Awesome Fontstacks Blog

The Jetpack edition. Another changelog.

Yesterday three of us (Wolfgang, Thorsten and me, Jan) spent about 12 Hours of heavy coding in the mindmatters office to deliver another evolutionary iteration on awesome-fontstacks.com. Here’s a quick rundown on the features we added and changed:

• We now enable you to tweet your bundles if you create them. We will also tweet them to @fontstackz. We’ve seen people to tweet bundles before, so this is just a logical extension of our twitter integration. Yes, we’re still thinking about other login solutions as well. Later, maybe. Please use that feature, because twitter usually is a good traffic driver and more traffic on the page makes us happy. :)
• We created a users overview, showing all users who created bundles on the site, sorted by “popularity” of the bundles.
• We are now able to deprecate font families. Deprecated families can not be selected anymore when creating bundles and bundles containing deprecated families will carry a warning on their page. This is a first step to be able to keep our font repository clean and disable fonts where needed, for example because the licensing changed completely.
• We are happy to introduce some long-needed sorting feature to the all bundles page, so now you can sort by age (as it was the default before) or by popularity (currently number of likes, but that will probably get more complicated soon), which is also the new default.
• We also (again!) modified the process of font selection during the bundle creation, by adding font-style filters to all remaining steps (except the monospace step, of course), restricting the headline font selection to fonts that actually contain bold fonts and, as a last small tweak, we sort the monospace fonts by using our fontmatching algo, so that the best matching font will be on top.

The deploy then was a bit of a painful process with quite some hickups, but that’s what you get when you do it at 22:30 on a Saturday. After that, it was beer-time and boy, after 12 hours of continuous hacking, that was well deserved. Please let us know what you think about the update, either via twitter, email or here in the comments. Also, you can use our awesome getsatisfaction community. Ah, and about the jetpacks: It’s 2011 already, where’s the future you promised us?

The CPH edition. The changelog.

As you might have noticed, at least if you follow us on twitter we pushed a new update (and an update for the update, and an update for the update of the update, and then another update) on sunday.

So, before I tell you how awesome it is to drive to Copenhagen for a weekend chock full of good food, beer and code, here’s roughly the stuff we did for you:

Even more Awesome Fontmatching: The first iteration of our font matcher was based on the font metrics as saved in the font files. Unfortunately, especially in the field of free web fonts, these metrics are usually wrong or at least slightly off. As it seems, we found a pretty good way to remedy that - We now look at the actual characters to generate our own metrics. This basically means two things for you: We were able to push our font matching algorithms quite a bit, resulting in much better suggestions and also, we will be able to bring back a lot of interesting fonts into the game - Most of which we had to disable during the rumble because of sub-par metrics.

Extended filter mechanisms: You are now able to match Text/Headline fonts by not only comparing relative heights but also the relative letter width, resulting in less, but better matching combinations. Also we enabled a way to filter for different styles when choosing a deco font, resulting in, hopefully, more interesting bundles.

User profiles: You can now see your saved bundles on your own profile page, but also look at other users’ profiles to see what they consider to be good bundles.

Bookmarks If you happen to like a particular Bundle of someone else, you can now bookmark it. Also, if you, by chance, managed to build a bundle identical to one already saved by someone else, you will not be able to claim it to be your own. tough luck. (But of course, you can then subsequently bookmark that one as well.

All the - Small Things I think we did a pretty good job of taking our virtual duster to work and improved the overall experience at many a places. We also fixed some long standing but hidden bugs (You will probably notice the sudden appearance of script fonts in the deco fonts section. They were always there, you only didn’t get to see them).

Last but not least, we also did talk a lot about the platform, this being the first time since the rumble to have more than a dinner to spend together, so there are still great things to come. Also, we did talk a lot about the process in which all of this happens, namely very short, intensive bursts of development activity and what this means for code quality, maintainability and such. But this will all be told in a different story not far from here.

So, after all this being said, we want to give the Podio guys a round of applause for letting us use their awesome offices in Copenhagen and hope that this wasn’t the last time we can spend some quality time developing kick ass software in one of the worlds greatest cities.

As always: We would like to hear from you, either here, on twitter or on our getsatisfaction support community, especially if you like our new release and what we can improve or what works great.

Jan (for the whole Team: Florian, Thorsten and Wolfgang)

A happy new year and a happy new deploy!

Well, we would have hoped for a quicker roundtrip, but in the whole pre-xmas-and-end-of-year-mess we didn’t manage to push out the results from our mini dev sprint on 15th of December last year earlier than tonight. But it’s done and well, here we are now:

You can enjoy an overhauled look of the bundle browse page. Yes we know it still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of functionality, but at least it doesn’t look like the badly hung over intern did it in a spare hour after copying several volumes of the enzyclopedia britannica.

