So, our mystery project launched its first version yesterday and within 24 hours it made its way around the internet and got tons of hits!  Thanks to everyone who helped promote the site.

 Someone posted it on PSL's reddit feed and Technically Philly took notice.  They wrote an article about isNSFW. Go check it out!

Pretty sad that someone else writes about isNSFW before me, right?  But we have been very busy with work and with making sure the site is stable.  A full writeup to come shortly.

 -eli

On April 16th I'll be heading to the Drexel Baiada Center to give a speech on Daily Missio.

Aksel Gungor and the Drexel Entrepreneur Association (DEA) are trying to take the Ignite! Philly model and bring it to drexel's campus for waht they're calling Ignite! Drexel.  Since I'm a recent graduate of Drexel University, Aksel approached me and asked me to give a 2 minute speech about Daily Mission and what we're trying to accomplish.

I'll admit that before attending the PSL events I was going to pass on the idea.  I'm still learning how to pitch and promote Daily Mission in a way that will make people "get it."  But the laid back atmosphere at PSL opened my eyes to what's really out there in the community.  People are more geniunly interested in what others are doing than I had previously thought.  I was afraid people would tear down every pitch and shred everything I might say; that's the reason I didn't get a booth at the PSL expo night in the first place!  But I'm finding that the community is actually quite caring and sincere.  They truly want you to succeed!  Imagine that!

So, assuming my little guy (that is, my newborn) behaves, we'll see you at the Baiada Center on the 16th.

 -eli

We're working on another small, niche project that should be completed in the next week or two.  The codebase is very small and the effort to get it done is in the area of 50 hours.  Normally we'd curb the idea and save it for later.  Daily Mission is a handful by itself so adding on another project?  Yea, probably not the best idea.  But with such a small amount of effort, we felt like we could get 'er done.

Stay tuned for the launch of the new mystery site.  Along with it, we're going to hopefully launch a new TS Labs section of the site to showcase our personal projects.  We have Daily Mission and this Mystery Project to add to it along with a few articles, jquery plugins, and .NET custom controls that we think others might find useful.

I'll try to update soon.

 -eli

I first started this blog post as a recap of the PSL Expo night and then decided... if you want to read about the expo, go check out their site!  In short, the expo was awesome.  There were a lot of great projects and it was cool to think that they're all budding in and around the Philadelphia area.  And with that, let me move on to my personal experiences of the expo night.

For some background, this was only my second PSL event.  I attended my first one when Jameson Detweiler (konnect.me) convinced me to tag along with him.  Let me tell you, that day was one of the most inspiring days I've had as an entrepreneur.  I met the guys at Morgan Lewis in the morning, saw Josh Kopelman speak in the afternoon, and then finished it off with a PSL Social.  At the social, I was fortunate enough to meet up with Pete Groverman (Tapinko) who I had spoken with a few times on the phone, but who I hadn't met before that day.  And in between Jameson and Pete I met a slew of others that helped revive my entrepreneural spirits.

So that brings is up to the PSL Expo.  There were over 50 projects on display and a few hundred people roaming around between them.  While there were some great projects on display, I have to admit that I was there for a more selfish reason: I wanted to listen to and learn from the various pitches by these people.  You see, I find myself in an interesting situatuation.  I've got a few startup ideas, one of which -- Daily Mission --is already off the ground.  But if you go back and read my blog post on being an engineur you'll see that in the past I've been more engineer than entrepreneur.  Well Daily Mission doesn't need an engineer anymore.  Phil and I have worked hard to engineering what Daily Mission needs in terms of technology.  What it needs now is an entrepreneur!  It needs a business leader and I've been working hard to step up to the plate and learn how to do that.  The PSL events so far have been the single most valuable resources that I've had to do this.

Ok, so what did I learn?  Well most importantly, I learned that everyone had their pitch down to a science.  There wasn't fumbling.  There was a lot of confidence in the air about their projects and how they were going to change the world.  Ok, so I probably didn't need the Expo to tell me that I need to be confident in my pitch, but it was still useful to see that no matter how many people came to a given booth, the presenters weren't making up their elevator pitch on the fly -- it was practiced and well understood.  At my first PSL event I got the opportunity to refine my pitch.  It started off terribly (just ask anyone that had to endure my rambling while I tried to piece it together) but I will say that by the end of the night I had a pretty good understanding of what was working in my pitch and what was not.

After I made my rounds and heard a few pitches, I parked myself with Pete at the Tapinko station.  I got to hear him give a few pitches.  It was unfortunate that the internet wasn't working because his entire presentation revolved around being able to show off his product.  But that didn't stop him from engaging anyone that was willing to even stutter step in front of his table.  I was impressed with his confidence and I took some mental notes on how to engage people.

