DaveChild

Usually instrumental soundtracks. I usually listen to streamingsoundtracks.com. Aside from the occasional vocal piece, it's great background music.

> less side effects

Well, yes. Less effects of all sorts naturally means less side effects as well.

Thanks for the honest feedback. I know it's a hugely competitive space, and I'm hoping that the bootstrapping and low-cost approach means I can turn this into an income-level project, rather than perhaps a full-on company.

> There are still businesses out there that have never heard of things like agile, or source control, and who manage projects by sending emails back and forth.

That's pretty much my target. There are tonnes of small agencies and small ecommerce outfits (especially in the UK) that aren't using anything to manage bugs or work. The problem, of course, is finding them.

Interesting idea, the temping thing. I suspect some simple freelancing might have a similar effect.

I'm rather hoping, though, that my blog and cheat sheets (at addedbytes.com) gives me the exposure to the kinds of people who might be interested in this type of product. It's clocking up 200,000 page views a month or so, and that's almost exclusively developers and ecommerce types. I'm hoping a series of blog posts on the topic of bug tracking will help a few lost souls out of the email and spreadsheet bug-management quagmire!

Thanks for the compliments. Glad you like the look - I was going for simple and clean.

I cross-posted this to reddit, cos I like it there too:

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/vmo71/envoy_a_simple...

> Selling tools to tool builders is a tricky proposition.

Indeed! We're a fussy lot :)

All good points about reliability - I'll see what I can do to add that reassurance to the setup.

I think it's fairly similar, at least in philosophy. I always liked some parts of FogBugz - minimum number of required fields, always one owner and making it as easy as possible to get bugs in to the system from multiple places - and those all things I continue to think are important, and have tried to get in to Envoy. Ease of bug addition is critical, as without it you can't get management to use the system and it fails, so all accounts automatically have an email address they can use to send in bugs. I'm looking at ways to use the API to tie into other systems too to make the addition of bugs as easy as possible from other places.

Clickable links:

http://www.envoyapp.com

http://demo.envoyapp.com

~~ Also, some wavy line background ... ~~

The app started, as I suspect many do, with me wanting a simple bug tracker, timesheet and wiki app for managing bugs, time, etc. I'd used FogBugz, JIRA and a few others (and their influence is probably obvious) and wanted something similar, but that I could tinker with.

So, I built the thing I wanted to use, and have been using it myself for a few years. Over time I've added things as I found I needed them. Some of those things have stayed, some have been dropped after finding they didn't work the way I thought they would.

I was using it at work, and others were finding it useful and asking if they could use it too, so I decided to see if it would be useful to other people, and grew it into what it is now.

> you can't conveniently switch between standing and sitting.

I have a standing desk and a stool. When I want to sit, I can sit. I can also lean against the stool if I feel like it. I switch positions throughout the day, depending upon how my legs feel etc.

Well, don't bother visiting that on a mobile. The entire page loads, and then you get redirected to a mobile version ... which is broken. Pathetic.

MD5 isn't the issue - it's the lack of salting. Without a salt, almost any hash can be cracked with a rainbow table. With a salt, you'd need to know the salt for each hash, and then generate a new rainbow table, in order to recover the original password.

A macbook pro runs Ubuntu (or most other distros) beautifully. Pretty hardware with a decent OS ... can't beat it :)

Mice do make a huge difference. I had years of forearm and wrist pain until switching to a vertical mouse.

> It seems that we can just copy its URL and then anybody can access it

In much the same way you could copy the image itself and distribute it.

Surely the worst case is that you launch a product and learn some valuable lessons about competing with similar offerings?

It doesn't bode well for accessibility when even browser makers like Mozilla can't get the most basic elements right - links with only colour to differentiate them, images without alt text, missing form labels ...

> Many websites that are specifically optimized for some browsers don't work on Opera

While that sounds plausible enough, I've not encountered a website that didn't work in Opera for a long, long time.

Being a web dev, I tend to keep a collection of browsers open all the time - Chrome for email, twitter, calendar, bug tracker etc. Firefox for development (Firebug FTW). Midori for state-less browsing (it empties caches and data when restarted, so I use that when I need a clean session). And Opera for social, personal, fun, feeds and reading etc.

They all have their strengths, but I'm still amazed Opera doesn't have a higher share.

I moved a couple of thing that were tools on my own site onto their own domains. Both just fun projects, but still, they made it out of my brain and into the world :)

http://www.mathaversaries.com/

http://www.readability-score.com/

Fear that they'll find the bodies.

I use them a fair bit. Enough that I released a set of them on my site ( http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/ ) and then made a site for other people to build them ( http://www.cheatography.com/ ). :)

Certainly not a sign of ineptitude. For me, they just save me the time it takes to go to a manual to look something up. I've got a couple on my desk at the moment, for SVN (weening myself off GUI tools) and one for VI.

Not quite yet, but early days for my projects:

http://www.addedbytes.com/projects/

I'm working hard on the top three, and aiming to start making some real money out of them by the end of summer.

Well, that's fine for people in the US. But for everyone else (i.e., the vast majority) for whom Hulu, netflix, etc are not available, the legal onlines alternatives are for the most part crap or missing the content you want.

> At the very least, thanks to that link a year ago about how google would save electricity for the world by adopting a black background, I know that I'm saving the environment!

Sadly not, at least not with flat panels. Google responded to the "blackle" think on their blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-black-new-green.ht...

No fans of The Stand here? :)

Captain Trips.

It's still there, just without a domain:

http://72.14.189.113/

Glad you like it! Since launching it I've become almost obsessed with ideas for cheat sheets, and one thing I want to add in is a "cheat sheet zeitgeist" - a page which lists requests, ordered by their recent popularity.

I'm working on a few formatting issues at the moment. Unfortunately, the pdf generator I'm using doesn't have much of a concept of pagination, so I'm trying to work that part out in PHP, generate multiple PDFs, then glue them together. It's not working too well so far :)

Hi ishi. Glad to hear you like the idea :)

Thanks for letting me know about the filename issue. I'd not spotted that. I've changed the filename to something more useful!

Also, here's a link: http://www.cheatography.com/