Tag Archives: Interviews

An interview with Umut Muhaddisoglu from Uptime Robot

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I was lucky enough to exchange a few emails recently with Umut Muhaddisoglu from Uptime Robot, I have used Uptime Robot for some time now and have found it an invaluable tool, so I wanted to find out a little bit more about what makes it tick.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

I’m a web developer who used to run a creative agency and a hosting company. ~4 years ago, the hosting brand is acquired by a larger company and, on the web side, wasn’t feeling as excited as before for creating stuff for customers.

As a result, I quit all the setup and started working on my own projects. It started with running WebResourcesDepot (http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/) where I regularly share free web design/development stuff that I may need (so, others may need) one day. It grew so much and, within time, I found the time to focus on another project: which is Uptime Robot.

What made you decide to start uptimerobot?

I was a customer of multiple hosting companies, had my own hosting company, managed lots of sites-servers and uptime was always a part of my job.

Having used many uptime monitoring solutions, most of them were built with system admins in mind and almost all of them were extra-complicated and high-priced.

On the contrary, I needed something simple (yet stable) that would alert me when a website does not work or an e-mail server stops responding. That’s it.

Also, I had a will to build a large-scale web app that handles lots of transactions which would teach me many new things. Uptime Robot successfully did that perfectly with millions of checks/day and lots of logs to deal with :) .

And, with the price, “free” sounded like the lowest it can be :) and we are trying hard to keep it so.

Did you do all the work yourself or did you get a team of people involved?

We have built it with Daniel of SSLmatic (http://www.sslmatic.com) and improving it together.

What language does the site use in the backend?

There is too much stuff going on in the background and it is a combination of some EXEs created with C++ and batch files created with VBscript. MySQL is our choice of storing the data.

What problems did you face making it?

None, we knew what we were doing.

But, within time, as the userbase and number of monitors grew, we needed to read + learn so much in optimizing queries and database to make things as fast as possible. There is still lots to learn there.

And, I feel like, within time, we may move some parts of the engine to Node.js (which is what I’m amazed of these days).

If you could start from scratch, would you do anything differently?

We have a built a beautiful monitoring engine, that’s what I still think when I view the code. For the front-end, we had focused on simplicity. But now, I can see that it can still be much more simpler (which is what we’ll focus on v2).

Do you have any cool features or plans in the pipeline?

There are many things waiting in our to-be-launched and to-do lists. Web-hook notifications, detailed reporting, response time monitoring are few to come. And, we are also working on v2 which shall make monitoring much more simpler.

What is your development setup like? (do you code on a mac, what programs you use, things like that)

I have always been a Windows person. Although Mac and Linux have many advantages over it, “working with what you feel comfortable at” makes sense.

Using Dreamweaver and Notepad++ as the IDE, Navicat as the database manager and Chrome + Firefox (with Firebug) for debugging the frontend.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Look forward to hearing the tosbourn.com readers’ feedback about Uptime Robot.

#End of Interview

Thank you so much to Umut for taking part in this short interview, if you are looking for excellent uptime monitoring you should definitely give them a try.

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What would you like to see more of on the web – a follow up with Zoe Bogner

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Just over a year ago I asked the question what would you like to see more of on the web to a couple of people who work with or on the web.

As it has been over a year I figured now would be a good time to follow up with the interviewees and see if they got more of what they wanted!

Zoe Bogner was one of the participants, she originally said:

This year, I hope to see the web become a more accessible place. I think we’re over the dark days of inaccessible flash objects and poorly used tables, hope the fast uptake of mobile devices, combined with the huge push towards HTML5 as the standard for online video and audio will, perhaps almost inadvertently, greatly improve the ways we present information.

Already I’ve noticed a very different approach in the handling of Flash-less users; I’m seeing less ‘please install the latest flash player’ and more seamless alternative content (alas, I do not escape those flashing banner ads on my iPad). I’m chuffed to see an increase in the use of alternative delivery methods (e.g. transcripts) and the work being done on the WAI-ARIA spec, the WHATWG’s<track> element and the efforts of individual browser developers to bring us captioning.

