Thinking in Purple

Cleaner URLs

2011-09-16T23:19:00.000+05:30

We pushed out an update today that gives your teams cleaner URLs on Meeting Room. The new URLs contain your team's name. This means a couple of things:

The old URLs don't work any more
You can now choose what your team name looks like in the URLs

To change your team's URL, all you need to do is go to the "Manage" tab in your team and set it to whatever you'd like. Of course, if the name is already taken you'll need to come up with something else.

In addition to making the URLs cleaner, this new routing format helps us make our code a little cleaner. It's one of the things that we just didn't have the time for earlier and I'm happy we're settling some of the code debt that's been accumulating.

The next thing we're working on is a strong notifications system. This is an area where Meeting Room is severely lacking today. More details on this coming soon, so stay tuned! In the mean time, give the custom URLs a spin and let us know what you think.

Shiny new stuff: Wikis

2011-09-03T04:24:00.001+05:30

A couple of hours ago, we rolled out an update to Meeting Room that includes our most requested feature so far — wikis. If you've already got a beta account, you should see a new "Wikis" tab when you enter your team page.

Use the "Wikis" tab to create and access wikis in your team

Editing pages

Meeting Room Wiki is powered by the awesome WikiPlex wiki engine. The markup syntax is pretty clean and easy to use, but to make things easier we've included an editor to help you with the tags. We plan to make the editor more powerful over time. For now, it should give you just enough formatting and linking options to get you started with your first wikis!

Creating new pages

When you create a wiki, a "Main page" is automatically created for you. You'll notice that there is no link to create new pages. The only way to create a new page is by adding a link on an existing page. This helps to reduce the likelihood of orphaned pages that aren't linked to from anywhere. Our thinking is that a wiki page that isn't linked to and, therefore, undiscoverable isn't very useful. That said, creating a new page is a two-step process.

First, create a link to the new page on any existing page. On a fresh wiki, you can do this on the Main Page like this:

Creating a new page by linking to it

Once you save this page, the link shows up in red to indicate that the page doesn't exist yet. Clicking on the link will take you directly to an editor where you can start adding content for the new page.

Other stuff
You can always see previous versions of a page by using the "Page history" link that appears in the sidebar on the right side of the screen when you're viewing any page.

Team owners will also be able to delete pages and change wiki settings.

Hello, World!

2011-07-20T13:19:00.000+05:30

Today, a couple of pieces of PurpleBeak are finally going live -- our website and our blog. This is an important milestone for any web startup because this is the starting line for churning out content and getting ranked on search engines.

As the first post, I thought it would be appropriate to write a little about why PurpleBeak exists.

PurpleBeak was started with the belief that there's a difference between making software and making software that makes a difference. We believe in a future where the web is:

Pervasive
The web is going to be everywhere. It's going to be less of a place that you go to for information, and more of a way for information to find its way to you.
Beautiful
Advances in browser technologies will allow us to create apps that deliver awesome user experiences across devices and platforms.
Immersive
The way we see the web today as a collection of web pages will soon change. Mobile apps, tablets and other new ways to stay constantly connected will change the way we see the web.
Purple
Seriously. The web uses too much blue and black. We're going to fix that and staring painting the web purple. :)

We look at the future of the web and we're inspired to go out there and build it. That's the essence of what we do at PurpleBeak. We make software that makes a difference.