So code cleanup is going really well.  In the process I have really polished up my CSS/XHTML/Javascript skills.  The core software for RGB Daily, Pligg, is written with Prototype and  Script.aculo.us on the front end.  A couple of the custom plugins that where written use JQuery though. Working my way thorugh bugs I became really impressed with jQuery and decided to find out more about its author, John Resig.  Turns out he lives in Boston and also works for Mozilla now.  He is definitely my kinda architect.  In the pocess of two days I pretty much taught myself jQuery.

I started out just wanting to get rid of the ugly dialogs that the alert/confirm javascript functions produced.  I learned a lot from a plugin called Impromptu, written by Trent Richardson.  After figuring out how Prototype was stomping over the “$” shorthand of jQuery I was on my way (I’m a Java guy, not use to that kind of wild west stuff).  I hacked the CSS and added some convenience wrapper classes to implement replacements for the native prompt functions.  Here is a quick pic of what I was able to achieve:

PR

So I’m showing a little more than just the confirm dialog.  In the coming weeks I’ll be giving a little more guidance on what RGB Daily actually does and for what communities it serves.  For now you can have a look and speculate

As for updates on soft launch…  Still looks like September is reasonable.  At this point to be honest I just want to make the core production ready.  That means a bug free UI (address known bugs from internal testing) and a server side that is built for scale on clustered LAMP.

Mosso: How reliable can public clouds be?

Mosso had some hiccups today and that really bothers me.  I couldn’t commit my changes to the staging server for over half an hour because of FTP and site outages.  I really like what they are doing in terms of ease of use, but at times I just feel like they are no better than Media Temple. For the record I am a customer of both.

When it comes down to it I’ve had less outages hosting on a GoDaddy shared account.  Performance was also faster than the “cloud computing” alternatives for my case.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that there is a ton of engineering smarts going on at both outfits, but I know customers with public sites are constantly pulling their hair out.  I’m trying  my best to engineer my way around things that might bring down Mosso at scale; well my piece of Mosso anyway, like the DB.  What I can’t take care of though is the fragility of the entire system. These clouds seem to demonstrate some form of systemic fragility on a regular basis.  From Amazon, Google, and all the way down the line.  The August 11, 2008 Issue of Information Week talks about the concept of “Private Clouds”.  Basically talking about running  multinode cloud OSes on private infrastructure.  Elastra and 3Tera (further along) seem to have figured this out.  I’m just waiting for the price to come down.

I think that Mosso has an opportunity here for a new class of products.  If I’m correct,  at the core of their architecture they use virtualization to deploy and manage their nodes.  It would be really cool if they could implement some way to provide higher isolation between nodes.  Allowing people to have private interconnected nodes (web/db & shared SAN) that would be cool.  GoGrid looks interesting, but they don’t have a NAS/SAN device that can be attached to VMs.  Core to my evaluation of all of these solutions is how I can effectively manage growth on disk.  RGB Daily is media intensive and those requirements will only go up in the future.  Hopefully Mosso releases private VM containers in the near future to compliment the cloud.  That would solve a ton of problems without adding a lot more complexity.  For now I’ll be sticking with them and trying to figure out options for the DBs.

‘Til next time…

Status of Launch

So launch is really late, but the code is ten times better for it.  I also know pretty much every corner of the codebase and that will benefit me as the founder /architect of this puppy.  If a potential partner of investor has a question I have the answers and that’s invaluable.  August is the last major month of coding and a formal launch will happen towards the end of the month.  This is a drop dead date.

So I have been implementing a couple of performance improvements across the codebase.  RGB Daily is written in PHP, CSS/XHTML, and Javascript.  I was able to speed up the performance on the client side by integrating Minify to serve us the CSS and Javascript.  Processing on the server side was still taking around 2-3 seconds on average.  It turns out that the bottleneck was the templating engine.  There was a long standing bug which cleared previously loaded config constants when a new config file was appended. Consequently the main config file that was used in the application was reloaded after every sub module that makes up the page.

I refactored the code so that it only loads a single config file once per template instantiation.  I will go further and cache the parsed config files to get even more speed gains.  Localized files will only cost as much as a simple include.

To that end, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Seesmic API is really easy to integrate.  I thought video might come after launch, but now its clear to me that partnering with Seesmic is definitely the right thing to do.  The world has change since I started coding again.  I couldn’t be happier.

Seesmic Integration for Prelaunch 

As for the code base we are 100% feature complete.  Over the next week we will be cleaning up the codebase for the launch.  Over 9 months in the making, we are ready to show off all of our hard work.  There has been a lot of evolution in the service and we hope it will serve our users well.  Once we launch we will start introducing all of the cool features that are available at RGB Daily.com