Most of all, I’m hoping we will not relive the object-embed-satay-swfobject nightmare of previous years, and instead we will see the browser makers and spec writers come to some sort of codec consensus. Here’s hoping for a productive 2011!

So with that in mind here is her new response!

2011 was a very exciting year for me as a web developer. Although Ethan Marcotte kindly gave us the term Responsive Web Design way back in 2010, and the HTML5 movement was already starting to pick up steam at that time, I think it took a good year before these ideas really gained the traction needed to be considered for too many big, serious projects. When I gave this interview in early 2011, I was in the process of trying to convince my colleagues to develop our first Flashless e-learning courses. I got most of my wish in that project (the assessments were still Flash), but just over a year later we’re now wrapping up the sequel, which requires no Flash player if you’re using a smart browser.

It seems like a no-brainer today, what with so many people now owning smartphones and iPads, but a year ago that idea was a tough sell. “Nobody is going to use this site on their phone” I was told. It was an ambitious project, I won’t lie, but today mobile and tablet access is the most requested feature of our Flash-fueled courses.

Regarding codecs, I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the format wars. I think it’s now safe to say the battle has died down to a point where browser makers have agreed to disagree, and all efforts are now focused on refining their own <video> and <audio> implementations. It’s bought us some much needed stability, even if it means we still have to produce and host multiple version of the same video, but at least we’re no longer aiming at wildly moving targets. However, the <track> element for transcripts that I pine for still looks a long way off.

2011 was a pretty amazing and groundbreaking year for me. I saw a lot of processes towards an increasing device-agnostic and accessible web future, and I can’t help but smile at the thought of what the next 12 months will bring!

Thanks so much to Zoe for taking part, and I am glad that it seems like she got what she wanted from the web in the past year!

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Interview with Stephen Kinkaid from Big Wet Fish

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Today I am proud to share with you an email interview I conducted with Stephen Kinkaid, the owner of Big Wet Fish, a web hosting company based in Northern Ireland.

I should say, I am a customer and BWF fanboy – so was very glad to get this interview, I think a lot of hosting companies could learn from what BWF are doing.

Anyway, onto the interview!

For those who don’t know who you are, could you give us a bit of an introduction.

My name is Stephen Kinkaid and I am owner of Big Wet Fish Hosting in Belfast.  I was born in 1974 (get the calculators out) and I grew up in Derry/Londonderry.  I went to Queens University in Belfast in 1992 to study Computer Science graduating in 1996.  I then completed my Teacher Training at Queens and got my first teaching job in Glengormley High School in 1997.  I moved to te role of Teacher in Charge of IT in Carrickfergus Grammar School in 2000 and onto Head of IT in Carrickfergus College in 2007.  I have been working full time at ‘the fish’ for well over a year now and am excited about what we have achieved to date and what we hope to achieve in the future.

A level students needing web space – Carrick Grammar must have been pretty forward thinking, did you get to affect much of the curriculum there?

Unfortunately not. You are constrained by the Curriculum and the need to have the students pass exams. The specification at the time for the web design unit stated that websites should have ‘Advanced Content’ so I took that as the chance to host the websites and have a little bit of php and mysql going on (by little I mean real simple stuff but enough for a basic introduction and stir their curiosity). Ironically at an Exam Board training day I was informed that adding a (wait for it) ‘Flash Navigation Button’ or an html image rollover or a hit counter would also be classed as ‘Advanced Content’ for the purposes of the mark scheme. In my opinion something is seriously wrong with the teaching of IT and Web design if the exam board class an html image rollover as advanced content.

