Shopify Aquires StoreSync

Posted: January 8, 2010 | Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments

We don’t normally cover technology news, but I am very excited about this breaking story.

It’s Friday night and while everyone is at The Crunchies news is breaking that Shopify has acquired StoreSync, created by MindCreative. Tobias Lutke broke the news. Below is his tweet about the event.

I have been following the progress of Shopify since day one, and I believe that this is their first acquisition ever. StoreSync provides users with a mobile interface for their stores and this is a  a great fit for Shopify.The StoreSync Blog states the fact that they where acquired by  Shopify and that their product will only be available to Shopify customers moving forward.

Versions in Docley: What does it offer and how we built it

Posted: November 12, 2009 | Categories: Docley Product | No Comments

In the next couple of weeks, I am going to cover some of Docley’s main features every few days. Today we are going to look at how we created the versions screen and I will take you on the journey we went on to get this feature implemented. We will also show you what it looks like (there is a video below).

We used quite a few of 37 Signals’s Getting Real techniques to build the versioning feature in Docley. Firstly we took their advice in Chapter 6: From Idea to Implementation. We brainstormed on paper, before we coded anything. Here is the process:

First we designed the view users will see of the versions of their documents:

Then we designed the upload new version screen.

After this we realized that these should actually be one screen. Both these functions belong together and putting them on the same screen makes sense. So that is what we did.

After coding up the screen and tweaking it a bit, it looks like this:

As you can see we dropped the comments from versions, but more about that in another post. The comments functionality is now handled in another part of the application, but I have said to much already.

We also used Epicenter Design (Getting Real Chapter 9 ). The design process above describes only the piece of functionality that allows fro versioning. When we designed it, we only focused on the main part of the screen that the user will be interacting with. At this point we didn’t care about the other menus or the rest of the screen. We where totally focused on Versions of files.

Here is a quick screencast of the functionality (1:30 mins):

Versioning in Docley

Stay tuned, we will show you more Docley functionality soon. Subscribe to the Docley Blog Feed.

The Tim Ferris way of Testing ideas and how I did it.

Posted: October 19, 2009 | Categories: Testing my ideas | 9 Comments

I work in the electronic Document Management and Records Management industry and wanted to build a hosted Web Based Document Management System that doesn’t suck. It has to be straight forward and easy to use.

Last year I read The 4 hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and he talks about testing a product, before it even exists to decide if it will be viable. Rob from the Micropreneur Academy also discusses this.

Basically this is what Tim Ferris recommends:
Build a two page website. The main page describes what the product or service will accomplish. It has a strong call to action to buy the product. The second page is a signup page for the product clearly stating the price. The signup page also contains a web form that takes all the users information.

The next step is to buy $100 worth of Google adwords, limit the daily rate to $20 as well as the price you are prepared to pay for a click

This is one of the five adverts I ran:
Document Management
Wasily Store \ Retrieve Documents
$20 per month
docley.com

I ran these adverts for two weeks and here are my findings:

87 visits
142 page views
24 people went to the signup page. (27 %)
12 people signed up. (14%) I actually have their email addresses. I believe that these users will actually buy the product.

Before I started my test, I decided that if I can get a 10% conversion rate, I would feel confident in building a product that would be able to do what the signup page promised.
I went ahead and developed the product and it’s very close to launching. If you would like to get invited to the private beta, please go to the Signup page.

Stay tuned (Subscribe to the RSS feed or Twitter)  for some sneak previews in the next couple of weeks.

Simple and Clean

Posted: October 13, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments

Last night I showed my friend Docley’s functionality.

He was quite impressed and said: ” I like how simple and clean the interface is.” This made my day. Since day one I have been trying to keep the Docley interface simple and clean.

Thanks Johan.

Brands in Public: All publicity is good publicity right?

Posted: September 25, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments

Two days ago,  Seth Godin launched Brands in Public.  I looked at it   and thought that it was a great idea to get companies connected to what people are saying on the web and allowing them to “Join the Conversation”.

Seth created some pages for well known brands. I am assuming he did this so these brands can see what their pages would look like and what is actually said about them. I bet most of these companies have no idea how to pull all of this information together. Regardless, doing this caused an public outcry on the web. Some people even created a new word for it: Brandjacking. These posts made it sound like brands in public went and created pages for thousands of brands and that they are now forcing these companies to pay them.

Today Seth decided to take down the Brands in Public pages that they created. They only created 200 of them and I am still positive the only reason they did this was as an example for other brands and not to hijack brands. I think Seth did the right thing by taking down the pages.  It is crazy how on the web things can be over exaggerated quite easily. I am also sure that this little fiasco was good publicity for Brands in public.  All publicity is good publicity right? what do you think?

Welcome to Docley

Posted: August 22, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments

Docley has been a project that we have been working on for over a year now.

Companies like Documentum, Livelink and Hummingbird have been doing Document Management for Fortune 500 companies and goverment agencies for years. These organisations have been experiencing the benefits of these systems for years now. The problem is that their software is huge and needs a team of IT professionals to manage the software and hardware infrastucture. They also cost hunderds of thousands of dollars to purchace and maintain.

Docley is a fresh new way to do Document Management.

All businesses can benfit from a Document Management system. Docley is commited to making document management simple and easy, so that individuals and business can get a grip on their documents and find them quickly and easily. Docley will also ensure that you don’t loose any business critical documents. It’s like one huge electronic filing cabinet.

Stay tuned for more information about Docley and how it can help you store and retrieve your documents.

Ferret: undefined method `find_by_contents’ error and solution

Posted: June 20, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments

Problem
When trying to use the acts_as_ferret  the following error appears:

undefined method `find_by_contents'

Solution
It seems that the API of the plugin has changed, and the

find_by_contents

method should be replaced with:

find_with_ferret

Nginx redirect for /blog

Posted: June 7, 2009 | Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments

It took me quite a while to figure out how to do an Nginx redirect for http://docley.com/blog

Here is how to do it:

## NGINX: permanently redirect local url to /blog

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name docley.com;

    location /blog {
      rewrite ^ http://docleyblog.com permanent;
    }
}