UnFiltered: Behind the scenes at Firehose Filter

Aptana Cloud makes things happen

firehosefilter — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:41:41 +0000

A few months ago, Dave Kruse pointed out a new offering in the slice hosting world, Aptana Cloud and my world will never be the same.

The “killer feature” in my mind of Aptana’s Cloud is the free 7 day trial. Yes, that’s right. Free production-outward-facing hosting for 7 days. To me that is extremely important, especially when dealing with side projects.

Anyone with a side project burning a hole in their head will tell you the hardest part is that first push out to the real world. One piece of that is deployment. While paying for hosting is something I know I need to do, it’s one of those things that makes me stop and pause and wonder and get distracted and let my code sit in non-production for way to long.

With Aptana Cloud, I just created a site (no credit card required) and about an hour later was up and running. (An hour may seem long, but I think deployments are like driving a Suburban, if you only do it every few months, you’re bound to clip a few curbs.) You even get basic system and web stats monitoring. (Now, I’m not entirely crazy about having to use Aptana Studio for the pretty stats…I’m a TextMate guy…but I can live with it.)

All things considered, I think it’s a great great way to get your app off your local harddrive and into the wild. Now…I wonder how it will handle swarms of people?

The CU Filter: A great place to start

firehosefilter — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:31:34 +0000

It’s no secret that I enjoy following and participating in a corner of the Financial Services Industry that I call Credit Union Land. The people I’ve met through the Credit Union industry are some of the most transparent, good hearted, and innovative people in financial services, period. As a whole, this transparency leads to lots of web talk and Credit Unions are always first on my radar when I think of trying out anything in a niche environment.

So when I first started looking at niche trending of twitter and blogs, Credit Union Land was an obvious first stop for me. What became apparent as I talked to a few people about the idea and as I observed comments by others is that for many CU individuals, there is a close CU Circle that they like to follow and communicate with, and then there is all the other CU chatter that they need to keep tabs on. (This is definitely true for me as well.) The latter is where I feel a service like FirehoseFilter and specifically The CU Filter can help.

So the first stop on the FirehoseFilter is a place where anyone can come in and quickly see what the over 140 Credit Unions on twitter are talking about. Check it out and let me know what you think.

The CU Filter

Gearing up for a reveal

firehosefilter — Sat, 23 May 2009 06:28:54 +0000

I’m finally feeling comfortable enough to start pushing towards a preview of FirehoseFilter. It will be a simple example of what a tool like this is capable of and the benefit it can be. Get excited!