You may have seen the debate of late about IT in schools and how it fails to deliver what is needed for life at University or the World of Work. Although I am not a teacher any more (well technically I still am just am not teaching!) I tend to agree with many of the critics about the poor state of IT in schools. In defence of teachers, a teacher has to teach the specification in order to have their students pass the examination so it is unfair to pile all the blame on teachers. Take the provided software on the managed service solution to schools – the only provided software for web design in schools on this date in 2012 is Microsoft Frontpage so unless a school invests from their own budget this is the only tool a teacher has to help a student develop a website. I had to fight to get £3000 to buy en education site license for Dreamweaver from the limited school budget. I have been in classes where teachers have told students that a Frontpage Layer is just like a Publisher Textbox in that you can move it around (yes the teaching of web design IS that poor in schools)! I could go on for paragraphs here but I think you get a sense of how strong I feel about this. The Government is investing millions in a new managed service network for schools and I fear training of staff and proper software provision will be neglected once again.

So that is your history, but lets talk about the present! For those who are unaware of Big Wet Fish, could you give us a brief history.

I did an interview for repknight.com back in June 2011 and much of what I summarise here can be found on their Blog.  http://repknight.com/blog/?p=52

I started BWF in 2002 as a hobby when I needed some reseller space for my students to use for their websites they were doing for their GCSE and A Level work.  I used to get frustrated at the standard of IT Teaching in schools (I still do!) and I wanted to give my students the ability to host any web work they did on line and to also introduce them to basic php and mysql.  I started selling web plans on Ebay in 2003 but did not really start any serious work until November 2007 when the first BWF website went on line.  I wanted to start a company where clients came first – where clients were more than a number (the old cliche!) and where clients felt valued.  We always try to go the extra mile for clients using a common sense approach.  Clients are seeing that and our growth in the past 12 months has seen an 85% increase in turnover and we see no signs of that growth slowing down.

Could you briefly describe the current setup for us, in terms of staff and locations.

We have servers located in two locations.

  • Firstly we have servers (Shared, Reseller, VPS and Cloud) in Bluesquare in Maidenhead near London.  We have been using this data centre for a few years now and have found them to be a solid provider.
  • Secondly we have servers (Shared, Reseller and VPS) located in DIMEnoc in Orlando Florida :  http://vimeo.com/32164614  gives you a tour of this facility

We have a full compliment of staff available 24/7 to support clients with their needs.

Stephen K (myself)

I work from Belfast and manage all sales and accounting enquiries.  I also help out on the helpdesk when needed and I manage any new server build projects.

Giles W (Senior Support Admin)

Giles is our Senior Support Admin and his role is to handle any escalated support tickets from our front line team and also work with me on a daily basis to ensure things run smoothly.  Giles did a design degree from Full Sail University in Orlando Florida and started off his career with Hostdime in Orlando where he worked his way up to a Level 2 support technician.  He left Hostdime Orlando in 2010 and has been working for BWF since that time.

Praveen N (Level 3 Linux Tech)

Praveen works the helpdesk for us office hours Monday-Friday and he is a computer science graduate specialising in Linux Servers.

January W (Administrative Assistant)

January is Giles’ wife and she assists with Level 1 Support tickets, sales tickets as well as accounting issues on a contract basis.  She presently works for us 2 days per week.  Giles and her have just had a baby so her hours fluctuate but many of her admin tasks are not time critical so it works well for us and her.

Nixserv Solutions (remote technical team)

We also have a contract with a remote support company who are based in India.  This company have built up a strong reputation in the industry as being trustworthy and reliable and these technicians are on hand 24/7 to handle support tickets that we do not handle in house. The person who owns this company was a former Hostdime India technician and he came highly recommended by the Vice President of Operations at Hostdime USA.  We trust their judgement so trust this company based on that strong recommendation.   When a ticket is not answered internally within 30 minutes the remote technicians will pick up the ticket and handle it efficiently 24/7.  They are also monitoring the servers 24/7 and alert us the moment there is an issue.  In fact if you check our Twitter feed this morning a client just said :

‘Why to host with @bigwetfish? They tell you when something went wrong and you didn’t know. They don’t keep you in the dark! The light is on!’

