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Textile and Markdown Editors

2009-07-04T06:27:00Z

Today, in response to your feedback, we are releasing an update that provides a number of changes to editing formatted fields in Unfuddle.

Editor Toolbars

Let’s be honest, Markdown and Textile can be a bit daunting for non-technical users. When editing a formatted field (such as ticket description), you will now see a custom toolbar depending on your markup of choice. This toolbar contains buttons for some of the most common formatting tasks (bold, italic, strikeout, etc) making the specifics of your markup language much easier to remember. The toolbar also includes buttons for inserting links to Unfuddle tickets, changesets, repository source code, etc.

Per Field Markup

Every formatted field now independently stores the markup language in which it was authored. This means that you can also change the markup used for any text field at the time of edit. This has some interesting implications. For instance, if you previously authored all of your Unfuddle content using Textile, but decide to switch to Markdown, all of your old content will still render correctly.

We have also made it possible for each person to individually specify their desired markup to be used when authoring new content from the Personal Settings page. Now, your Textile fanatic can finally have his way. However, you should note that it is possible to restrict which markup languages are available to your users from the Account Settings page. In this way, you can prevent any new material from being authored in a markup that you find undesirable.

Text Preview

Many of you have asked for the ability to preview a ticket, message, or notebook page before posting. Well, now you can! Simply click the appropriate button in the toolbar and you will be shown a nearly instant preview of your formatted text.

Please enjoy the new editing ease and be sure to let us know what you think!

Recovery Strategy Improvements

2009-06-08T08:17:00Z

As we intimated in our previous post, the outage we experienced offered us an opportunity to evaluate our disaster recovery plan under pressure. While I am glad to say that no data was lost in the hardware failure, our team was convinced that there was definite room for improvement. After bringing the affected customers back online, we immediately began work on evaluating alternate systems and processes that would have shortened this week’s downtime dramatically.

We are now taking snapshots of all customer data at 5 minute intervals. This provides us with two distinct advantages:

As many of you may know, Amazon EBS volumes are already redundant, a hardware failure on an Amazon EBS volume usually means a drastic reduction in speed, not a complete failure. This was the case on Wednesday. In the case of reduced performance, we can take down the affected server, take a final snapshot capturing any disk activity since the last 5 minute snapshot. This should go fairly quickly even on a volume experiencing problems.
In the case of the catastrophic failure on an EBS volume, we can very quickly restore customer data from the last snapshot losing only 5 minutes of data.

If we had been using the 5 minute snapshot scenario before Wednesday, the downtime would have been lessened to approximately 30 minutes – the amount of time for one of us to manually snapshot the affected volume, create a new volume from that snapshot and reattach it.

I want to thank all of you for your support and suggestions since this outage. Know that we are committed to the integrity and availability of your data and we will continue to evolve our systems and processes to make Unfuddle even more solid.

Automated Backups with Amazon S3 Support

2009-04-23T06:03:00Z

Since the launch of Unfuddle, we have always considered it one of our highest priorities that our customers would have direct and immediate access to their data in the form of project backups. Downloading comprehensive project backups has always been possible with Unfuddle. However, automating this process has always required writing some custom code against the Unfuddle API.

Automated Backups

We now provide the ability to schedule automatic backups of projects, removing the potential tediousness of going through the Unfuddle API. Any project or account administrator may now setup a project to be backed up daily, weekly, or monthly.

Additionally, with Unfuddle now running entirely on Amazon’s infrastructure, it seemed only natural to allow for these automated backups to be sent directly to Amazon S3 buckets. You can now specify your Amazon credentials along with an optional bucket name and all new backups will automatically be sent to your S3 account for your own storage.

Message Bumping and Comment Attachments

2009-03-09T01:53:00Z

Based on comments we have received from you, our Amazon EC2 migration has been a huge success. As promised, we are ready to start rolling out enhancements to Unfuddle. Today, we are deploying the following features along with some smaller interface updates:

Message Bumping

Unfuddle messages typically function as a blog for your project. However, as message comments can often be a natural place for discussion of the message content, we have decided to move to a message sorting model similar to most forums. Now, whenever a comment is made on a message, the entire message will move to the top of the stack making the activity more obvious.

