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.

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. 

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.

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.

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

• 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.

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.

After almost a year of squatting as just a simple category on height1percent we finally have a dedicated blog to SlimTimer. I now have more room to post about scheduled service outages, product direction and new features.

Expect a lot of important posts in the next week …

… the slumbering dev team is awakening.

Over my frantic and sometimes shrill protests, a schooner full of performance issues docked with the server Monday morning. Not even a peace offering of copious amounts of RAM would satiate these foul bytes and they’ve since held the whole place hostage with their insanely slow response times.

(I’ll never be able to write for ErrTheBlog /sob)

I’ve did a boatload of performance optimizations over the last two days that I just loaded up on the server which should hopefully put and end to the suffering.

I’ve testing this release quite a bit, but as with anything that includes radical backend changes and a compressed time frame there exists a certain amount of risk. That said, if you notice anything odd about how SlimTimer is working please email me straight away.

We’re looking for people who use SlimTimer for their business to join our cadre of “Underpaid Geniuses” (aka Friends of Underpaid Genius). Here’s what you can expect from membership in this exclusive group:

• You’ll help us understand your software needs by filling out a survey or through a short phone interview (or over coffee/pints if you’re in the Bay Area).
• You’ll be invited to and be able to influence the early alpha and beta versions of the product.
• You’ll received benefits like free premium accounts, t-shirts and other shwag.

We’d like to hear from everyone but we’re especially interested in talking to people/businesses who aren’t developers or designers (we still love you though!) such as lawyers, writers, business consultants, photographers, et cetera.

If you’re interested please email friends@slimtimer.com with a short blurb about your business and what software you use for things like project management, time tracking, invoicing and expenses (eg: SlimTimer, Basecamp, Blinksale, Quickbooks, etc).