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i use this, now 50% more social.

0 comments By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with , , , , , June 22nd, 2010 @ 13:54

We’ve just pushed a major update to iusethis, adding several social features and updating the commenting system with support for replies. To improve performance, we’ve also added a new caching system, to allow us to cache more data for logged-in users.

Find your friends

Looking up your contacts in GMail is a feature that we’ve wanted for a long time, but we did not want to compromise users by asking for their passwords. Now that Google supports OAuth we were able to implement it the way we wanted. In order to use it, go to your profile and click the ‘more’ link on the ‘friends’ sidebar:

i_use_this_mac_os_x_software__applications_used_by_marcus-20100622-095254.png

Once There, click on this sidebar:

i_use_this_mac_os_x_software__friends_of_marcus-20100622-094917.png

The system asks you to grant iusethis permission to access your address book data, choose the google account you use:

Google_Accounts-20100622-102953.png

Then we will present you with a list of contacts who have accounts on iusethis. Just press the ‘follow’ link to add them.

Messaging

You can now contact users on iusethis directly. To do this, go to the user’s profile, and click the contact link:

i_use_this_mac_os_x_software__Recent_comments_by_rob-20100622-103404.png

Then just write your message and click ‘Send’. Just like everywhere else on iusethis, you can use textile formatting in your message. The message will be delivered to the user as a normal email, with your registered email address as the ‘From’ address, so that he can easily respond to your message.

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If you do not want to accept messages from users, you can disable it from preference.

 

i_use_this_mac_os_x_software__software_for_the_osx_population-20100622-114940.png

We also added app owners to the app page, in case you want to contact them:

YoruFukurou_-_i_use_this_on_mac_os_x-20100622-143625.png

Replies

@username replies has been a defacto convention on iusethis for a long time, and we’ve already been doing things like linking to users automatically, but now we actually support links back to the comment you’re responding to. This also means that each comment has it’s own permanent page:

i_use_this_mac_os_x_software__comment_left_by_marcus_on_Steam_at_2010-06-16T08_43_38-20100622-130535.png

For consistency we are now using relative timestamps for dates everywhere, and the dates act as permalinks. By default, we will assume you are responding to the latest comment by this user on the app you’re commenting on, but if you want to reply to a specific comment, you can use the ‘reply to comment’ link on the comment permalink page. We also took the opportunity to streamline the user comments page to be more like the main recent comments list:

i_use_this_mac_os_x_software__Recent_comments_by_brh-20100622-142656.png

Hope these changes are useful to you. If you have feedback, please respond to out twitter account, @iut.

Quicksilver plugin for iusethis.com

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with , , , May 15th, 2009 @ 13:11

Quicksilver is one tool I can’t live without. When I use a Mac without it, I feel handicapped. I’ve been doing some iPhone development lately, and I am feel comfortable with Objective-C. Yesterday I decided to write a Quicksilver plugin. This tutorial series made it easy. I have made a video using Snapz Pro to show how it works:

You can download it right now and try it out. Like other utilities we make for iusethis, it’s free and open source (Artistic/GPL dual licensed). Check out the source from Github.

The Hunt For The Apple Store Associates Program

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with , , , March 6th, 2009 @ 21:08

As you might know, we run a software site for mac users, i use this. The site is free to use, and we finance it through the use of advertisments. Mostly we get advertisments from the Google ads program, as well as indie shareware developers, and occationally promotional programs like macheist.

I figure Apple Products would be a good fit for our users, so I was pleased when a quick Google Search turned up the Apple Store Associates Program.

Apple Store Associates Program - Login

On going to the ‘Register’ link, I noticed that they use the linkshare program, where we are already signed up as part of the iTunes Store program. However, using the linkshare site I was not able to locate the Apple Store Associates program. At this point I was a bit puzzled. I figured maybe I needed to sign up with a new account on linkshare, so I try that, is redirected to a newer signup form, and after registration, is just landed on the regular linkshare homepage. Still no sign of the associates program.

I figured I should try to contact them by mail. They list a contact email on the frontpage, but unfortunately it bounces:

    The Symantec Brightmail Gateway program : host elderberry.apple.com[17.128.115.181] said:
   550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: storeassociates@apple.com (in reply to
   RCPT TO command)

Now I am ready to give up. Anyone got a lead? Drop me a mail at marcus@nordaaker.com.

Painless rollouts with FCGI::Engine

By marcus Filed in Article Tagged with , , February 24th, 2009 @ 22:44

Our software site i use this is built on the MVC Framework Catalyst. We currently run it using the Russian web server Nginx and standalone fastcgi servers. I am using the Moose based CGI::Engine distribution by Stevan Little to start the servers. This module makes it really easy to manage your applications. You just create a YML config file like this:

---
- name: "iusethis-osx.server"
  nproc: 4
  scriptname: "/www/iusethis-osx/script/iusethis_fastcgi.pl"
  pidfile: "/var/run/iusethis-osx.pid"
  socket: "/var/run/iusethis-osx.sock"

with an entry for each server you want to run. (Note that the paths has been changed to protect the innocent.) Then you just create a simple perl script (See the FCGI::Engine::Manager SYNOPSIS for a sample), and you can easily start, stop and check the status for each application individually or every application in your config. If you have a system v style init, you can just stick the script in /etc/init.d/ and it will behave just like any of your other startup scripts.

There is one annoying detail. Each time you roll out code, you have to restart your fastcgi processes. Since Catalyst takes some time to initialize, the application is down, and end users gets 500 Internal Server Error responses, unless you have a load balancer in front and take the node out of the cluster before upgrading. It does not have to work like this. Since the fcgi workers use a non-exclusive lock on the socket, you can start a new set of processes before you kill the old ones. this way, no requests are lost.

I really wanted this feature, so I have spent some time today hacking on FCGI::Engine. Stevan accepted my patches, and released version 0.06, which supports this restart mode, via a new ‘graceful’ method added to FCGI::Engine::Manager + some bug fixes. Nginx already support On the fly upgrades, which means there is no need for us to drop a user connection when rolling out new code again.

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