After Tapinko I, of course, made my way over to Jameson at konnect.me to check out his pitch.  He was fortunate enough to have internet and it really helped his presentation.  I watched him run through konnect.me about 4 or 5 times and everytime was the same runthrough.  It was interesting to watch the people being presented to.  You could see when they had that "aha" moment -- when they truly understood what Jameson was going for.  In the matter of 30-60 seconds he was able to run through the main features of the site and highlight a lot of what makes konnect.me different, expandable to other verticles, and even what makes it unique and useful today even with a small market.  Between me and you, I think he's done this before.

Those were the only two booths that I knew people at, so after overstaying my welcome there I headed down to the floor to mingle with some of the fellas I met at the previous PSL.   I ran into the guys at Morgan Lewis again.  They were nice enough to suffermy seemingly endless tirade about how draining a newborn baby can be (sorry!).  I also ran into Ben Kessler who I apparently wrote up while I was an RA at Drexel.  He's off doing a really funny and interesting new website called unbreaded.com -- a website devoted to reviewing sandwiches.  I got another chance to chat with Bart from IndyHall which I think is one of the coolest things I've learned about through PSL. (A small aside: IndyHall is a big shared office space where different companies can rent out space and essentially be a part of a larger community.  Everyone interacts and bounces ideas off each other, and while they all may freelance and work for different companies, they thrive as a community.  If I lived and worked in the city this is something I would definitely be a part of.)

I see I've written a lot already so I'll wrap it up in a few sentences.  PSL and their sponsors are incredibly generous.  They've offered up their time and resources to bring local entrepreneurs together in hopes to make Philadelphia an east coast stronghold for technology.  I'll say that I've always wanted to stay in the area because I'm a bit of a homebody and I like being around my family, but over the past few years I was starting to wonder if I could actually launch a big project successfully in this area.  Well after seeing what others are doing and after seeing how willing everyone at PSL events has been, my impressions have changed.  I do feel confident that I can make my projects work in this area and I look forward to growing alongside organizations like PSL.  Who knows, maybe one day I'll be a sponsor at one of the events, not just a mooch.  It could happen... right?

Cheers
 -eli

P.S. My newborn is kicking my butt!  I didn't have time to proof read this blog post and it took me 3 days of here-and-there typing to actually finish it.  So please excuse any typos.

Well we just had our bit April Fools Day prank.  You can find the mission at http://www.dailymission.com/mission/24b53/Never-Gonna/  The rundown is this: we created a mission offering up a $50,000 award and then took away the ability to compete.  Ok, so not the most inventive thing ever, but give us a break!  It was our first attempt and we didn't have time to do any elaborate coding like other sites.  I can safely say that we got at least a handful of people with it.  I got a few frantic emails and IMs along the lines of, "OMG I CAN'T PARTICIPATE FIX IT QUICK CUZ I HAVE A GOOD ONE I WILL WIN!"

So that's April Fools.  The big news is that we're working on a new layout.  We've finally found a graphic designer that "gets us."  He understand what DM is going to be and he is leading the way in the design.  It's great to work with a professional that doesn't need his hand held and to be told what to do every step of the way.

The redesign should launch sometime in the middle of April. Phil is heading upmost of the redesign.  Since my wife had a baby 2 weeks ago it's been not-so-easy to get the time I need.  Plus, this is one of those deals where too many cooks in the kitchen would mean disaster.  At least that's what I tell myself so to not feel bad about not helping Phil with the coding in this round!

Look for the new version soon.  I'll blog about it to let you know when it's done.

Cheers

 -eli

I've been bad at blogging lately.  I haven't had much time!  But I guess that's a good thing.  We've been busy.

A little late to make this post, see our full blog entry about daily mission beta 3's launch.

http://dailymission.vox.com/library/post/daily-mission-beta-3-released.html

We're excited to announce that we've officially launched the first public beta of Daily Mission.  So not to double blog, you can read about it here:
http://dailymission.vox.com

http://www.dailymission.com

 -eli

So now that the site has launched, I can announce that the hybrid solution was for 1.FM.  First off, let me mention that DNN is "heavy."  I hate that it's a website and not a web application.  The build times are incredible.  I'd much rather build locally then upload and have it just work.  Instead, after you upload a file, it reocmpiles the whole application.  With an application as big as 1.FM, this can take a minute or two, even on their new 8-core server with 8GB of RAM!  The one time I thought IIS went down because it took so long.

