SlimTimer Blog

Unplanned Outage

Richard White — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:31:10 +0000

Our host (EngineYard) is having major issues with the cluster we’re on (ey05): http://engineyard.wordpress.com/

We’re following up and hope to hear something positive soon.

Improved performance and premium subscriptions for your whole team

Richard White — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:38:40 +0000

Just wanted to make a note that our move to our new server cluster was successful and has improved performance dramatically. We’re very pleased with our new solution stack of EngineYard (managed hosting), NewRelic (performance monitoring) and HopToad (error monitoring) that should help us keep on top of things.

I’d also like to mention that you can now upgrade your whole team to premium on one account. Email us (support AT slimtimer.com) if you’re interested.

Server Downtime this Sunday

Richard White — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:27:12 +0000

Happy New Year! To celebrate we’re moving SlimTimer over to EngineYard which should help with a lot of the performance issues that have been cropping up lately. We’ll try to make the switch as painless as possible but expect it to be offline for the better part of the day. Sorry for any inconvenience.

New server online but with performance issues

Richard White — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:01:54 +0000

Moving the server and it should be down for the next 2 hours. Keep your timers open and they’ll save their time when the new server comes online. We’ll keep you updated here.

Update: Server is up and as soon as the DNS updates you’ll be forwarded along. If you don’t want to wait the new server IP is 209.20.76.230 which you can plug into your HOSTS file.

Update2 [18:00 GMT]:The new server is pretty sluggish right now. We’re actively working on the problem. You may experience intermittent connection issues.

Data export, backups and premium subscriptions are here!

Richard White — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:03:18 +0000

We just soft launched our premium subscription service with a couple of features that a lot of you have been asking for in data backup and export. We’re also trying something different that you won’t see on many other services on the web: name your own pricing for premium services. We’ll suggest a monthly price based on your usage level, but ultimately you know what SlimTimer is worth to you.

There will also be discrete, and like our taglines hopefully amusing, ads on the timer window for non-premium users which will be rolled out next week.

Finally, a big thanks goes out to the two newest members of the SlimTimer team: Scott Rutherford and Daniel Beardsley, for helping put all this together. With SlimTimer soon to be a profitable venture and two extra hands we should start making light work of our backlog.

Thanks again for using SlimTimer and lending your support.

Service outage starting at 01:00 GMT

Richard White — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:35:03 +0000

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past 4 days looking at ways to improve reports. Unfortunately the solution requires us to take down the service for a few hours this evening. Thank you for your patience.

Seeking Partner in Crime (aka LF1M RoR Mage PST)

Richard White — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 02:06:12 +0000

The response to UserSuggest has been tremendous and has given me a mandate for what’s next (If you still haven’t thrown in your 2 cents do it now), but first the other shoe has to drop: I need a partner in crime.

And not just any two-bit developer brute either, but someone with real panache:

You’ve built and launched Ruby on Rails app
Freelance experience is a plus
Being a SlimTimer user is a big plus
Able to commit 10-15 hours a week (your day job makes a good front for our interweb operation)

The plan is this, I’ll keep watch on the front(end) while you cover the back(end). Got it? Good.

Compensation will be a sizable equity stake and share of the loot (our first order of business will be to implement a payment system).

Interested? Email me right away but be discrete.

You decide what’s next

Richard White — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:54:13 +0000

We’ve just rolled out a new tool for compiling your feedback that will give us a clearer picture of where SlimTimer should go.

The tool is UserSuggest and with it you’ll be able to make suggestions and/or spending votes on existing suggestions that you would like to see implemented. Check it out at usersuggest.com/sites/slimtimer.

UserSuggest is comparable to a Digg for feature requests or Dell’s IdeaStorm with one major difference: you have a finite number of votes to spend on one or many suggestions*. I have to give a nod to Joel Spolsky as I was inspired by his article on Setting Priorities wherein he describes giving a product team $50 dollars each to ‘fund’ the features they’d like to see in the next release. Our goals are to decrease the overhead required to manage your feedback (this means reducing the amount of duplication) and be able to easily discern the priorities for the community as a whole.

This constitutes Phase I of our plan to ramp on new development for SlimTimer. The next phase is to finally go freemium and create a premium (paid) subscription service to complement our free plan. More on that later.

Finally, this also means that the use of the message board for feature requests is now deprecated. I’d humbly ask anyone that’s posted a feature request in there recently to repost it on UserSuggest.

* your votes renew as suggestions are deleted or completed

Lighter, Faster Reporting

Richard White — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:17:07 +0000

User filter now defaults to ‘You’ instead of ‘You+Friends’ (formerly ‘Myself’ and ‘All’)
Reports for just ‘You’ now run significantly faster than other options and than they did before hence why the default was changed.
Redesigned the interface to feel lighter and less cluttered.

Dropped some options (~~‘Last Week’~~*, ‘Last Month’, ‘Others’) that weren’t getting a lot of usage in order to simplify the interface. See the graphs below for some usage stats on those options.
Added a ‘Last 30 days’ option
Renamed the ‘Audit’ report as the ‘Invoice’ report

There was one other global, but subtle design change made and I’ve got a cookie for the first person who leaves a comment point out what it is.

Look for an announcements soon on how you’ll be able to participate in deciding our next features and also a final(?) answer about SlimTimer going freemium.

* update: The ‘Last Week’ option has since been resurrected due to overwhelming public support

…

Commentary & Supporting Statistics

The following were derived from a sample of ~2000 report requests pulled from the SlimTimer logs for a recent Monday. The graphs all represent what % of reports were run with that option. I used these results a supporting evidence when deciding which options to eliminate.

The two ‘Last’s came in dead last with only 3% each.

You don’t see ‘Others’ on here because it, when rounded, was 0%.

I didn’t eliminate the ‘Audit’ report, but rather renamed it to ‘Invoice’ as that’s a more apt description of it. I’m curious to see what effect, if any, a name change has on usage (though ‘Invoice’ maybe be too much of a tease, since it’s not an actual invoice) and will use these numbers as my baseline.

Downtime this Saturday (Nov 3)

Richard White — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:09:11 +0000

We may be upgrade the database from PostgreSQL 8.1 to 8.2 this Saturday from approx. 1800 to 2300 GMT which would result in the SlimTimer being down during that time. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.