Monthly Archive for February, 2005

Factory Nova site is up

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 28, 2005
in Factory Nova
. 2 Comments

I’ve just launched a simple one page site for Factory Nova, which is a project management system that we are currently working on.

This is a very early Factory Nova interface prototype

For several years we were searching for a project management solution that we could use for our projects.

We needed a product that would not only allow us to easily and effectively manage projects, but would also help us to communicate with our customers, that would allow customers to actively participate in the projects.

All the information about a particular project had to be easily accessible by any person taking part in the project and stored always relative to the project. Finally, the product had to integrate effortlessly in our existing workflow — for example, we didn’t want our customers to study a new web interface if they didn’t want to, they could just send an email with a query to our mailbox and it could be processed automatically and stored inside a relevant project.

We’ve failed to find a suitable solution and decided to build our own.

Flickr Insert plugin for WordPress

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 27, 2005
in WordPress
. 14 Comments

After using Flickr Tags plugin on this blog for a week I’ve decided that it slows down displaying of every post by too much. I still plan to include the photos from Flickr in the posts in the future, but I don’t think I’ll do it very often.

So I’ve created yet another WordPress-Flickr plugin. It is basically the same Flickr Tags (which is itself based on Flickr Post) but the behaviour is completely different. Instead of placing the photos from Flickr in the post when the post is displayed, the plugin now does the same when the post is published or updated. It also now retrieves thumbnails from Flickr and stores them on your own server, so later, when the post is displayed, thumbnails are taken directly from your server.

You can get Flickr Insert v0.2 here.

Installation instructions

  1. Unpack the zip, upload the contents to wp-content/plugins folder on your site.
  2. Make sure that “flickr-insert” folder is writable by web server (for example, by setting 0777 access rights for it). This is the folder where the thumbnails will be stored.
  3. Rename flickr-insert.conf.sample to flickr-insert.conf and edit it.
  4. Insert the contents of flickr-insert.css file in your theme’s css file (for example, wp-content/themes/default/styles.css).
  5. Activate the plugin in the WordPress control panel.

Usage

Upload photos that you want to use in the post to Flickr, use some unique tag that would let us identify them later (I’ll use “test” tag for this example). Inside your post put the following control text where you want the photos to be inserted (there should be no spaces between underscrore and “flickr” and “test” and underscrore):

_ flickr:test _

Then just save the post and check how it is displayed to the public.

Update October 3rd, 2005.

Just used the plugin myself first time after a long break and I can confirm that your properly tagged photos might not be found. But the problem is really in Flickr itself. It seems that a new tag and the information about newly tagged photos propagate through the Flickr system with some delay. After I waited for some time (maybe an hour) the photos which were not found at first by this plugin were finally fetched from Flickr.

Update March 16th, 2006.

I’ve just released a fixed version of the Flickr Insert plugin (version 0.2) with a small but vital change — thumbnails of the photos are now taken from the new static.flickr.com URL that Flickr is now using. You can get it from a link above or just click here.

Why “Stuffed Guys”?

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 25, 2005
in Stuffed Guys
. Closed

The process of creating the name of our company has taken only several days in Autumn of 2001 and in case you are wondering everything started with a word “staff”. Although English is not my native language I was aware that “staff” and “stuff” are two completely different things, but still they sound similar. This is how “Stuffed” part was born.

The name of the company had to deliver the following image to potential customers:

  1. “Friendly”
  2. “Simple”
  3. “Non-corporate”
  4. And even “Funky” (as in Funky Business)

Adding “Guys” to “Stuffed” was a natural decision.

I like how we are called. One of our customers described his feelings about the name as “corporate and at the same time friendly”. A lot of our customers call us “guys”, as if they are talking to their friends or at least to well-known people. I love this!

Only later I’ve found out that “stuffed guys” is a common way to call certain (stuffed?) toys. I think this only helps to build the right image.

What users really want?

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 24, 2005
in Factory Nova
. Closed

There is an entertaining “use case” quote about a student that wants to get laid with the help of your software, which is currently cyling through different blogs.

Do you really want to make your software as simple as that? I am confident you can’t just say ‘yes’ here. This is only one of all the possible use cases after all! It might not be appropriate for your software. The project management system that we are developing is not targeted at students, it is specially created for small-to-medium sized businesses like ours. These businesses want to manage their work online or want to manage all the communication regarding a project (including communications with a client) in one place. Why in the world we would want to use a student as a use case?

We do need all these tasks, documents, discussions, files, bugs in one centralized place. So does it mean we are not thinking about our users and instead we create a product that “managers want to buy”? Absolutely not! We just think about different users. Our imaginary users consider Basecamp to be too simple for their needs and Microsoft Project — too complex.

PS. Just to make it clear. I am not arguing that you need to think about your users. I completely agree. Just don’t forget who your users really are.

Blogs completely consisting of spam

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 23, 2005
in General
. 4 Comments

I am thinking of switching to Plesk on our dedicated server. We are currently using Cpanel which is fine and all, but Plesk’s new interface looks too good to miss.

I’ve decided to find what other people might be saying about Plesk 7.5 Reloaded, so I’ve searched Feedster Blogs for “plesk”. What I’ve got in the results is a complete crap. Pages and pages of what looks like spam messages mostly posted on Blogger-powered blogs. Whole blogs of spam?

