BricaBox Blog

Kyle Bragger is:

• BricaBox’s CTO since mid-2007
• An inspired designer, whose work has been featured on Webcreme and other design sites. The man sweats valid HTML and CSS. BricaBox still hasn’t been “debugged” for IE… but it works more or less with no problem, because that’s the way he does it.
• An innovative developer… programming since he was an early teen. Once he wrote a flight systems simulator just by reviewing the manuals for a large plane’s control panels. He’s a code bricoleur.
• “Only” 21 years old… and a half
• Someone once on the path to becoming a physician (after two and a half years of pre-med and German, he dropped out)
• Nearly fluent in said German, and often found IMing German phrases which can not be translated in this space
• Debunker of myth that all developers are socially maladjusted (just like I am re: homeschoolers, I hope). To my apartment’s champagne house warming party, Kyle was the only one who thought to bring champagne flutes as housewarming presents.
• A family man. He’s a loving big brother, a Uncle, and a patient son.
• Not a blogger, but a regular tumblogr.

Why am I writing about Kyle? Because too many people know who I am and not enough people know Kyle. It’s time you got to know him.

Back story, or: How Bragger met BricaBox
This past spring, I was working on version 1 of this project, creating a little app called “VentBox” (if you’re wondering how the two are connected, realize that you can make VentBox with BricaBox, etc, etc). The first design for the app was something I sourced from oDesk, but it looked and felt like crap, so I decided I needed a real designer to get involved, just like I was working with a real developer at the time.

So, an ad went up on 37Signals Gig Board — our person wish list is still posted on the VB Blog — and very shortly after, I got this email in the sea of others:

Greetings Nate,
I’m very interested in the VentBox gig: http://gigs.37signals.com/gigs/179

My company site & portfolio, although very, very limited at the moment (just relaunched my company site and have many pieces to put up yet), is located here:

http://www.trndy.net

Could you elaborate on what you mean in saying “directed the user”?

Regards,
Kyle

Now, there’s a whole great long story behind why I ended up working with Kyle (mostly it had to do with him undercutting the competition and sounding crazy enough on the phone that he’d be fun to work with), but pretty much the rest is history.

He came on board in early March; visited NYC in the middle of the month to brainstorm about the new design; pumped out the design nearly before he left that day; started working on some new features (”I had bought a programmer too?!” I couldn’t believe) right off the bat; helped present the new design to Brett’s Web 2.0 Meetup back when there were 30 people in the room (not the 250 there are now); that night he helped me understand that the platform I really wanted to build should be built from scratch — I had learned so much developing the first version, but the code was not transferable — and then convinced me he’d be willing to help me see my idea through, and that he was the right man for the job; by this time, Kyle was already moving up to New York City, after taking a job with The Huffington Post.

Now, I’m can’t speak for Kyle and say that he was smart to have joined forces with me — time will tell? — but I can say that he’s been the right man for the job. Let me tell you about how Kyle has innovated with this platform, from the eyes of the “not-technical-enough-to-program” CEO:

BricaBox is an extremely complex application. Our goal is to both simplify and enhance the collection, organization, connecting of, publishing, relating around, and promoting of content and data. Simplify and enhance. Better said, simplify and revolutionize.

So, besides just being thousands and thousands of lines of code, there is functionality within the app which has not really been done before, even by Ruby on Rails super-star outfits like 37Signals and Robot Coop; Rails was born out of 37Signals’ Basecamp, so it goes without saying that Basecamp itself doesn’t really push outside the boundaries of Rails… it defines them. But sometimes, when you’re not doing Basecamp, you have to go outside those boundaries.

For instance, we publish your sites on subdomains of our site. Simple, right? If you were getting down and dirty with PHP, perhaps. But even 37Signals uses a PHP front-end to manage marketing, billing, etc, etc. Then they throw the sites on the subdomains using a plugin (or gem — my non-coding self doesn’t remember the difference yet) called “account as subdomain,” but there’s no global view — no main account on BasecampHQ.com. But that’s what BricaBox is. You have BricaBox accounts, sites, global directories, specific profiles, and…

…then there’s the whole custom domains issue, which again, no one has really done like we’ve done. The Robot Coop published xs_auth so that you could login on one of their sites and be logged in on their other sites, but they didn’t have to worry about subdomains like we do. Not only do we allow top level domains, but we also allow subdomains of top level domains, and Kyle coded that straight up.