Comment Attachments

Many of you have asked for the ability to add attachments to comments. Because you asked, it is now possible to attach files to your comments throughout Unfuddle. Additionally, please note that the attachment interface has been updated throughout Unfuddle.

We are looking forward to turning more of your suggestions into enhancements to Unfuddle over the coming months!

Infrastructure Upgrades and Amazon EC2

2009-01-27T03:45:00Z

After some very long nights and a lot of very hard work, we are proud to say that Unfuddle is now running wholly on Amazon EC2 servers. Vast amounts of Unfuddle code have been completely revamped to scale horizontally and to take advantage of the Amazon approach to hosting. Site performance has improved significantly across the board with virtually infinite room to grow.

Along with this infrastructure upgrade, a number of relevant software updates are now available. Most notable of these is that all Unfuddle Subversion repositories have now been upgraded to 1.5.x, bringing you new features such as Subversion merge tracking.

In choosing the Amazon platform, Unfuddle is effectively saying goodbye to Rackspace, our previous hosting provider. Rackspace was an excellent partner that served Unfuddle and its customers very well over the years. However, we simply needed to move on to an infrastructure partner that could better grow with our needs.

The Unfuddle team is very excited. Now that there is no longer an imminent need to upgrade our infrastructure, we can return to improving the feature set of Unfuddle. Many of you have been waiting patiently for more updates to Unfuddle – your comments have not gone unheard and we have some very exciting features that are now literally around the corner!

Unfuddle Welcomes Jayson Minard

2008-12-02T08:47:00Z

Despite being quiet on the blog lately, we have been very busy here at Unfuddle. The first piece of exciting news is that the Unfuddle trio is now a quartet!

For the first time since it was founded, Unfuddle is adding a new team member – Jayson Minard. Jayson has agreed to serve as the new Chairman of the Board of Unfuddle and will be primarily focused on business and product strategy.

Jayson has been in software development for over 20 years. He has worked for Zend, Novell, BEA, StarBase and Borland – where Jayson was the Chief Architect of JBuilder. More recently, Jayson was the CIO/CTO of AbeBooks which was acquired by Amazon. He currently runs MindHeap Technology consulting to technology groups focused on high scalability systems.

There are many exciting changes just around the corner. Jayson has a strong background in highly scalable web applications and software development processes. We believe Jayson to be exactly the person who can help us better serve the increasing number of software programmers who use Unfuddle.

Jayson, on behalf of all Unfuddlers – welcome!

Joshua, David and Cary

Git Hosting and Repository Improvements

2008-05-18T04:50:00Z

Today, we are proud to announce the immediate availability of Git hosting on all Unfuddle accounts. For those of you have not yet heard of Git, it is a distributed version control system that can have some distinct advantages over Subversion for certain teams.

The release of Git comes with a number of exciting improvements to repositories in Unfuddle:

Unlimited Repositories. Each Unfuddle account may now have an unlimited number of Subversion or Git repositories. Mix and match as you will!
Project/Repository Associations. Each Unfuddle project may now be associated with any number of repositories. This means that you can have a mix of Subversion and Git repositories associated with each of your projects.
Repository Browser. Unfuddle now sports a slick new repository browsing interface that makes it simple to view and analyze the contents of your repository right from your browser. One of the coolest things about the new interface is seamless syntax coloring for most commonly occurring file types.
Repository Callbacks. Many of you have build or deployment processes that regularly “ping” your repositories to see if a new commit exists. In order to eliminate the need to “ping” at all, we have implemented the concept of a repository callback. If you provide us with a URL to which we can post, we will notify your servers of any commits that happen on your repository immediately after the commit occurs. Now that’s continuous integration!

To learn more about Git support in Unfuddle and how to get started, please see our Git Documentation, or just click on the new “Repositories” tab in your account. Please note that the Unfuddle API has also been updated to represent the new repository model.

Thanks to all of you who have taken the time to share your feedback. Unfuddle continues to grow with our industry and we have many new and exciting features on our roadmap!

OpenID Support and Other Random Tidbits

2008-04-06T11:53:00Z

Earlier this evening, we rolled out a number of updates to Unfuddle. The most visible of these updates, and in direct response to your feedback, is support for OpenID.

