Inksome News

Future changes

inksome@inksome.com — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:51:35 GMT

Following on the heels of this post, we have decided to lower icons on free accounts, but down to 50 not ten. The change will still occur on April 1st. We need to encourage people to buy paid accounts and extra icons, and this is a step in that direction. However dropping down to ten might have been seen as too large a loss, so we reached a compromise.

There will be more efforts made to encourage more money coming in to the site, as well as things to improve the site's looks and functionality, as we have time to implement them.

Thank you for your suggestions so far; they are being considered and taken to heart.

-- staff_shell

Changes

inksome@inksome.com — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:50:55 GMT

For the past few months, this site has been losing money. I haven't had the time or energy to work on it, and unfortunately those people who have offered to help have not been able to help in the area that Inksome needs most - programming and technical expertise. This is not to say that I am ungrateful for the help I have gotten - I am very grateful to all of Inksome's volunteers. But if Inksome is to become a viable concern, I need two things. First, I need for this site to stop losing money. I cannot afford to pay all of Inksome's bills. Second, I need help maintaining and improving Inksome technically.

The second issue I'm trying to address on my own, but I haven't had much luck. The first issue, however, is something I can do something about. Starting April 1, free users will no longer have 150 userpics. Free users will instead be limited to 10 userpics. Paid and permanent users, as well as early adopters, will still have the same number of userpics they currently have. Also, if by April 1 of 2011, the site is still losing money, I will shut it down permanently.

staff_kit

Back online

inksome@inksome.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:22:00 GMT

The good people at Leeware inform me that our new PSU is installed and we are up and running.

Planned downtime

inksome@inksome.com — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:48:43 GMT

The good people over at Leeware, Inksome's current host, tell me that the PSU (power supply unit) in Inksome's server is on its last legs and they need to replace it. So at 9:00 PM CST tonight, 22 November 2009 (3:00 AM, 23 November 2009, GMT/UTC) Inksome will be down while they replace it. The whole procedure should take no more than thirty minutes.

Embedding security issue on LJ

inksome@inksome.com — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:56:33 GMT

LiveJournal experienced a limited security breach on 22 September 2009. This security breach involved embedded content. As Inksome does not currently support embedded content, it is my belief that we are not vulnerable to this issue. As always, however, if you have experienced any sort of security breach, please let us know by filing a support request.

staff_kit

Contract with you

inksome@inksome.com — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:23:41 GMT

Folks, I'm offering you a contract: for every $30.00 you donate to Inksome via our Sourceforge donations page I will guarantee you one hour of my time will be spent developing Inksome. See the post in my staff journal for more information.

Want to help with the refactor?

inksome@inksome.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:31:55 GMT

Then join inksome_dev.

Feature requests?

inksome@inksome.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:33:46 GMT

What features would you like to see in the new Inksome?

Planned features (note that a lot of these things might "go without saying", but I want to be clear):

No more "friends". Instead, the journals you read will be your "subscribed" list, and the users that read your journal will be your "subscribers". (Note: apparently this is what DW does, but I promise I came up with it independently. Great minds think alike. *g*)

Public / private / all subscribers / custom subscribers groups visibility of posts

Ability to control who can comment on your posts

Ability to screen comments on your posts

Userpics on your posts

Custom mood themes

Ability to edit posts and comments

If there's a feature that IS currently supports that I've left out of here, let me know. It's probably just an oversight on my part, but there are certain things - like BML - that I don't intend to support. Also, interoperability with existing LJ clients is important to me, but it's not happening until I've got the basic feature set implemented.

Coding progress

inksome@inksome.com — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:33:44 GMT

Just wanted to let you all know that the task of porting Inksome to Google App Engine has begun. It's going to take a while to complete, and it won't even be ready for alpha testing for at least another month, but it's in progress. :)

I've set up a page on SourceForge for it: http://inksome.sourceforge.net/. Donations to this project go towards helping me pay my bills while I'm redeveloping the site.

