Ian Landsman

Founder & Dev. HelpSpot / Larajobs

Lots going on:

In the forums:

http://www.userscape.com/helpdesk/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=1&pc=1

On the mailing list:

Because of your expressed interest in HelpSpot we wanted you to be
among the first to know...

Starting today, the HelpSpot beta is available for download!

As a potential HelpSpot user we value your feedback and view it
critical to the development process. As such, we're running a
HelpSpot beta September 12 - October 14. Beta participants are
encouraged to provide feedback on all aspects of HelpSpot. In
return, as our thank you, we're offering active participants a 50%
discount off the license price at the close of the beta.

If you're interested in participating, follow the link below to
complete the registration form.

HelpSpot beta registration:
https://www.helpspot.com

Your continued interest in HelpSpot is appreciated and I look
forward to future opportunities to work together.

Thank You,
Ian Landsman
President, UserScape
ian@userscape.com

I'll certainly have some more follow up tonight as well, but right now I have so much to do. For those who've been with me here for so long thank you!!! In the first 2 minutes we've had about 15 companies download the beta, I'm more than a little nervous!

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Got our first "HelpSpot Rocks" comment in the forum. Excellent, thanks Chris!

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I'm super busy with preparing the beta release of HelpSpot, but I wanted to post about a tool that has really saved my butt. If you need to debug IE and/or IIS then you need IE Watch. It's a great IE plugin which shows you all the back and forth headers IE sends and receives. It's really helped me out a lot, seeing where IE caches when it shouldn't and all the weird things IIS does. Good stuff.

http://www.iewatch.com/

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My pops works for United Spinal Association a great NFP for spinal cord injured people. Among his many duties there he also runs the definitive wheelchair technology site in the business, usetechguide.org. He just started up a blog on the site which should be full of neat wheelchair tech as well as random ranting and raving so check it out if you get a chance. Also if you could send some link love his way that would be great!

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In my last post I lamented about not being able to use Textdrive for some test hosting because they currently aren't taking on new customers due to a server move. Well, you have to love having a blog. It turns out Michael "Koz" Koziarski from Textdrive is a reader of this here blog. He has very graciously offered to get me setup.

Is that great customer service or what! And I wasn't even a customer, just some guy who posted about wanting to be a customer. These are the things that build great companies and that create excellent word of mouth.

They have all the features I've been looking for plus Ruby as well as a bunch of other nifty things.

Update: I just got my setup confirmation email. They've put me on a special geek only server (sweet) and I even got a special geeky message not sent to the other normal humans who get hosting. You guys rock!

So anyone out there who needs hosting be sure to go check them out (when they're back taking new customers, which I'm sure will be soon)

http://www.textdrive.com

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Anyone have any good experiences with a hosting company? I'm looking to get an external account to do more testing of HelpSpot "in the wild". It will only be used for HS testing so I'm not too worried about transfer amounts and so on. What I really want is for it to support MySQL, PostgreSQL and SSL. Not too worried about platform either. PHP4 + PHP5 would be nice as well.

I have all kinds of variations setup here using the wonderful VMware app, but I'd like to do more testing in a less controlled environment.

Everywhere I look seems kind of bogus. I was going to use TextDrive, but they aren't taking new clients at this time.

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Nice post by John Lim, creator of ADODB about some of what they go through when creating custom apps for the financial industry. There's alot of good stuff in there even for regular sites.

Maybe that should be PHP's slogan. "If it's good enough for banks it's good enough for you!". What do you think?

Also there's a good ADODB tip in the comments about clearing the password string. Sweet.

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I've been working 16 hour days for the past few weeks and it's just making me too darn tired to blog. I have a big blog post in my head, but my fingers just won't type the words. So to keep it simple, just go check out Paul's new ISV. In short I like the idea. Everyone has been spending so much time saying we don't need anymore CMS's for that past few years that I think now we actually do.

Also my wife says my posts are full of poor grammar and sentence fragments lately. Hopefully you can all forgive me!

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Robert has a nice little followup to my "adding PostgreSQL support to HelpSpot" post. He seems to be a PostgreSQL "guy", which is a good thing for me to know :-)

To follow up on a few items he mentions:

  1. Yes, I think the fulltext search is very much glossed over in the PostgreSQL world. I don't know how tSearch compares to MySQL's but what I do know is that MySQL's is supper easy to setup. That's huge for anyone who needs to throw up a simple search. It's also important for people like me who want to build an application that has a very easy installer, that doesn't require sending people off to the command line, etc.

  2. Good to know that there aren't alot of people offering help desk software on PostgreSQL, now you know where to send people who need it!

  3. I believe the page I was looking at about tSearch was the one you linked to. It must have just been taken down. It was last updated Dec 2003, but I figured the updates might just have been taken over as part of the main dev. If that's the case, then all the more reason it should be integrated in.

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Interesting few posts by Gavin Bowman about mistakes he made starting up his ISV. I agree completely with #1 and #2 and partially agree with #3.

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