Unfuddle currently supports OpenID as a means of authentication when accessing the web interface of your Unfuddle accounts. While OpenID has many benefits, one of the biggest advantages to Unfuddle users is a single signin that spans multiple Unfuddle accounts.

This means that you can setup each of your Unfuddle accounts to use the same OpenID. Once you have successfully signed into an Unfuddle account using your OpenID, you will then be able to access all of your other Unfuddle accounts associated with that same OpenID without having to sign in again.

To setup your OpenID for use with Unfuddle, simply sign into each of your Unfuddle accounts using your username and password. Then, click on “Personal Settings” in each account and enter your OpenID URL. Once you have saved your changes, you will be able to use either your OpenID or username and password to sign in to these accounts.

Additionally, we have added a number of export formats (like CSV and iCal) for both ticket and time tracking reports, accessible directly from the web interface.

Another notable change with this release is that, for the first time since the launch of Unfuddle, many of the URL’s within Unfuddle have been changed, increasing their uniformity and similarity with the Unfuddle API. Please note that this will invalidate any exsiting links you may have out in the wild, including RSS and iCal feeds that you may have referenced from your clients. There is a new version of the Unfuddle Widget now available for download that references these new URL’s.

Project Archives and Plan Upgrades

2008-01-30T21:00:00Z

Our customers are growing and Unfuddle is committed to growing with them. Many of you have asked for more projects as well as the ability to archive projects that are no longer active. We are happy to say that we have added these features today.

To archive a project, an account administrator need simply click the “Archive” link on a project from the Projects tab. This places the entire project into a read-only mode, including its associated Subversion repository. If needed, the archived project can also be easily reactivated.

In addition to the project archival feature, you will find that we have upgraded our plans across the board, adding more people, storage, and projects for the same price to our customers. Of special note is that our FREE account now supports 200MB of space and two users. For a full plan comparison, see our plans page.

Thanks again to those of you who have shared such valuable feedback with us through both the community forums and emails. This feedback has truly grown Unfuddle into the product that it is today!

acts_as_conference: Rails Minds Unite

2008-01-16T05:24:00Z

There is no doubt that the Ruby on Rails community has developed faster than any of us could have imagined. How does one keep up with it all?

Why, acts_as_conference in Orlando, Florida on February 8th and 9th, of course! This is going to be a concentrated time of learning and connecting for Ruby on Rails developers from all over. You’ll be brought up to date on the latest happenings in the Rails community, discover how Rails can play nicely with others, and hear insightful discussions on the business and philosophy of software development.

We are really excited to be both sponsoring and attending acts_as_conference. We have already heard that a number of Unfuddlers will be there too. If you are planning on being there, please be sure to drop us a line. We would love to meet you in person. We’ll be the ones wearing Unfuddle T-Shirts. Oops, so will all of you, since we are handing them out at the conference.

Trac2Unfuddle: Trac Import Tool

2008-01-08T18:59:00Z

So you are still using Trac, eh? You’d love to switch to Unfuddle but you can’t bear the thought of having to move all that data over manually?

Well, we have the answer to your prayers. Trac2Unfuddle, our newest little utility based on the Unfuddle API, is a small Ruby script that will import your existing Trac projects into your Unfuddle account.

We all knew that the introduction of the Unfuddle API would make for some exciting new creations. Well this is one of them. Head on over to the Unfuddle Tools section of our website and get that Trac project moved into Unfuddle today!

The Unfuddle API and Widgety Goodness

2007-12-13T19:48:00Z

Today, we are very pleased to announce the release of the Unfuddle API to all Unfuddle customers. This is a very exciting release for us all as it offers a tremendously powerful way to integrate Unfuddle into other applications and development processes.

The Unfuddle API offers direct access to practically every aspect of your Unfuddle account. It is completely RESTful and offers all resources in XML and JSON, as well as a number of other formats where appropriate (RSS, iCal, CSV, and others). We have had a number of users also report success integrating the Unfuddle API with ActiveResource, the dead-simple RESTful client found in the recently released Rails 2.0.