It occurs to me that while I posted about the Google App Engine plan in staff_kit, I didn't do it here. So here's the plan:

I'm redeveloping Inksome to run on Google App Engine. This allows us to (hopefully) reduce our expenses, because up to a certain level of resources Google App Engine is free, and increase our reliability, because Google App Engine is a cloud platform - there's no one machine to go down. This will require a complete redesign of Inksome from the ground up, however, because GAE doesn't support Perl or MySQL. Thus it's going to take a while. :)

And yes, this means there's another Switcheroo coming up sometime next year.

State of IS

inksome@inksome.com — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:21:56 GMT

I need to make this a monthly thing, I know. :)

Right now, we're doing all right for money. If my figuring is correct, we have four months' worth of expenses in the bank account.

The Google Apps project is stalled ATM. I've had other things on my plate - things that I need to do to get paid *g* - so I haven't had time to do the development like I've wanted to. I'm still looking for people to help me.

mysticshell, who has been handling paid accounts, informs me that she needs help processing paid accounts. If you'd like to help, please let me or mysticshell know.

I'll open the floor to general questions.

New pricing and site plans

inksome@inksome.com — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:30:07 GMT

As I said in my post in staff_kit, I've lowered the prices for paid accounts in an attempt to increase our paid account volume. The new pricing has been updated in Paypal and is listed on the Paid Accounts page.

I would like to address those people who suggested I put ads on Inksome in order to increase our revenue and help keep the site afloat. While I appreciate the suggestion very much, I'm not going to do that. Not only do I not wish to go back on my "no ads EVAR" promise (though that's a big thing) but putting ads on the site is a whole lot of trouble. I have to seek out advertisers for one, then add code to various parts of the site to display those ads to free users, but not paid users. And then there's the fact that Internet advertising is becoming less and less viable as a revenue source, so I'd have to display more and more ads, and more and more annoying ads, to keep up revenue. It's just not worth it, IMO.

Finally, as I said in my post, I'm going to be redoing IS in Ruby on Rails. Any Rails geeks out there, or anyone who wants to learn Rails with me, is welcome to help - most of the IS code will be GPL'd anyway. Why Rails instead of PHP or Perl? Resume fodder, plain and simple. Unless and until IS can pay me, I need to work a day job, and Rails would be a nice skill to have.

Unplanned downtime

inksome@inksome.com — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:07:55 GMT

Apologies, folks - looks like our server went down temporarily in the middle of the night. Thanks to a quick call from mysticshell, we're back up and running.

I'm not dead!

inksome@inksome.com — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:57:57 GMT

Yes, Inksome is still a going concern! We had lots of people join yesterday so we thought we'd let you know that everything is fine. As always, this site is run by one guy, staff_kit, in his spare time. To make that spare time even less, he just got a new job (and it's a good one with benefits!) which comes with a much longer commute.

Over the holidays, he and his wife (me!), were also very busy with a fundraiser for our church and spending time with family.

This is also a request that any kind of technical problems or issues about payments be discussed either on the support boards or in an email to Kit. Technical problems go on the support boards and payment problems go to Kit. Please do NOT use the LiveJournal community, tsfkas, as we don't always see these posts right away and we'd like to avoid rumors flying all over the place.

In conclusion, We Aten't Dead!

There are two geeky fandom jokes in this post. Can you find them?

Love,
staff_jamie

Downtime

inksome@inksome.com — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:55:55 GMT

Apologies, folks - looks like IS went down sometime in the night, and I didn't get it up (snicker) and running again until this morning. We should be back now, though.

Thanks to mysticshell for alerting me.

Inksome's privacy policy

inksome@inksome.com — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:06:56 GMT

So I hear LJ have updated their privacy policy. In a spirit of fairness, here's our unofficial policy - unofficial only because it's not written in legalese.

Inksome will not share your personal information with anyone outside of Inksome staff, Inksome volunteers, and law enforcement officials (when we are legally required to do so). That's it. I don't want my personal details being sold to a zillion and two different marketing agencies, and I don't expect you do either.

