#shopify Christmas party was a blast. As evidence, I am typing this on my new iPad 2

— David Underwood (@davefp) December 18, 2011

I’ve been wanting to do something ‘cool’ with it since then, but until now I hadn’t found the right project. Then earlier this week I came across Geckoboard, a neat app that allows you to create Panic-like status boards to monitor all sorts of interesting stats.

I decided I wanted to use it to create a living room dashboard that pulls in my calendar events, the current time, the weather, and maybe a todo/shopping list. I would then place my iPad somewhere prominent and have all the info available at a glance.

Mixing Business and Pleasure

Unfortunately for me, most of Geckoboard’s built in widgets are integrations with business oriented services: Github, Basecamp, Pingdom, that sort of thing. Whilst these would look great in an office lobby, I don’t think my wife would appreciate live uptime stats in our living room. Time to improvise!

Geckoboard has this concept of custom widgets which allows you to shoehorn any data you can get your hands on into various predefined templates for display. There are a range of different chart types available, as well as maps, numerical displays, and plain text.

I decided I was going to get my feet wet by creating a weather widget that would display the current temperature along with the conditions. This would be represented in a custom plain text widget.

Sourcing the weather data turned out to be really easy. Yahoo has a fantastic weather API which is free to use for non-commercial purposes that works by simply sending a request with your location to a particular endpoint. The hardest part (which is still dead simple) is looking up your ‘WOEID’ (short for Where On Earth ID), a numeric ID for your location.

WOE Is Me

With my WOEID in hand, it was time to wrangle the data. I created a new Rails project with a simple endpoint that took an ID and spat out the weather data for that location. With a little help from the xml-simple gem I then refined the response to include only the data I needed (The temperature and the condition text) before re-wrapping the response in json to be returned. This was maybe half a dozen lines of code in my controller. In fact, Rails is probably way over the top for something like this but it’s what I have the most experience with so I went with it anyway.

I created an app on Heroku to host everything, and then tried it out. Here’s what the widget looks like (excuse the boring Ottawa weather):

Really simple, but exactly what I wanted. I liked it so much that I decided to share it. Head over to the app on Heroku for instructions on how to use it yourself: Gecko-Weather.

I’m planning on adding a couple of extra features soon, namely the ability to specify Fahrenheit/Celsius and some error handling in case the weather info is unavailable for some reason. I’m also open to suggestions, so please post any requests in the comments!

“Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood”, challenging him to increase internal usage of the company’s product.” – Wikipedia

I’ve been at Shopify for the better part of a year now, so I thought it was about time that I engaged in some dogfooding of my own. The result has just gone live: The Noble Pony

Giving Myself a Crash Course In E-Commerce

Setting this up was a bit trickier than if I worked at, say, Facebook. Shopify is not a service unto itself, but rather an tool that forms part of a much larger chain: running an online shop. Before I even signed up for a Shopify account I needed several things:

1. An audience
2. A product
3. A business plan
4. Funding

After considering some alternatives I decided that I would sell T-shirts with my own designs on them. This was because all the creative work could be done by one person (me) at my computer using free software (Inkscape). I could then take the designs I came up with to a local printer who would handle the manufacturing. As for an audience, I was primarily designing for myself. However, I knew that I would have to publicize my products somehow and so picked interests of mine that had strong communities I thought I could market to.

My business and funding plan are very closely linked. Due to the way T-shirts are printed, it only makes sense to order them in bulk. Economies of scale and all that. Putting my own money up to fund an initial printing run would be too risky, so I’m running the shop on a pre-order basis: People promise to pay for shirts, and if enough people are interested then I do the print run and ship the shirts. If not, oh well. I cancel the orders and no-one loses out (except my hopes and dreams of striking it rich).

Getting Set Up With Shopify

Once I had a design for a shirt, investigated the production costs, and decided on the business plan I got to work and set up The Noble Pony, my very own Shopify shop. The actual mechanics of doing this I’ll cover another time, but the main elements I needed were:

1. A storefront design
2. A payment processor
3. A fulfillment/shipping solution

I went as bare-bones as possible by tweaking a Shopify theme called Solo for the storefront and setting up PayPal Express Checkout for my payment processor. I’ll be handling the fulfillment side of things myself so I did some research into Canada Post rates and set a couple of weight-based flat rates accordingly. The shipping setup was the hardest part by far as I initially went through the process of setting up an account with UPS only to find out that shipping really small/light packages with them was way too expensive (Shipping the shirts would have cost more than the shirts themselves).

