iPhone app here and there, that help the Fanzter family of products become even better. But more on that later…
Jon Maddox
VP, Tech & Product Development
jon@fanzter.com
