The Unfuddle Blog

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

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:

1. Unlimited Repositories. Each Unfuddle account may now have an unlimited number of Subversion or Git repositories. Mix and match as you will!

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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!

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 existing 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.

As many of you may have noticed, we have been experiencing some performance and connectivity issues since about 2pm EST. The issue is now remedied, however, I wanted to take a few moments to update you as to the cause of the problem.

Unfuddle has been growing rapidly. Yesterday afternoon, in response a recurring problem with our load balancer, we made the decision to swap it out for a new one that would provide a more robust and responsive experience. While the transplant appeared to have gone well, there were a number of problems that only began to surface earlier this morning.

As of an hour ago, we have swapped yet a different load balancer into place and Unfuddle is now back up and running.

I apologize for this inconvenience.

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!

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.

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!

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.

Earlier today, we began experiencing some strange issues with our email server. Many of our customers began reporting that they were not receiving email notifications, password reminders and the like. Upon further investigation, we have learned that this problem has been intermittent, and has been happening for about the past week.

As soon as we discovered the problem, we immediately took measures to remedy it. We have just finished installing a new mail server. With this upgrade, everyone should once again be receiving email.

Please note that any invites you may have sent over the past week may not have been received by the intended recipients. You can either manually notify these people or re-invite them into your account.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have any questions regarding this issue, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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!