However, with that said, I still say the benefits of the solution far outweigh the hurdles.  First of all, I get a prepackaged set of modules for purchase at www.snowcovered.com.  Second of all, it gives me a single authentication and authorization system for anything that I wanted to custom build.  Combined, there isn't much I can't dothat would be within 1.FM's needs.

At launch, we were faced with two performance issues that I think are worth mentioning.  The first is something to be ever aware of when using prepackaged software:  just because it looks like it does what you want, doesn't mean it does it well!  Most of the features that are on every page and that deal directly with 1.FM data I built myself and made heavy usage of data caching.  However, when we launched, there was something on the site that was just killing us and more or less bringing the site to a standstill (with about 4100 concurrent users).  After profiling with RedGate's Ants Profiler we found that it was the "latest videos" module on the homepage.  Apaprently it wasn't caching any of its data.  And of course it was the one boxed module I was relying on to be on every page!  We solved the issue by wrapping the module control in our own custom User Control and using OutputCache.  Since there was no need to ever hide videos -- all videos are public all the time -- there was no reason for us not to cache the rendered control itself.

And this brings us to the second issue.  I completely underestimated the power of caching controls!  I was very strict about the way that I cached the data.  Everything was cached and fetched in an application thread, so no user felt the burden of requesting data ever.  However, with 4000 people hitting the site at the same time, just databinding and rendering that data became a HUGE bottleneck.  We were maxing out the 8 CPU cores consistently.  With just a few strategically placed OutputCache's in my user controls (actually I think it only took _three_) we were able to keep the server load at approximately 20-30% CPU usage with that server load, which is more than acceptable.  I have to give all the credit to Phil for this one.  He stepped away from his project of the day to run the profiler and tell me what to look for while I coded away like a good little monkey. He tracked down the problem spots, I put in the cache control, and off we went.

We'll still be doing some maintenance and changes on the site.  I don't know if we're out of the woods just yet with the performance tuning!  But if I have to take one thing away from this it's never underestimate the power of a good profile.

 -eli

For more months than I care to mention, we've been doing phased development of the Orbit/FR website.  Orbit/FR wanted a tailor-made Content Management System (CMS) that met their specific needs and requirements.  Some of these requirements came from issues from the previous website: all data was kept in a single, flat, database table with no backups and no front-end management tool, so only their web admin could fix anything; there were no formal or standard templates, so even when things looked similar they had slight differences which gave the company a bad image; and the markup of the old site was terribly malformed; everything hinged off of one page -- index.asp -- that served up pages by a PageID through the querystring, so things weren't very optimized for search engines.  Other requirements came from meetings prior to launch: the need for a backend administration system to manage all aspects of the site, from meta data to images to sales representatives to contact information.

In the end, we did everything we could on our end to keep costs down for Orbit.  We made sure to plan each section and feature out ahead of time to make sure that we didn't have to go back and recode anything.  We also made sure that we took advantage of third-party tools and new .NET features wherever we could -- specifically, LINQ, Telerik RAD Controls, jQuery, Master Pages to drive the three or four distinct templates in the site, SiteMapDataProvider to manage breadcrumbs, sitemaps and navigation, and google custom search API to use google's search engine power for a seemlessly integrated site search.  Mix all of those in with some good coding practices and polymorphism, and some solid custom-built User and Server Controls, and what we ended up with was a solid, structured, ASPX-based CMS that allowed even non-technical people to administer and update (and protect via VSS).

So what took so long for the new website?  The number of hours spent building the system weren't all that high -- probably only one to two months worth of hours if you stack them together.  The problem we had was getting content together.  The system was built, but no one had good content to put in it!  So after months of struggling to scrape content together to make it a full-featured launch, we finally got all the data imported into the system and pushed the site out the door last week.

Graphics were done in part by a third-party contractor and by Orbit/FR's new parent company, Satimo.  The new site features a new logo and color scheme which aligns with Satimo's corporate branding.

The site was done in semantic markup with tableless design and styled completely by CSS.  Some light javascript and jquery and it uses graceful degradation for users who do not have javascript enabled.

The website isn't 100% complete.  Just phase 1 has been completed.  Orbit has  plans for the site, but that probably won't come at least until 2009.  There are bigger things to take care of for now!

That's all for now.

Cheers
  -eli

What can I say, being small has its advantages and disadvantages.  Unfortunately, this week it proved to have its disadvantages.  We were faced with an immediate software requirement from one of our clients that had to be taken care of ASAP.  We pushed through for the past three days, but it wasn't enough.  We only finished up the project today... a day late.

So that means we missed the Drexel Career Fair.  But for all the reasons I can think of to miss an event, there can't be a better one than that we're _too_ busy with work.

Better luck next time!

 -eli