And how about our content aware “blocks” system? For those of you who have seen it, you may begin to grasp the complexity which is behind the interface and functionality. Today, that interface and functionality got a lot crazier and more complicated, but more usable for the enduser. It’s not so often you find someone who innovates in code and UI in the same movement. But yeah — that’s my CTO.

So consider this a Thanksgiving post. I’m thankful to be working with this guy. But also, consider it an introduction, because you’re going to be seeing a lot more of Kyle now that we’re getting BricaBox out there and people are thinking about and wondering what’s under the hood. It’s pretty fantastic stuff, and if you have any questions, or if you have any suggestions, feel free to reach out, buy him a beer, and chat him up. He’s at Kyle (of course) @ BricaBox.com.

PS: Any technical representation or description of ourselves or others could be off the mark. There are things I “get” about the programming aspect of things and things I don’t get. Let me be clear: anything I’m off the mark on here is not a representation of claims Kyle’s made. He’s too humble to say he’s the first at something. So I could be wrong on some of these analysis, but that doesn’t reflect Kyle or take away from his work.

This week’s episode of nextNYers, a show produced by NYC’s own For Your Imagination studios, features yours truly.

It was a lot of fun to sit down with Meghan and chat about our platform. The only part thing we covered in the taping which I wish also made it into the final cut was the fact that I’m not alone in this company. I had said some nice things about Kyle which I’ll have to tell him in person now
Also, watching the video definitely reminds me that I need to annunciate more clearly and get our pitch down a little better. But that’s what it’s all about! Learning!

Thanks For Your Imagination and CenterNetworks for doing the series!

Kyle just pushed the release button on a new feature….

Profile Comments!

Here’s a comment I left on my sister’s profile (note her calling VentBox a failure and misspelling BricaBox. Cute!):

Intro:

• We’re big fans of Amazon.com.
• Currently, Nate’s reading Everything is Miscellaneous
• VentBox only did one thing “smartly”

Introducing, the “Related Content” Block

Yesterday we issued a new Block to publishers, which can exist in the small column of content pages, called the “Related Content” Block.

What this block does is very similar to an Amazon.com feature you may be aware of and which is talked about at length in David Weinberger’s book. Also, it’s the one feature VentBox had:

Basically, it analyzes user engagement history and displays related content based on those user engagement metrics. In layman’s terms, it’s “People who *engagement termed* this also *engagement termed* this.”

As seen the case below, stats don’t lie. We implemented this block on the Silicon Alley 100 BricaBox; and, when you compare Charles Forman’s nomination against mine, you see that “People who nominated Charles Forman also nominated…” folks like Nick Denton and Henry Blodget, while “People who nominated Nate Westheimer also nominated…” Charlie O’Donnell and Caroline McCarthy.

Makes sense.

The usefulness of this feature is evident and the benefits are spread evenly among publishers and users. This puts interesting and relevant content one click away from site visitors, and increases page views for publishers. It’s a win / win. Anyway, we’ll tweak this feature going forward, but for now, please enjoy.

It’s almost a little silly, but we never officially announced BricaBox’s launch last week. So here we go:

“BricaBox has officially launched.”

There, I said it. It’s official.

What really happened is that we arrived in Las Vegas, and before we went out to the first round of shmooze-fests, we threw off the mask that kept non-logged in folks from seeing public sites on the platform, and allowed anyone to create a user account with us. Without announcing a thing, we came back and 12 people had registered.

So that was our launch: anyone can register, and anyone can see a public site.