Update: After not finding anything interesting on the web about the new Plesk except a very good looking interface that I’ve noticed myself, I’ve decided to stay with Cpanel. Cpanel rocks anyway! :)

Btw, SW Soft, the developer of Plesk has an office in Russia, in Moscow. Actually I believe Plesk is developed in Moscow, at least partly. During my search for Plesk reviews I’ve stumbled upon a blog belonging to a Plesk developer and it was in Russian.

Flickr Tags plugin for WordPress

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 20, 2005
in WordPress
. 14 Comments

While writing the previous post I’ve started experimenting with an excellent Flickr Post plugin by David McNicol which integrates photos from Flickr with WordPress posts in an automatic way.

However, I was not very comfortable with the idea of the plugin. Instead of its automatic behaviour I wanted to completely control where in the post the photos should be inserted, I also wanted to insert the photos using particular flickr tags. So I’ve created my own version of the Flickr Post plugin called Flickr Tags.

Now I can insert any tagged photos from Flickr in any place of any post in WordPress by simply inserting a line similar to this:

_ flickr:tagname _

All the magic is still done inside the functions borrowed from Flickr Post. And I am not sure whether my changes should better be integrated inside the David’s plugin or not. I’ve asked David about this and awaiting his reply.

Other imporovements:

  1. It is possible now to link to the photo page on Flickr (Flickr Post links to the photos directly, which is not desirable sometimes).
  2. It is possible to open all links in the new window.
  3. Small optimization: 10kb of core functions are not compiled if flickr tags are not found inside the post saving a fraction of CPU :)

There is a side effect of such a way of working with Flickr. If later you will add photos in Flickr to the tag that you’ve used inside one of the published posts, the photos will automatically appear inside that post. Not sure right now if this is good or bad, but at least this is interesting.

You can download Flickr Tags here.

The History of Stuffed Guys

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 20, 2005
in Stuffed Guys
. 4 Comments

Until January 2005 Stuffed Guys was actually me alone working from home full time. I’ve also used several freelance programmers whom I knew from my previous place of work (big publishing house here in Moscow, responsible for Russian versions of Cosmopolitan, Mens Health, Playboy and other magazines).

Everything started in 2001 when the publishing house decided to close the internet project where I was working and so I had to decide what to do next. At that time I had already one permanent customer from London, UK for whom I was doing small web programming work. It happened so that the same week when I’ve got fired I had a trip planned to visit that customer on-site to see in person how his business is working (the customer had a small but very successful online business selling prescription medicines).

For the record, that customer was Shakil Khan and I am very grateful to him for taking me through very exciting 2 years. Without Shak there would be no Stuffed Guys now.

So I flew to London and spent several days there. We were talking about our current and future projects and it became clear that I could easily work full-time only for Shak and be a happy person, no need to search for a new full time job. And that was the moment when Stuffed Guys has really taken off.

In 2002 I’ve developed Stuffed Tracker, which is a tool to track effectiveness of online advertising campaigns. Shak needed it as a marketer and I thought it was a nice idea to create an application that I could sell on my site as well. I’ve always wanted to create and sell my own software.

I can’t say that Stuffed Tracker was a big hit. It lacked and still lacks a lot of important features, but it was good enough at the time when it appeared and Shak used it heavily and (I think) it helped him a lot in his marketing efforts.

For me personally Stuffed Tracker was a success. I’ve got several new clients for custom programming projects through it, including Twinroom — my biggest client to date, for whom I’ve wrote a full blown online hotels reservation system. It is written in Perl and consists of 49245 lines of highly optimized code (1765.27 kb in size!). It is called Twibo and it is my greatest professional accomplishment.

At the end of 2004 I’ve created a new strategy for Stuffed Guys. I’ve decided that its time to expand and move from home to office. I’ve hired 2 full-time programmers and we are now working from our own small-and-nice office near the center of Moscow.

My workplace Ivan's workplace Shalmoo's workplace

The main part of the new strategy is developing 2 web applications. The first one is a full rewrite of Stuffed Tracker in PHP with a lot of new features that I’ve always wanted to include in the product but couldn’t due to its simple initial design. The second one is a project management system, which I’ve called Factory Nova, specially targeted at small-to-medium sized businesses that want to manage their own work online or want to communicate with their customers online in one centralized place. Above all, we need a system like Factory Nova ourselves and we couldn’t find what we need among current offerings on the market. Factory Nova is also written in PHP.

PHP for web programming is also a part of my new strategy. I love Perl, but to create competitive products we have to do them in PHP nowadays. It is obvious that right now much more people are looking for PHP based products then for products written in any other language.

This is where we stand right now. And from now on I plan to cover our life in this blog.

Hello world. Again!

Published
by
Sergey Smirnov
on February 19, 2005
in General
. Closed

This is my second attempt to start a blog. The first one was using Movable Type and was all about Perl, this new one is using WordPress and should all be about the life of my small company Stuffed Guys (I will try to explain why I’ve chosen this name for a company in one of the future posts).

Currently there are 3 people in the company including me, the owner. So we don’t really qualify for a MicroISV status (btw, it was certainly a great idea from Brian Plexico to start a blog with “MicroISV” name, now everyone should be pointing to his site when mentioning MicroISVs). MicroISV is usually considered to be a 1-person company. Not really sure what status is right for us. We are just a bunch of Russian guys creating our own cool (or so we think) web software (more about this later).

This concludes my first public announcement. Stay tuned.