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
Posted by Aaron LaBerge on November 23, 2009
We just launched the 2009 Coolspotters Holiday Gift Guide. Full of only the very best and very latest products in the world today, we hope you’ll take advantage of it during this busy holiday season. It was designed to make it easier for you to find the perfect gift for the fashionistas, the entertainment lovers, the gadget buffs, the sports enthusiasts, and just about everyone else, in your life.
Check it out and have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Aaron LaBerge
CEO & Co-founder
aaron@fanzter.com
Posted by Jon Ferry on August 19, 2009
I always find it interesting to see how start-ups handle growth and scaling. That’s part of the reason why I joined the Fanzter team, so I could see first-hand the analysis, planning, and execution behind scaling technology. I thought I’d take some time to give back to the community and share the current technology stack behind Coolspotters. Moving forward, we’ll be using this space to discuss the pros/cons of new technologies we’re researching and the decisions we make along the way.
Where We Are
Coolspotters, our flagship product, was built using Ruby on Rails and runs on Phusion Passenger application servers. Traffic is balanced using HAProxy. We use MySQL for storing all spot, profile, comment, and user data; everything except images. To increase performance and reduce load on our databases, we aggressively cache our data using Memcached. About 50% of Coolspotters activity hits cache. All searches, including site search and form auto-completes, are run against a Solr search server.
All Coolspotters servers are hosted on Amazon’s EC2 service. This allows us to scale quickly and perform reliably while keeping our costs down. All MySQL data is stored using Amazon’s EBS which provides snapshots several times a day. So should anything bad happen, we can restore our database quickly. I mentioned above that all data except images was stored in MySQL. For images, we use S3 for storage and Amazon’s CloudFront for delivery from several locations around the globe. All of our Amazon services are configured, deployed, and managed using RightScale.
Future Plans
We’re always trying to create a better experience for our users. This involves careful analysis of our infrastructure, identifying areas that need improvement, creating solutions, and then executing. One area we’ve identified as needing improvement is search. The indexing time of our current solution, Solr, isn’t optimal. Since search is tied into so many aspects of Coolspotters, we know we need to improve this to get the user experience we want. We’ve been experimenting with Sphinx as a replacement and have been pleased with the results so far.
Another area we are looking to optimize is image encoding, storage and delivery. Currently, most of the media uploaded to Coolspotters are images, so any improvement we make to speed up encoding and rendering time has a great impact on the entire site.
We’re looking forward to sharing more about the technical aspects of our products and what goes on behind the scenes here at Fanzter.
-Jon
Jon Ferry
Software Engineer
jferry@fanzter.com
Posted by Eric Kirsten on August 6, 2009
Launched just over a year ago, Coolspotters has grown to be the definitive source for the products and brands used by today’s biggest celebrities. All of us at Fanzter have been very excited about this growth, and we work every day to ensure that our community is empowered to share, discover, and interact around everything they’re passionate about – in a way not found anywhere else on the web.
Recently though, we took a breather to appreciate an incredible honor presented to us by the editors at PC Magazine, who named Coolspotters as one of their “Top 100 Websites of 2009“.
We greatly appreciate being considered, but we promise not to slow down! Keep an eye out for some exciting releases and developments coming this fall! Thanks again for the award, PC Mag, and a huge ‘thank you’ to the incredible community of users we have on Coolspotters!
-Eric
Eric Kirsten
EVP & Co-founder
eric@fanzter.com
Posted by Aaron LaBerge on June 23, 2009
We’re excited to announce today that Fanzter has acquired Mustache, Inc., a Richmond, VA-based software development company. Mustache’s founder, Jon Maddox, will be joining Fanzter full-time and will lead technology and product development for the company. When we started Fanzter, we committed ourselves to hiring only the best people, launching the best products, and partnering with only the best companies. Our acquisition of Mustache is consistent with this theme and, in Jon, we are excited about the opportunity to add a brilliant entrepreneur and product-builder to our team.
Mustache has created several popular iPhone applications such as Summizer, Streaks, and Brackets. If you’ve ever tried any of these apps, then you know how elegant and useful they are. We’re proud to add these products to our growing portfolio.
This acquisition gives us an incredibly well-rounded product suite – a family of applications that are informational, entertaining, and a little bit addictive (we hope). It definitely takes Fanzter to a new level of excellence, and we’re looking forward to what’s next. We can guarantee it won’t be boring.
-Aaron
Aaron LaBerge
CEO & Co-founder
aaron@fanzter.com
Posted by Aaron LaBerge on March 23, 2009
Today our friends at Curious Office launched their newest product – Inkd.
Inkd is a buy and sell marketplace for printed materials (brochures, business cards, flyers, envelopes, etc.) where business owners can choose from original templates made by professional designers. It’s an awesome service and definitely worth checking out.
Enjoy!
-Aaron
Aaron LaBerge
CEO & Co-founder
aaron@fanzter.com