What’s still closed is the ability to make new sites. This, will be rolled out in our “January release,” but if you’re too anxious and would like to get a site now, contact us and let us know what site you’d like to make. Chances are we can squeeze you into the pre-launch publishers queue Also, please sign up for our publishers email list, hosted by the Google (Groups). That’s a great way to chat with other publishers and people who are also interested in publishing a BricaBox-powered site.

If you already noticed that we launched, or only know us since we launched, you’ve also probably seen some new designing going on. Just today, Kyle updated the home and login/sign up pages. He wrote about it here.

Lastly, we’ve been very excited to have enjoyed nice press, even without sending out a single release. Check out this Twitter message from web-strategist.com’s Jeremiah Owyang:

.

Hi, Kyle here. I wanted to write a brief post explaining some of the visual changes BricaBox is undergoing as we speak. You may have noticed the brand new homepage we’ve got up at www.bricabox.com; it’s just one of the many redesigned aspects of the app we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks. We’re taking an in-depth look at each page and identifying what we do well, as well as what we could be doing better. It’s our hope that the upcoming design changes will make BricaBox the killer publishing platform you’ve been looking for. So, if you see a page that looks funny, slightly out of whack, or just plain screwed up, our apologies, but rest assured something great is coming very soon. Cheers!

I should be packing, or QAing BricaBox, or writing up a press release, or, well, a lot of things… instead, I’m writing to say how excited I am for this trip to Vegas we’re about to take.

In a few hours, I’ll meet Kyle at JFK airport and board our JetBlue flight to Las Vegas. When we land (around noon), we’ll head to the hotel (the Hilton), and then immediately head to the Convention Center, which is right across the street. After setting up (nothing to set-up, really — just make sure everything is there), we’ll head back to the hotel to push out whatever major updates we need to before opening up to the world (actually, while Kyle is coding, I have a few important errands to run).

Then it’s time to party and shmooze. We’ll be heading to The Conversation Group’s party at Hard Rock Cafe, for sure. Other parties are sure to jot across the Twitter feed and we’ll find ourselves at those too. All this before finally heading back to the hotel again to get ready for a big next day.

On the day of the Expo, both Kyle and I will be “manning” our booth — booth 502, to be exact. We’re super excited to be right next to AdaptiveBlue, another New York, and much more semantically advanced, company. I’ve met Karen, the head of Engineering, back at the Supernova Mixer in NYC, but have yet to meet Fraser and Alex. This will be fun.

What to expect from BricaBox:

We’re launching what we’re calling a “public alpha” of the platform. Really, it’s a public beta mixed with a private alpha (the beta being the outward facing sites and the alpha being the publisher site of the platform). Either way we cut it, we expect to be one of the freshest companies there (I don’t know of anyone else launching there), though certainly one of the more technologically awesome.

More launch news will come out later regarding the launch (that’s the “press release” I was talking about).

Lastly, expect us to live blog a little. If we’re not live blogging it’s probably because we’re talking about BricaBox and meeting all the great folks at the conference. I’ll also probably do a little Twittering, so head there or “follow” innonate if you’re interested.

“Brica What?!” is a new series of video case studies we’re going to publish to help people understand what BricaBox is “good for.” The first episode is Nate’s first attempt ever at a screencast. The quality of the direction, narrative and transcoding will increase over time. I’m just happy to get one out and hear people say, “Ahh, so that’s what BricaBox can do…”

Yeah, that, and a whole lot more. More episodes coming soon. For now, enjoy:

PS: For those of you with BricaBox access already, check this out at what.bricabox.com, the official home of the “Brica What?!” series.

We’re at the office late tonight, in honor (or fear) of the 1-week-to-launch date upon us. Peep this screenshot to see one of the sites powered by the platform that we’ll launch on the 8th. It’s the community-powered “New York Technology Directory.”

By the way, you see that Technorati data? Yeah, that’s what BricaBox does. It makes your content smarter.

There weren’t any door signs in the incubator space we’re running in, so Kyle designed one for us and we went to Kinkos at lunch to print it off and laminate it (the whole thing cost less than $5).

We can’t wait to add names to the bottom of this.