The Finished Product

So what have I actually created? I threw around a couple of ideas about Reddit-related shirts as well as Starcraft-related shirts. Then I played with Inkscape until I finally came up with this:

If you’ve ever played Starcraft 2 you’ll recognize this instantly: It’s a group of the battle.net league icons. There’s a little more to it than that though. The shirt itself looks like this:

The design is supposed to mimic the way a soldier wears his or her medals or ribbon bar. Plus I think it looks cool.

What’s Next?

My goal is to have 100 pre-orders by the end of January. Since opening the shop and announcing it on /r/starcraft two days ago I’ve pre-sold a grand total of… 2 shirts. Clearly the age of ‘If they build it, they will come’ is long over. My next task (and the subject of my next blog post) is to learn as much as I can about publicity and advertising and sell the hell out of the shirts. I’ll report back with my findings.

Note: Mad props to ~JovDaRipper for creating the brilliant T-shirt templates. Go check out his gallery on DeviantArt.

Pull

The trouble with forums generally is that they’re not designed to push topics to you; You have to go to them to get updates. This is great if you’re a casual user but when you’re an administrator who needs to read everything that gets posted, it’s a hassle. I had to remember to check the forums constantly. It also meant that regular users weren’t engaging one another as much as we wanted: More often than not initial responses were provided by admins rather than other users.

Push

That’s why we ditched the Shopify developer forums and redirected them to a new Google Group for developers. Mailing lists are by design inherently push-based, so now the messages come to me. There are options to reduce or turn off notifications all together but judging by the number of times a community developer comes to the aid of another it seems that they prefer to get notified immediately.

User Land

I recently had the opportunity to see things from the other side when I delved into the Dropbox developer forums. It only supports RSS updates (boo!) so once I’d posted I had to remember to go back and check for updates. That took me 3 days. The responses I found on my return were great, but if I had been able to track the thread via email I’d have known a lot sooner. I also find myself with no desire to go back and read through topics to answer them.

Alternatives

Google Groups are fantastic, but they’re not for everyone. The Ottawa Android group that I attend uses Libre List which is a far lighter weight solution. A quick google search reveals many more possibilities.

PostCatcher allows you to create a url that serves two purposes:

1. When you POST to it, PostCatcher will record the request
2. When you GET the page in a browser, it displays the previous requests for you to examine

Investigating an unfamiliar webhook is as easy as registering your PostCatcher url to receive updates and then generating some requests. The PostCatcher page will update in real-time with the new data, allowing you to see and examine out the structure easily.

Alternatives

Before PostCatcher I used a similar service called PostBin. It’s written by progrium, who is also responsible for Localtunnel. Unfortunately I’ve found that PostBin is unavailable more often than not due to being over quota, hence the switch to PostCatcher. The latter also benefits from a slicker ui as well as login via. Github allowing you to keep track of your previously created ‘catchers’.

I’ve been playing League of Legends over the last month or so, and I rather like it. But that’s not what this post is about.

A couple of days after I installed the game, I noticed something strange. My network monitor gadget was showing an ongoing upload of about 1Mbit. Whaa? I don’t remember telling anything to upload large amounts of data. Time to investigate!

Throwing open performance monitor, I saw a process called pmb.exe. Perfmon has a handy context menu feature that allows you to search the net for a process name, so I did that and found that the process was a program called Pando Media Booster.

This looks familiar…

Seeing that name jogged my memory. I’d seen it before, pulling the same trick. That time I had been trying APB: Reloaded. I decided to hit up the Riot Games forums to see if pmb.exe was linked to LoL in any way. Turned out it was.

It seems that the trend amongst many free-to-play games (including LoL) is to supplement their direct download sources with peer-to-peer services for distributing the game client. This makes a lot of sense from a cost-saving perspective, and I’m all for it. Pando Media Booster is a tool that facilitates this.