It is our strong desire within the medium term to bring more dedicated technicians working for us onto the helpdesk and to rely less and less on a remote Indian team.

DIMEnoc

We have contracts in place with DIMEnoc USA and DIMEnoc UK for our servers, bandwidth, IPs etc  There are spare parts for every server we deploy in the data centre and staff available 24/7 to respond in the event of a service outage.  Also in the unlikely event we have a support issue we cannot handle internally DIMEnoc and their sister company Hostdime Level 3 support admins will support us (for a cost) on a per ticket basis.

Seems like you have a scaleable team, on the theme of scale, Big Wet Fish have been known as a customer service focused company – do you think that reputation can scale as you grow bigger?

Yes we really believe we can handle this.  We want to look at examples of other hosting companies and take the positives and negatives and learn from successes and mistakes from other companies.  12 months ago I started the painful process of ‘letting go of my baby’ and I firmly believe our reputation today as as strong as it was 12 months ago.

Hosting Con in Boston in July 2012 has a number of seminars relating specifically to this question.  I plan to attend that conference this year to network and learn from others.

We built our business on strong customer service and the business will fall if we ever let our guard down.  This is our primary goal to continue to give clients what they need.  As we grow we need to instill this ethos into the entire workforce and enable the workforce to make ‘ad hoc’ decisions based on common sense.

Take yourself last week.  You had been asking about installing Ruby on your cloud server so I made a decision to offer you a free standard VPS server for as long as you had an active cloud server to allow you to test things without the fear of you having issues with your live cloud server.[Toby Note: I was incredibly grateful for this!]  It is these sorts of common sense business decisions that help clients to grow to love us – we need to enable all staff to make such decisions moving forward.  That decision I made for you will cost me a little money in terms of server space I cannot sell to someone else BUT critically the decision was taken to aid an active client and our primary aim is to keep all clients happy.

Some of the seminars I have in my mind to attend at HostingCon in Boston in July 2012 are:

  • From Bedroom to Boardroom
  • How to get your whole company thinking and acting like owners
  • Maximise productivity by supporting employee freedom
  • Growing and Managing a remote workforce
  • Take your company to the next level
  • Finding your story : Branding yourself in the hosting industry
  • ‘The next evolution in customer care’

As you can see we are focused on moving forward but critically moving forward always with our clients at the forefront of our minds.  We must be doing something right as we were approached recently by another hosting company who do similar things to us to buy us out.  We looked at the offer on the table and politely said no.

Hosting Con sounds good, but are there any web host events closer to home that you think would be worth a look?

Were it Web Design then there are loads of local events but for Web Hosting unfortunately much of the current development seems to be in the United States (any excuse for a trip to Boston!).  There are the World Host Days and this year it was held in Germany which I guess is much more local than the USA.  We did not attend but many of the seminars are available online:  http://www.worldhostingdays.com/eng/agenda-120322.php

That said, the range of speakers at Hostingcon meet the needs more of our organization at this moment in time with much more focussed talks relevant to us.

What technical challenges have you had to face as your business has grown?

We stick to what we  know and can manage so that helps us overcome any technical challenge.  For example, we have the ability to deploy Windows Servers on our Cloud but we only will do so on the understanding that it is 100% unmanaged.  We specialise in Linux CentOS servers with the Cpanel Control Panel.  Having all our shared and reseller servers set up in an identical fashion assists us in helping clients with issues.

We work on a team approach.  We actually do not like clients calling us with technical issues as a helpdesk ticket helps us deal with the issue in a team approach and we feel a client will get better service in this fashion.  If a tech has fixed an issue that another tech is unsure about we have a strict policy that the one tech will instruct the other tech. We all learn things on a daily basis with this approach.

Any hosting horror stories you can share with us?

