BricaBox Blog

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:

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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!

A few days back, while deploying a batch of new code to BricaBox’s production…er…boxes, we hit somewhat of a roadblock: Rails’ autoloader was killing a few of our namespaced routes (e.g. /block_builder/tags/some_action). Stranger yet, the issue seemed to only occur in production, not in any of our dev instances. After some thoughtful conversation with Lee at EngineYard, ensuring our monit config wasn’t acting up again, and investigating the more obvious possibilities, turns out it was in fact Rails’ own naming conventions for controller filenames that was causing the whole thing; one quick rename of a controller file and we were good to go. The route parser was hitting “block_builder”, finding a controller class to match (by way of the autoloader), incorrectly setting our action to “tags”, and proceeding from there. By renaming block_builder_controller.rb to something else, it was essentially hidden from the autoloader, thus allowing Routing to correctly parse “block_builder/tags” as a namespaced controller, passing back “some_action” as our action, etc.

The moral of the story? If shit starts acting up, check your filenames!

It’s August 1, the day we told people we’d begin our alpha phase of development at BricaBox. As of now we have a few new users (mostly family) tooling around on the site and we’re getting great feedback already.

For the rest of you, it will be another week or so before we bring in the next dozen, and perhaps another few weeks before we let those folks begin inviting the next.

Why the slow alpha? As we’ve approached this date, the question we’ve been asking ourselves a lot is “What kind of alpha do we want this to be?” In software development there are two kinds of alphas: the slow one and the fast one. Here’s where we see the lines drawn:

Lost of people choose to do the fast alpha because the see the alpha as step in line with the direction they are heading. The alpha is a milestone before private beta, which is a milestone before launch. With the fast alpha, no major plans will change and early user influence over the ultimate product is negligible. The fast alpha is an act.

But we want this to be a slow alpha.

As you can imagine, we’re burning up to get the platform done and out into the hands of the masses. Fame, fortune, and everything that comes with it awaits us, right? Perhaps — but that’s not what we’re trying to do here, yet. First thing we need is a killer product, and the best way to get a killer product is to test your assumptions before investing too heavily in a ill-conceived design.

So far, we’ve heard nothing but great feedback and we want more of it. What’s great feedback? It’s not a pat on the back pushing you in the same direction, great feedback is game-changing advice which points you in a better direction. Especially when it comes to a product like BricaBox — a platform and an abstract one at that — great feedback tells about strengths you things you didn’t know your product had, and about weaknesses you didn’t think you had to worry about.

So, continue heading over to BricaBox.com and signing up for the alpha/beta email list. It’s from there where we’ll add the next users. And for now, thank you so much for being interested in the all we’re doing. We appreciate the interest and can’t wait to show you the goods.

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PS: If you’re interested in something else that’s interesting, check out this post from Bug Labs. They have a hardware product coming out that sounds a lot like how we talk about BricaBox.