Roleplay hosting now open for business!

inksome@inksome.com — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:15:54 GMT

Inksome now offers roleplay hosting! For $50/year, you get:

A reserved block of usernames with the roleplay's abbreviation. Every username created with that group's XXX will be a character in your game.
50 invites to use for character players or additional communities
A paid IS community (which means the ability to customize it to your heart's content)
500 MB of webspace on IS's server to create a "Story So Far," the list of available characters, and all the OOC stuff in a way that avoids some of the inconveniences of such info being buried in a community journal.

If you're interested, contact myself or staff_jamie.

Temporary downtime

inksome@inksome.com — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:52:36 GMT

I need to take the server down for just a few minutes. I don't expect us being down for more than 15 minutes at the outside.

You may have noticed...

inksome@inksome.com — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 04:12:48 GMT

If you were a paid user whose time expired, your account didn't automatically revert to Free status. The script that handled that got messed up in our last server move, but it's fixed now. If you got extra paid time because of this, you won't be charged for it, because it's my fault it happened. Merry Christmas. ;)

Welcome to Inksome!

inksome@inksome.com — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:02:25 GMT

So in the past couple of days I've gotten a metric assload of new signups. Welcome, one and all! Now, a couple of things to note:

For those of you who bought paid time, I'll get your paid time applied as soon as I get a chance. Don't worry that you'll lose any paid features between the time you paid and the time I set you up - paid time is reckoned from the date and time I mark you as paid (thus giving you access to all the nifty paid features). So no matter how long it takes me to get to you (and I'll get to you soon, I promise!) you'll get all the paid time you paid for.
Paid accounts are handled entirely manually by me, and me alone. And I work a full-time job - Inksome is my side business right now. So anything I do for Inksome I do in my spare time, which I have precious little of. Especially this weekend.
Smooth Sailing, Flexible Squares, and... one other popular layout whose name escapes me are all proprietary to LiveJournal, and are thus unavailable as system themes.
Styles based on the Bloggish theme are b0rked right now unless you put in some custom CSS (I think). I haven't figured out how to fix it permanently. If you can figure it out, and your fix works, I'll give you a permanent account. :)
Email to some providers (definitely Hotmail, and possibly AOL as well) is wonky. That's another issue I have yet to figure out. Anybody know of a good Postfix log parser?

Thanks again to all of you new users, and all of you old users who have been spreading the word, for choosing Inksome!

-- staff_kit

Captchas

inksome@inksome.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:34:06 GMT

I think I have successfully fiddled the code such that now captchas are only required when a commenter is not logged in. :)

DNS issues

inksome@inksome.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:26:37 GMT

Mea culpa on this one, folks - When I did the latest switcheroo, I didn't completely update our DNS, which has caused some goofiness. I've been told that email notifications have been spotty as well - this may be related.

*sigh* I'm sorry this wasn't as seamless as I said it would be. I'm working on it, though. :)

Transition issues

inksome@inksome.com — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 01:57:24 GMT

Let me know if you're still getting the "Sorry, we're working on something" error when you try and bring up your journal. It's the same issue we had way back when we first moved from the VPS Scribblit was living on to the dedicated server.

We're back!

inksome@inksome.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:46:16 GMT

Total downtime: just about two hours. Not bad. Not good, either - the transition should have been virtually seamless, but not bad. :)

Here we go!

inksome@inksome.com — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:52:19 GMT

i'm taking IS down for a few minutes to move things over to Beta. Hopefully things should be pretty seamless, but watch http://twitter.com/inksome for updates.

Beta going live!

inksome@inksome.com — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:02:17 GMT

Unless any of you have experienced some sort of outstanding issues with Beta - and if so, please post them here - I'm going to bring it on-line on Monday as Inksome's main server, and take down our old one. This will save us about $100/month in hosting fees. :)

While it's always a good idea to back up your stuff, you shouldn't need to do it. I'll be copying the entire database over.