Server 19.  Before we deployed our own OnApp Cloud in Maidenhead we had bought some OnApp Cloud space from a Dublin based Cloud only provider.  I need to say that this particular company has evolved greatly since that time and are now known as a very stable and solid provider but in mid 2011 we started getting tickets that server 19 was off line.  We checked our OnApp logins for this provider and the server had been terminated.  Contact was made with this provider and they informed us that a developer employed by them was working on their ‘Hostbill’ module and had issued an API call to terminate some servers.  They said only a few servers were destroyed of which one was ours.  Thankfully we had R1Soft continuous Data Protection backups and this provider provided a technician to get everything back running after a few hours.  They also gave €250 credit as compensation.  They did take responsibility for this but this left us reeling at relying on a Virtual Platform to deliver shared and reseller hosting accounts to clients.

Thinking to the future now, do you have anything big in the pipeline you want to share?

Ask me after I attend Hosting Con!  Seriously though there are lots of things going on at the moment.  A summary of some is below.

Our Cloud is reaching capacity so we need to make some decisions moving forward about that within the next few months.

We also fully realise that our website is probably our biggest weakness and we have a 4-6 month plan in place to have a new website in place.  This will hopefully enable users to see more clearly what we can offer them and what we can do for them.

We also have some tentative ideas about how we could split the company into divisions which could happen at the same time as the website launch – one for our cheap shared servers where we have thousands of clients all paying a little money  - one for our VPS and Cloud servers where we have a few hundred clients all paying a lot of money. This would help us clear up the support channels available to all clients.  There are a lot of ‘grey areas’ at the moment we need to clear up.   We love our clients but moving forward as we grow we need to make our support policy much more clear.  For example, if you only pay £2.49 per month (8 pence per day) you would only get helpdesk support.  If you pay £70 per month on a cloud server you get phone support.  Having 2 divisions – one for basic shared and reseller and one for business shared and Cloud Servers seems like a sensible approach.  These are all in the ‘Melting Pot’ at the moment and are all open for discussion between staff.  Anything we change will be customer focused and we will always work hard to ensure our valued clients come first.

We will also be watching the industry to look to see how we can move forward and embrace new technologies.

Finally, is there anything else you would like to talk about or mention?

Yes it seems appropriate to end this interview with a word of thanks to our clients who have made BWF the company it is today.  Without you we would not be here. It is a pleasure to see some clients from our early eBay days renewing year on year.  These clients especially I salute for being with us at the start and sticking with us over 10 years – watching us evolve into a one man ‘bedroom’ operation into a company with many staff providing 24/7 support.

I feel I also need to mention DIMEnoc/Hostdime in Orlando Florida and in Maidenhead UK.  We are proud hosting partners of yours and have been for ten years.
Thanks for being there for us when we needed support.  Thanks for continuing to be there for us to assist with the really complex ‘head-melting’ issues.  Having the power of a huge corporation behind us gives us and our clients the confidence that we have the contracts in place to handle even the most complex issues.

##End of Interview

Thanks so much for Stephen for taking the time out to answer my questions. You can following BWF on Twitter.

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Interview with Derek Johnson

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I briefly met with Derek at a Build workshop last year and have been a big fan of the work he is putting out and his work curating the HTML5 Gallery, so I was glad when he accepted my offer to interview him for my site.

Tell us a little about yourself, what you do and who you work for?

I live in Co. Armagh with my wife Keyara and our three children. We are expecting our fourth child at the end of April.

I work at Website NI in Benburb, Co. Tyrone building websites for clients throughout Northern Ireland. I am especially interested in HTML5, responsive web design and mobile friendly web development.

I’m also one of the co-curators at html5gallery.com a showcase of sites that make good use of HTML5 and related technologies. We are always looking for new curators if anybody can lend a hand BTW.

If someone wanted to lend a hand with HTML5 Gallery, how do they get in touch?

They should contact Rich Clark on twitter @Rich_Clark or via the contact form on the site.

How did you get into tech and more specifically web development?

