The past week has been very educational with the bugs and issues being reported by the Beta Testers. We actually went with Friends and Family, many of whom are non-technical to do the first round of testing. I really wanted to see how they interacted with the site. Whilst we gave instructions on use, they were not overly detailed on purpose. In any case most testers didn’t read them 😉

We were aware of many of the bugs but a few really caught us by surprise and all of them will need to be fixed for Beta2. Some issues we considered low priority to fix turned out to be the opposite for all the users and we need to sort them out asap as it will also reduce the maintenance load on us.

With 1.5 hours to spare we have just issued the first Beta Test invite. That means we meet our Q4 2006 deadline 🙂

Phew. More invites coming soon.

We’ve been using WebFaction for all the LouderVoice hosting mainly because they come highly recommended by the TurboGears and Python communities (and donate to the TG project). So far we’ve been very happy with the service, performance and ease of deployment. Their recent launch of an API which allows people to script one-click installs of many applications for use by others has proven to be a very popular move.

They have just given one more reason for using them: They’ve added one long-running process and 40MB of RAM to all plans. Not only that but they’ve doubled the diskspace and quadrupled the bandwidth included in each plan.

The system is up and running solidly for the past few days out on the interwebs. I had hoped to start Beta1 invites today but there are still one or two problems which I really want to get closed before we do. I’m also working on the test guidelines, roadmap and known-problems lists. As soon as we’re ready, I’ll let you know.

If you are even remotely interested in trying out Beta1 or Beta2, head on over to the main landing page to sign up.

It’s great to see the new Blogger come out of beta, it is a big step forward from the old one. But I find it strange that they seem to be deprecating all the old APIs whilst only providing Java, .Net and PHP libraries for the new APIs. I’m surprised that a company that does so much in Python, employs Guido van Rossum and just bought YouTube which, according to Guido, is written in Python (wow!), does not have ATOM/GData libraries available in that language.

We’ve finally put up the email collector on the LouderVoice holding page. If you want to be part of the trials, please sign up.

The plan at the moment is that we’ll be inviting a very small number of people we know into the Beta1 phase in the next few days. This is because we know there are missing features and some holes in the exception handling but it is still a highly functional application and we want to get that initial feedback. The focus in that phase is around features not stability. Questions we will be asking include:

A lovely new extension/addon for Firefox called Operator has just been announced over at Mozilla Labs. Its basic functionality is similar to Tails and Tails Export in that it detects microformats on web pages and allows you to do “stuff” with them but it looks like the author, Michael Kaply at IBM, has big plans for Operator and felt that he could not achieve that with the existing tools.

Some of the things you can do include:

I’m afraid this post is in the same tone as most of the others I’ve read about Le Web 3 – the shark was truly jumped. Did my attendance fee pay for the security for Shimon Peres and the French presidential candidates? Was I at Le Web or Les Grands Buddies de Loic?

Whilst the lack of functioning wifi was deeply annoying for attendees and was a PR disaster for Orange, it was completely unacceptable and frankly amateurish for them not to have dedicated bandwidth for the startup room. The inability of Web-based startups to show their products live at Le Web was laughable and the shrug-attitude of the organisers about this must have been horribly frustrating for those who put all that effort into their preparation.

Electric News has done a nice article about PXN8, PutPlace and LouderVoice attending Le Web 3. I’m thrilled we are in such great company. There may also be a mention in the newspapers tomorrow. Damien came up trumps again for us all.

The Cork crew are taking an early flight on Sunday and arriving CDG at 13:45. If anyone wants to hook up at any stage, just call me or text me (Conor) on +353-87-9790297. I’m aiming to be at this party on Sunday night and the official one on Monday night. I have to leave early afternoon on Tuesday so don’t forget to catch that pigeon.