For those of you who cannot wait to take the Unfuddle API plunge, more information, including examples, can be found in the Unfuddle API Documentation. There is also a forum in the Unfuddle Community dedicated to to API topics.

It should be noted that the Unfuddle API is still wearing it’s BETA hat. Thanks to the help of our beta testers, the vast majority of the Unfuddle API has reached equilibrium. However, we wanted to broaden the opportunity for feedback one last time before giving the API its final seal of approval.

Is that a Widget in your Stocking?

It’s also the holiday season for many of us…and that means presents. In celebration of the holidays and the new Unfuddle API, our designer David, has whipped together the first version of a Mac OS Dashboard Widget for Unfuddle. Now you can monitor project activity, create tickets, time entries, and more, all from the comfort of your Mac desktop.

The icing on the cake is that the Unfuddle Dashboard Widget actually leverages a huge portion of the JSON interface to the new Unfuddle API. Cool, huh?

You can learn more and download the Unfuddle Mac OS Dashboard widget here.

Introducing Notebooks

2007-11-15T22:17:00Z

As many of you know, there have been two major features that we have had before us over the past couple of months: Notebooks and a full Unfuddle API. Today, we are very proud to be releasing Notebooks to the world.

While Unfuddle messages are good at capturing ephemeral conversation, there has been no way to author something like a specification or manual. Notebooks are a collection of related pages, often comprising documents such as specifications or reference documents. Each notebook can be thought of a stand-alone wiki.

Unlike many other wiki implementations in project management tools, each Unfuddle project can have any number of Notebooks. We have found this to be a great help in organizing our data, as traditional wikis can often become very sprawling and difficult to maintain.

You will now find a new tab titled “Notebooks” in each of your projects. Getting started is as easy as creating a new Notebook and starting to write!

NOTE: The default permission on Notebooks for all non-administrators is ‘None’. If you are currently in a project and you do not see the Notebooks tab, you should contact your project administrator for access.

Here are some of the highlights of Notebooks:

Each Notebook page is completely versioned, allowing you to quickly see history and compare differences between versions.
Notebooks can have any number of attachments, which can then be referenced from your pages.
Pages can be interlinked using simple Unfuddle markup.
All notebook pages are fully integrated into Unfuddle search, email notifications and RSS feeds.

Enjoy!

Ticket Report Goodness and Plan Upgrades

2007-09-07T01:14:00Z

Account-wide Ticket Reports

That’s right – no more jumping between projects to view and manage your tickets! You can now view account-wide ticket reports from the Account Dashboard.

Account-wide ticket reports function just like project ticket reports. You can still make bulk updates to many tickets at once, and now you can sort or group by project as well as all the other available fields.

Currenly, only account administrators have permission to manage the account-wide ticket reports.

Plan Upgrades

We have also just upped the storage capacity of a number of our plans. The Compact, Corporate, and Enterprise plans now offer 750MB, 2GB, and 6GB of storage space, respectively. For more about the different plans please check out the new plan matrix.

Unfuddle Community Forum

In preparation for some of the exciting features we have in our pipeline, we have decided that it is finally time to give Unfuddlers a home of their own. Come on down to http://unfuddle.com/community and meet your fellow Unfuddlers. Share your successes, give feedback and ask for help.

Ticket Associations and more!

2007-08-30T04:06:00Z

While we have been working hard on our upcoming wiki (yes, yes — we are implementing a wiki), we wanted to bring you a few things many of you have been asking for…

Ticket Associations

You have let us know how having the power to associtate tickets with one another would help, especially on larger projects. As of today, all Unfuddle accounts now have the ability to associate tickets with one another.

From any ticket, you can easily create the following types of associations: Parent, Child, Duplicate or Related. Sibling relationships are also deduced and displayed for convenience.

We are convinced that this feature has a huge potential to evolve the workflow of Unfuddle. Please let us know about any successes (or difficulties) you experience while using ticket associations.

Oh, and Cookies too…

Is anyone else sick of logging into Unfuddle umpteen times a week? In response to this seemingly universal malaise, we have gone ahead and added cookie-based authentication.

Now you can just check the “Remember Me” box when you sign in and you will be automatically logged into your account for two full weeks unless you clear your cookies or manually logout.