I started fairly late in life and I’m not your typical geek – at school I hated computers and would have gone out of my way to avoid them. On top of that I’ve always been crap at video games. So crap that I’ve never managed to clear all the little dots from the first level of Pacman. When I left school I traveled a bit and eventually settled in Scotland where I worked as a forester by day and in bars in the evenings to supplement my income. I loved forestry but the industry was shrinking after tax breaks disappeared and wages were low.

Reluctantly I decided that I was going to have to learn how to use a computer if I was to move up in the world, so I enrolled in a basic computer course at a local college. There were modules on Microsoft Office, communication, C++, networking and UNIX, all of which made me yearn for the excitement of watching magnolia emulsion dry on Winter grass while it grew over my feet, apart from one – web design.

I thought it was absolutely amazing that I could make this thing (in FrontPage at the time) that would go on the web for anybody to see. I still clearly remember how magical it felt to create and click on a link from one page to a different page and back again. I was hooked (and remain so) and spent as much of my spare time as I could learning and building. I wasn’t able to finish the course as it didn’t pay the bills, but I made my first paid site soon after that for a forestry contractor and charged £70. I was over the moon.

I kept at the part-time freelance while working in other jobs, moving to Northern Ireland, getting married and having children until I eventually landed a full time job at Website NI just over three years ago.

What are you finding yourself working a lot with at the moment?

Responsive design. Clients are asking us if they can have a mobile site or native app, and when we sit down with them to get a handle on their needs what they are actually describing are cross-platform websites. Thanks to the blinding ray of light Ethan Marcotte shone on us all in May 2010 we can now help with that.

The types of sites we build are usually content managed and/or e-commerce. It’s very rare for us to build a straight up static brochure site these days.

Ahh FrontPage – I was a Dreamweaver boy myself, anways, Who or what are your biggest influences?

Ethan Marcotte’s responsive web design as I’ve already mentioned. It is a combination of three fairly simple technologies, but the underlying philosophy is a strong one and I believe it will define the coming era of front end web development in the same way Jeffrey Zeldman did with web standards.

Another big idea that influences the way I work comes from Luke Wroblewski. In May 2011 I attended the Mobilism conference in Amsterdam where he gave his Mobile First talk. Afterwards he was having a twitter conversation with Jeremy Keith about “content first” and in one of his tweets he said API first was more inclusive than content first. Being a bit dim I didn’t know what he meant but was lucky enough to bump into him in the bar and asked him, and he was kind enough to explain it in baby steps for me. Without that talk and that short conversation I would still be flapping about doing the web design equivalent of putting a motorbike helmet on arse first.

A year or so ago I would have told anybody who listened that responsive design and client side feature detection were the answer to everything, but now I think they’re only part of the answer to a smaller number of problems. I’m starting to adapt things on the server more now because cheaper and older devices often don’t live up to the promises they make via feature detection. It’s a very new thing for me but it can’t be ignored as device fragmentation is, well, very fragmented. That’s a good thing by the way – the further we move away from excuses to create illusions of control the better, because we don’t have any.

What we do have though is progressive enhancement and the opportunity to build our knowledge of the device landscape as described by Stephanie and Bryan Rieger. For the rest of 2012 I don’t think I’m likely to read, watch or hear anything as useful as Stephanie Rieger’s Pragmatic Responsive Design and Bryan Rieger’s Adaptation talks they gave at Breaking Development Nashville last year.

What is your development environment like?

Benburb is a quiet but thriving village set in idyllic countryside, and there is an amazing amount of creativity about the place. There is a potter, painter, basket weaver, woodworker and sculptor all working and creating in Benburb. I think it rubs off on us a bit even though we are technology and they are traditional.

I don’t think that’s the prosaic answer you were looking for however,[Toby's note - it wasn't ;-) ] so I’ll give you that now! My main machine runs Windows 7 and I use Sublime Text 2 as my text editor and Opera as my development browser. Our test suite includes an iMac, a Windows 8 laptop, a couple of old £40 XP laptops with native IE6-8 installs, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry Curve, Nokia 5800, HTC Hero, Galaxy S2, O2 XDA and a Sony Ericsson something or other. I also use a Windows Phone emulator and the indispensable Opera Mobile emulator. I do as much guerrilla testing on friends and relatives phones as I can too.

