As we said before, since we got back from the Bay Area we’ve been working on getting the site out of alpha status. Our goal is to open it up to everyone as soon as possible. This plan requires 3 steps:
- Redesign the UI and make it more user-friendly
- Redesign the database architecture and alleviate the current scalability bottlenecks we are experiencing
- Move all infrastructure to Amazon Web Services for easy horizontal scaling.
To date we’ve accomplished the first milestone. We did a complete overhaul of the UI for Inkzee. It wasn’t just the design but we needed to add a lot of help features. One thing we’ve seen is that most users just use a small fraction of the features the site has (and there aren’t too many). Because the current version was on alpha status, there where no help pages whatsoever. That meant that only the most advanced users were able to navigate the site. Our goal is to make it plain simple for everyone and so we realized we needed a complete help system.
So, off we went and added a lot of help features into the site. For starters, we added a help page where you a a complete (or so we think) guide to Inkzee. In there you’ll, hopefully, find the answers to the most common questions you might have.
Secondly, we changed most of our cryptic icons and turned them into fully blown buttons with their textual meaning apart from the icon.
We also added a bunch of widgets to the main page so you now will have the latest news of this blog on the main page. We also added a much more interactive “get started” widget than the old plain text layer we had before.
And finally but not least, we added help bubbles all over the interface with tips about the feature at hand.
The first reviews from our alpha users has been very positive but we will love to get some feedback from everyone. Found a spelling mistake? Couldn’t find help about a specific topic? Do you still don’t undeerstand what that button or feature does? Feel free to contact us with your suggestions and ideas!
The Inkzee Team
#1 by jayant - July 21st, 2009 at 05:41
Have you tried other schema less data stores like mongodb, redis, voldemort ? I was looking out for something which is stable and has an available php api…
Thanks
Jayant
#2 by abarrera - July 21st, 2009 at 23:50
Hi Jayant, to be fair, I haven’t tested non of them. I researched some of them, like Voldemort but couldn’t find a good benchmarking. Seems few ppl are using it outside Facebook or they keep their numbers to themselves
Redis seems very sweet. Here you can find a nice post about TC and Redis comparisons: http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19458
In my case I feel TC is slightly better suited for Inkzee than something like Redis, although it’s nice to know about it. I might even give it a try sometime in the future.
Another post that talks about Voldermort, MongoDB, Redis ans TC: http://randomfoo.net/2009/04/20/some-notes-on-distributed-key-stores
As usual it’s a matter of choice to fit the problem at hand. For now, TC and TT have performed extremely well under my tests. Let’s see how it holds out.
Btw, TC has a bunch of php clients, including 2 I talk about in another post: http://blog.inkzee.com/index.php/2009/06/28/tokyo-tyrant-and-some-numbers/
Nevertheless, implementing a basic php client is quite easy. You have all the protocol stuff on the TC site
Thanks for the comment!