I am still getting some styles ready on the site. It all got very popular a bit to early for me!
625 karma · joined January 13, 2011
When I get a chance to breath I will look into the price levels in more detail.
I would ideally look for a provider who can just take all the hassle out of taking cards and doing reoccurring payments. Sorting out a payment gateway is a lot of effort which I would rather focus on the product in the short term (next 3 months).
Yep right again, I should try and make money. What price points would you think is acceptable? I was thinking around $4/mo $35/yr. Great idea on PAYG, a one off project for $7 which could actually get a lot of sales, that would have to be time limited to say 2 months however because people could just switch the content in and out. You are correct I would never delete the content, the cost is so low. Actually getting the money is another problem, Im based in London so the best option is currently paypal, I would like to hold out for stripe but who knows how long that will take....
Scaling, You are right that it could get bad, I've been chatting to a guy who's pdf compiles down to a 28 meg. The next step would be breaking the compiling out to a different server, the code is nicely decoupled so it would not be hard to implement. It wouldn't be to hard to have multiple compiling processes getting jobs from a que. Other than that I've not thought to much about it.
For simplicity sake I am planning on having 1 owner who's account is 'debited', other users could be of any type. Interesting idea like Browsershots, I will have to look at that a bit more.
This is great advice, please keep it coming.
- unlimited private projects / free accounts only have public projects like cloud9 - multiple compilers - unlimited collaborators per project - background compile looking for errors - git pull access
any other ideas are welcome.
The site is secure but can always do better.
I feel people on HN/you are a small percentage of people who use latex and git in that way. I think most latex users backup policy is copying and pasting folders. Im not against the idea, what I really don't want is to deal with merge conflicts and people emailing me asking for git help it is likely I will offer a pull only service one day.
I am an avid vim user and I would also love more powerful bindings.
on git: I want to add some sort of versioning, my current plan is to do a nice friendly wrapper around a single branch on git. This could then be pulled from for peoples peace of mind but probably not pushed to. My thinking is git is hard, I use it all day as a dev and I am still googling how to do things, if you are a mathematician yes you have the ability to learn it but you shouldn't have to and probably can't be bothered to.
Stolen from another comment I made about writing latex:
"writing LaTeX is different from code for many reasons, for one if you write a new class in e.g. c# all other classes do not care about the implementation, just what can the put in and what do they get out. With LaTeX that doesn't work, you duplicate yourself and get the narrative in the wrong order, they are very different paradigms."
Basically other systems have this down, classically google docs and either pad, but they are just for normal text. I would love to be able to have a wrapped git blame on the site, one you can see in real time.
I have looked into pdf.js and semi implemented it however it was only really worth it for firefox users, other browsers generally had a better experience natively, not that I am ruling it out forever but at the time I went for keeping it simple.
Seeing others cursors would be great. I am using the ace editor and that does not natively suport more than once cursor atm, if I had more time I may implement it myself but to be honest it is not going to happen in the very short term.
behind the scenes it is just a fully instance of tex-live 2011 which should cover 95% of needs. For other packaged which are available I am hoping people request them for the moment and I install them, for obvious reasons I am wary of allowing people the ability to install global packages on my server.
On first name and last name, you are right not really needed, same goes for email confirmation. I have been planning on killing those for a while but just hasn't happened!
£10 says it goes down in the next 6 hours.
There is no version control at the moment. I am working on how to implement this and diffs in a user friendly way soon. Basically git is not the answer for collaborative LaTeX in my option, a different more dynamic and simpler way is needed which I am working on.
I am aiming for a fermium model at the moment, deep down I want to offer free a service which helps people collaborate on important work. Ideally with premium accounts subsidising a free but fully functional accounts. i.e. help people work together first, make a living second.
few buzzwords for people: > MongoDB/mongolab, > 100% CoffeeScript, > Node.js, > Now.js/socket.io, > Twitter bootstrap, stole css for menu bar from nide https://github.com/coreh/nide > S3 > Linode > loggy.com
7Digital, electronic media company (music and books), our API powers Samsung Music, Blackberry, Ubuntu our own website and loads. Now also do ebooks powering services like Waterstones. Loads of interesting problems including scaling an API to serve 170,000+ requests per hour, processing and serving hundreds of TB's of data world wide while innovating. You get 10% of your time to innovate with, regular katas/dojo's. We are established, 7 years old, and profitable, 70+ people based in main old street office, ~45 of which are technical jobs. Fantastic work mentality, we always work the right way even if it takes a little longer, i.e. we don't cut corners on quality. Currently looking for dev's who are experienced with Test Driven development. http://about.7digital.net/careers
If the service gets bigger I am planning on leaving the LaTeX compiling on the ec2 and moving everything else into Heroku, but thats a big if.
One thing I would say to other small timers like me who can't use a PaaS for some reason, automate your deploys as much as possible, capistrano is a good start https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki . Also look through the list of Heroku addons for other services to make life easier, I use MongoLab and Loggly for starters.
7Digital, electronic media company, our API powers Samsung Music, Blackberry, Ubuntu our own website and loads. Now also do ebooks powering services like Waterstones. Loads of interesting problems including scaling an API to serve 170,000+ requests per hour, processing and serving hundreds of TB's of data world wide while innovating. You get 10% of your time to innovate with, regular katas/dojo's. We are established, 7 years old, and profitable, 70+ people based in main old street office, ~45 of which are technical jobs. Fantastic work mentality, we always work the right way even if it takes a little longer, i.e. we don't cut corners on quality. Currently looking for dev's who are experienced with Test Driven development.
.NET, JavaScript & Sys Admin
We provide digital download services to over 500 partners including Samsung, RIM (Blackberry), HP, Toshiba, Universal Music, EMI, Warner Music, Sony and have delivered millions of digital products in over 25 countries.
API serves around 160,000 requests per hour 16+ million tracks 2 days of innovation a month, regular Katas/Dojo's. We work in a S.O.L.I.D manor at a sustanable pace.
7Digital, we have the 3rd largest catalog of music in the world, our API powers Samsung Music, Blackberry, Ubuntu our own website and more. Now also do ebooks powering services like Waterstones. We are established, 7 years old, and profitable. Sustainable work load in a great team.