That is a nice array of test machines. How do you try and keep on top of current tech / development news?

Twitter, RSS and conferences are my weapons of choice. I curate my twitter following list and RSS feeds quite tightly (maybe too tightly) but I read all of it.

Conferences are slightly different in that you don’t get knowledge that isn’t necessarily available elsewhere, but the connections and conversations lead to so much more in the long term that they make the price of a ticket a bargain. I remember thinking after Mobilism that if I was to blog about it I would write about the people I met and conversations I had, and put the notes on each talk into an <aside>

 

What is your biggest bugbear at the moment?

Talented and/or successful people who mock less experienced people’s work.

It’s a cheap shot and mean spirited to set up a “WTF look at these fools LOL” tumblr, or to tweet a link to a site that could do with some work. We should remember that nobody sets out to create bad apps, sites or experiences, and that everybody has to start somewhere. The usual advice given to folk starting out is to put their work online and let people see it so more experienced folk can critique it and show where things could be done differently. Public humiliation was never part of the deal.

Everyone I’ve met online and offline who does this job loves it and does the best they can within the constraints provided by their budget, knowledge and experience. Let’s act like we’re part of a community not a class system.

How can people get in touch with you?

Twitter @derekjohnson. There’s a blog in the pipeline with a few draft posts done, but no definite launch date yet.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Pay attention to the recognized experts in our industry. They aren’t self-appointed or loudmouths or bluffers. They are well known because they have put the hours in and come up with the goods.

Also, if something’s not working fix it by opening your mouth to declare it broken.

#End of interview

Thanks so much for Derek for taking part in the interview – you should definitely follow him on Twitter and I wish him all the best in the future (especially with the new addition to the family!)

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Interview with Shiela Dixon

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Shiela DixonA good while ago I stumbled upon a link checking application for Mac OSx called Integrity.  I found the software very useful and enjoyed using it.  Around the same time I had decided that whenever I enjoy using something online I am going to contact the creator and maybe try and set up a quick interview with them, and that is what I did!

I contacted Shiela and asked if I could fire her some questions and she very kindly agreed.  So without further ado, here is the interview!

First of all, for people who don’t know you – could you give us a little background info.
I’m based in the Midlands of Britain, been programming since the early days of home computing (sent a vic-20 pac man game coded in 6502 machine code to a magazine while at school… wasn’t published…) Up until now it’s always been a hobby although at one time I did have a couple of titles published by real software publishers. I’m making an effort now to polish Peacockmedia and develop some licensed applications so that I can spend at least part of my working week developing.

Could you give us a little bit of a background to Peacock media, when it started, why you started it – things like that.
I registered the name as an umbrella for several of my interests; crafts, news / communications and website and application development. I’ve tended to use the name in connection with application development.

One of the apps you created (and the reason I wanted to interview you) was Integrity, why did you decide to build your own broken link checker?
As with all of the software that I’ve made, it was to fill a personal need. Many of the apps that I’ve tried have shortcomings. The best I’d found is Xenu Link Sleuth (which is Windows software and I used it as part of a day job but I don’t have a pc myself) I’ve not tried to copy that, but to make something that works equally as well and to be guided by my own needs (which I’m sure match other people’s needs.)

How long did it take to build and did you hit any major stumbling blocks over the way?
That’s impossible to answer as there’s no real finishing point – it’s always been in development with new features in the pipeline. I released the first version in 2007 when I had something useful working.

In the early days I had terrible problems with crashes related to the multi-thread nature of this app. This is the worst kind of bug because the crashes are random and not reproducible but thanks to information and feedback from users, and being prepared to look into problems as they’re reported (and spend many, many hours staring at code and scratching my head), it now seems very robust and effective.