Malware at Best

The trouble is, Pando seems consistently shady in the way it is installed and configured.  It’s usually auto-installed along with whatever game you’re installing. By default it’s set to run on start up and has no cap on the upload speed it uses. It doesn’t have a task tray icon so unless you’re paying attention you’ll have no idea it’s running. That sounds a lot like malware to me.

Fortunately uninstalling Pando is straightforward once you know it’s there and doesn’t cause programs that use it to break once it’s gone. But with bandwidth caps in place on most internet connections a program like this is basically spending your money for you without your knowledge. Pando (and to a lesser extent, Riot Games), I am disappointed in you. Knock it off please.

I’d love to see this coupled with a dynamo accessory so that you could mount it to your bike and charge the bag while cycling. If I hadn’t recently bought a Thule messenger bag for my work laptop (which I love by the way), I’d definitely try one out.

I currently have just shy of 350 steady installs (which I’m really pleased with), but that seems to be where things have evened out. As the app is free I don’t want to spend money on advertising it at the moment, so I figure that if I want more people to install it I should work on making it appeal to a wider audience. Here’s how I plan on doing that.

The Plan

Multiple Players

Right now the app only supports a single player – The idea is that you use it to track your own life (and poison) total and let the other player track theirs. This works ok for casual play, but since then I’ve attended a couple of pre-release events that are a little more competitive and realized that you should always keep track of all players’ life. Therefore the first big feature I want to add is the ability to track multiple life totals simultaneously.

Poison and Other Counters

The app was written while Scars of Mirrodin was the current expansion. As a result, it gives equal billing to poison and life. Now that the game has moved on a little bit, infect decks are seen less often. At the same time I’ve had a lot of requests to track other totals: Mainly related to the Commander set Wizards released this summer. To kill as many birds as I can with a single stone, I’m going to be working on a setting that allows the user to display an arbitrary number of totals per player, which can be used for whatever they like. Life, poison, commander damage, or anything else you can think of.

Monetization

Finally, I want to experiment with monetizing the app. The current version will always be free, but the new features I mentioned above (the ’2.0′ features) will probably be made available as an in-app purchase. This is as much an experiment in using the Google Checkout API as anything else, but I’m also interested to see whether people will pay a dollar for a life tracking app.

Implementation Challenges

The big thing I have to figure out is how I’m going to display all this extra information on the screen. The current interface is designed to maximize the size of each of the elements so that they’re as easy to use as possible. If I add more players/counters then I have to either make everything smaller or move some of the data off-screen and have the user page through it. Neither of those is particularly appealing to me so I’ll definitely have to spend some time experimenting to see which one works better.

I’m hoping to work on all these changes over the next month, so with any luck Life Dial 2.0 will appear in the Market early November.

Google Plus doesn’t support Apps accounts yet, but that hasn’t stopped everyone at work from adding one another. I have 32 people in my ‘colleagues’ circle (compared to a measly 25 in my ‘friends’). Surely there’s a way to harness this new platform in day-to-day business?

Turns out there is. Since Joey went back to Toronto last month the Apps team at Shopify (Myself, Joey deVilla and Edward Ocampo-Gooding) have been holding our regular morning meetings over Google Plus Hangouts. This has worked surprisingly well so far. The video and audio quality have both been great, even when we did a three-way connection on Friday. I like that there’s no associated contact list hovering in the background (like there would be with Skype) as well as the potential for drop-in, drop-out participants. We can just open the Hangout to everyone in our ‘colleagues’ circle and we’re good to go. The “whoever’s speaking gets center stage” feature is neat, but can get a bit annoying when the speaker changes rapidly. I’d really like to see an option to evenly split the screen between all participants, but other than that Hangouts are perfect for our short morning meetings.

From there you could do all kinds of interesting things, like having users request songs or foursquare integration that tailors the playlist for whoever’s checked in at the time based on their combined Last.fm history.

Maybe something like this already exists, I’m not sure. I’m not exactly the most prolific music listener ever. If it does, I’d love to hear about it!

Here’s a picture of my new TV :D