You can also now call your bundle names. Please don’t insult them, though.

This feature will make it easier later on to find your bundles as soon as we implement profile pages.

Apart from that I can happily announce that the coming weekend will be mostly devoted to the awesome fontstacks. I say mostly, because we do (as I lined out in the last post) spend it together in lovely copenhagen and I know this city has some potential to support large scale procrastination and leisure for those too weak to stay focused. We’ll see, but if I would be you, I would schedule my next visit to awesome fonstacks for the beginning of the next week.

Looking forward to keep you informed on the progress of our second awesome weekend over the next three days!

Jan

A glimpse at the future

As I said in the last post, all four of us have a day job to attend - This makes it extremely difficult to estimate timeframes for improvements on the site. So when we met last saturday (keep in mind, since Florian left Hamburg to work on Podio, we are a real distributed team) to finally celebrate the Railsrumble win, we prepended the drinks and food with a small planning meeting.

There are some small things we need to fix fast, like the Fact that obviously some fonts we chose a few weeks ago are not free anymore. We’ll at least provide you with a way to report such unfortunate incidents at a central place.

Also, we found that you (our users) sometimes (especially on font squirrel) are having a hard time finding the @fontface bundles we want you to download. This needs some more explanation.

In the long term, we really want to make good use of the year the win has bought us. This means that we will try to create a model where awesome fontstacks will be at least self sustaining. We have some ideas on how to do it, you’ll notice, I guess. :)

Since currently we are not in a position where we can work full time on the project, we are going to try something different (and if I have any say in it, we’ll keep you posted regularly on how that goes) - We’ll make it a true weekend project.

Maintenance and small new features will be done by individual team members (we’ll be using the trusty pivotal tracker to keep us updated on progress) whenever they can find the time.

Additionally to that, we’ll reserve complete weekends for rumble-like sprints. The first one is confirmed for a weekend in January. The three hamburgians will get on a train to the lovely city of Copenhagen and then hardcore coding and redesigning will commence.

We are very eager to find out how this model works. And actually, we have a plan of expanding on that idea in some ways, but this is not the time and place to reveal it.

Jan

Hockeystick for real

When I first installed analytics on awesome fonstacks, I was blown away - Twitter seems to be a good indicator - There are quite some people using our little service. That feels great and is a good motivation for keeping us working hard on the software.

Then, SmashingMag came back into play.

As I said, we were lucky in having our app added to a recent list of useful timesavers for web designers posted at the website. First rush. At that time, we didn’t have analytics so I can’t really say how much traffic that generated.

Then, still in the voting period, @smashingmag tweeted a link to our app. Second rush. (Still, no analytics. Note to self: Next time in the rumble - Install analytics)

Then, a few days ago, we were featured in the SmashingMag newsletter.

Needless to say that this really did create a hockeystick in my analytics view. Third rush. Also, twitter search suddenly bursted out awesome fonstacks tweets.

So we seem to owe Vitaly Friedman and his team a lot for making people notice our platform. Hat tip to you, Sirs and Madams!

Jan

Sing when you are winning

So. The RailsRumble 2010 finally is over and an emotional rollercoaster came to a preliminary halt. Awesome-Fontstacks is not only the happy winner of the “Most useful” category in the Rumble, but also one of the more-talked-about projects. We were absolutely amazed by the sheer number of tweets coming in. We had a very lucky start with our good friend Jakob Fricke who submitted our little app to SmashingMag, who incorporated us into their “50 Powerful time savers for web designers” post and it only got better from that point on.

Let me put it that way, I (we) probably haven’t done anything on the web with such a huge feedback EVAR. Much love to all of you people - It feels great to build something that obviously has value to people, even after less than 48 hours of work.

So, how do we continue from here?

We already started to improve a few small things, like fixing the annoying carousel bug on the front page and linking to this blog and our twitter account, but of course we want to make this service an even better one, especially after the great feedback from the rumble judges.

We cannot really say how we’re going to do it, because we all have a day job to attend and there’s not really a sound business concept ready to be taken out of the drawer, but winning a rumble category allows us to defer all these things at least for a bit - We have won free hosting on linode.com (awesome sponsors of the railsrumble), so keeping the site running currently costs us exactly nothing for the next year.

So, expect some smaller and some bigger changes in the near future. We’ll keep you posted.

And, again, if you voted for us in the rumble - Thank you so very much! We are honored and flattered to actually win the second prize in the second attempt after 2007 and the soundbadge.net “most innovative” success.

That should be it for now,

Jan (for the whole rumble team: Thorsten, Florian and Wolfgang)