Another challenge has been that Integrity has to deal with user’s own html (or to be fair, sometimes machine-generated html) which can certainly be unpredictable. I could have simply stated that code has to be well-formed, but again, I’ve tried to look into everything and try to make Integrity handle whatever it encounters.

Do you have any plans to develop it any further?
As I’ve said, I don’t think any app is ever finished. Users have always been good at coming forward with ideas for great new features.

Many have gone beyond link checking, and I have learned from past experience that building in every new requested feature can be counterproductive because you lose simplicity and you lose sight of the app’s original function.

In order to build some powerful but diverse features such as html / css validation, sitemap generation, and SEO checking, I’ve released a new product called Scrutiny which contains Integrity’s link-checking functionality – and these other webmaster tools as well. This means that I have been able to stick to the principle of Integrity being a simple and effective – and free – link checker.

I certainly have a healthy enhancement list thanks to the users. Something I’m very excited about is the new ‘visualisation’ feature, jut released in 3.7.2

Speaking of your other apps, you can see them all on your website, do you have any other ones in the pipeline?
Here’s an exclusive for you. I manage a mail-order business (inventory, customers, orders etc) using Organise, which I’ve made available for free. I also use a tool I’ve written myself to manage my e-commerce websites. This isn’t available yet and needs more work before it can really be of use to anyone else, but in a push to increase my own efficiency (we’re back to the fact that apps happen to fill a personal need) I’ve integrated the two so that the items and their quantities held in Organise feed into the websites and take away the need for manually managing these. It’s a way off, but I plan to eventually be able to offer Organise and the website CMS as separate products, and the two together as an integrated ‘web shop’ solution.

What is your development environment like?
On a physical level, Peacockmedia HQ is just my living room, and a number of macs. I’m grateful to Apple for consistently providing a fantastic development environment, XCode / Interface Builder, along with a number of useful utilities. I made a decision to support older systems (going back to 10.4.11) and ppc macs, so for most development I’m using Snow Leopard and running XCode 3, which allows me to build a single universal binary app which will run on 10.4 ppc right up to the new Lion. I keep a newer machine for testing and for running certain apps such as Photoshop.

What online / offline resources do you use regularly to help you develop your apps?
For coding problems, Cocoabuilder has long been the first place I search. Recently, with the rise of iPhone / iPad development, other Objective C / cocoa forums have sprung up, so a Google search is often very effective.

How do you try and keep on top of current tech / development news?
I enjoy keeping an eye on sites such as Slashdot and The Register for geeky stuff generally, but I’ve never tried to be at the cutting edge and respond to new advances in the system before or when they’re released. Even less so ‘rumour’ news (although friends are good at forwarding this kind of stuff!) In fact because of backward-compatibility and that commitment to older systems, I take the opposite approach and this can mean compromises on new OS features.

Apple’s website is a useful resource, I particularly enjoyed watching Steve’s keynote speeches, and these were often the way that I’d learn about forthcoming features. I’ll miss him.

Do you have any plans to release your apps onto the App Store?
I’ve struggled with this one, and it would be great to hear any thoughts from your readers. I think it’s a great feature of the OS and has brought easy downloading and use of third-party apps to mainstream users. I’m sure it would give much wider exposure to my apps, but there are some downsides – there’s quite a heavy financial cost, there’s also a development overhead in preparing an app for being distributed and sold on the App store. Distributing via the web as well as the App store leads to a very awkward situation when someone has paid for a licence key and wants to update via the store and vice versa.

I also feel uncomfortable with it being such a ‘closed’ system. With the handheld devices it’s impossible to download and run an app from the web or which is not approved by Apple. It hasn’t gone as far as this yet for the desktop OS but I’m worried that we might end up being under this level of control.

#End of interview

Thanks so much to Shiela for taking the time to answer my questions, and more importantly for developing some wicked awesome products.  You can get in touch with Shiela on Twitter on on her Website.

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