Our documentation page is starting to take shape:
Our website is back online, albeit with a different back-end.
What’s nice with the work that Florian has done over the past week is that switching from one back-end to another is just a matter of changing a single attribute in the HTML element of a single page on the site. While we’re trying to figure out what went wrong with our primary back-end instance, we’ll use the backup instance for the time being.
We also added a new documentation page. More coming soon…
Our website’s back-end is down. Stay tuned…
Sam just discovered our widgets page and suggested that we add a list of the cool pages that are not easy to find on our site. I thought that was a great idea, so I added a bunch of links on our product tour. We’ll add new pages to this list as we go.
The stoic.com website is flaky this morning. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get what you want.
Here is what needs to happen this week for STOIC Answers (ordered by priority):
And here is what we need to do for stoic.com:
If we can pull that off in a week, I’ll be really, really, really happy.
Now that our new website is powered by STOIC, we can generate most of its content directly from the platform’s objects. For example, the Workflow field of the Perspectives object is used to generate our roadmap for perspectives. What this means is that whenever we add a new perspective to the platform, we add a record for it in the Perspectives object, and we transition its workflow to the proper state. From there, the roadmap is automatically updated on our website. In fact, it’s not really updated, it’s just fetched dynamically from our master instance whenever you go to this page. One could call this real-time product lifecycle management.
Our website is back up and running. I had messed up our domain configuration. Sorry…
Our website is down. We’re trying to resolve the issue. Stay tuned…
Our new website is now live at stoic.com!
Quite a few things are still missing, but I wanted to have this new powered-by-STOIC website be live for a full week before we give our Kickstarter backers access to their instances. This should allow us to identify some of our most critical bugs, and it demonstrates that we believe in our own software, for better or for worse.
Besides, it’s much better looking (I think)…
PS: The website does not work on Safari. We’re working on it…
PPS: And now we’re getting a nice 404 error… Interesting…
Our new website is almost complete. Most content has been migrated from the current website, and the only major piece missing is the search engine for the homepage’s question box. We’ll try to get that done tomorrow, or Monday. In the meantime, if you find any broken link or any page requiring some work, please let us know.
While we’re finishing the first version of STOIC Answers, we’ve decided to re-build our website from the ground up, on top of the STOIC platform. We still have a ton of work to do, but I’d like to share what it looks like so far, and give everyone early access to the very first prototype (Warning: somehow not working on Safari). Most pages still need to be built, but a first level of integration with STOIC Answers is done.
If you click on Get Answers, it will take you to our cool new Q&A site powered by STOIC Answers. Don’t bother actually entering a question, because the search engine is not implemented yet. It will be built using elasticsearch, which we hope to integrate next week or the week after.
The homepage’s design is still something that we’re debating internally. In a nutshell, I’m trying to build a site that is highly interactive, so that it can address the needs of a broad audience made of both business users and technical users. Since we’re not targeting any group in particular, many different people will visit our site, and our goal is to quickly give them what they’re looking for, in an action-oriented fashion. And because we’re building a fantastic question-centric knowledge base with STOIC Answers, we felt that a search engine metaphor would be appropriate, as long as we can implement it properly, which remains to be proven.
If I manage to implement what I have in mind (and that’s a big IF), when a user enters a question like “How can I build a CRM application with STOIC?”, a page will be dynamically generated, with a list of relevant questions and answers. If we feel particularly lucky (à la Google Search), we might just take the user to a particular question page. And we will include additional content that we feel will help the user, such as:
At least, that’s the vision. I’m not entirely sure whether any of this is doable or not, but it sure would be really cool if we could build all that with STOIC, without having to write too much code (or any code at all for that matter). The main reason why we’re sharing our prototype so early on in the process is to get your feedback and ideas about it, so make sure to use the Disqus box at the bottom to tell us what you think!
For its part, here is what the Q&A site looks like:
All questions and answers that had been posted on stack.stoic.com by Thursday last week have been migrated to the new site. Comments have been migrated too, but are not yet displayed on the user interface. Authentication is not implemented either, hence it looks like you’re logged as me (lucky you). And posting and editing have yet to be turned on (don’t try to impersonate me). Nevertheless, navigation and sorting are working, and so do tags and users. The list of badges is live, but badges themselves have yet to be implemented.
The question page looks pretty good (Cf. What is STOIC?). I’m especially proud of the way we’ve integrated a markdown editor into it. Just go at the bottom of the page and start typing your answer using the markdown syntax. If you don’t know it, click on the help button on the right (question mark). This is a great example of how technical documentation will be embedded into the product and the user interfaces it generates.
I’m also really happy about the way we’ve implemented tags. Check the marketing tag for example, and see how the list of questions gets filtered to only show questions with that tag. Yesterday, François added a new control for it, which will be used in the question editing form. It looks positively gorgeous, pretty much like everything the guy does!
As we’re building STOIC Answers and our new website, we’ll carefully document our progress and show you samples of code used to build it all. Later on, these two projects will be used for our training and internship programs. Also, the entire website will be offered as a template that you can use to build your own website. It will include the following features:
Now, I’m going to finish migrating all the contents from stoic.com.
Fun stuff!
We just re-designed our home page, including a link to the Kickstarter campaign.
Over the past week, we’ve interacted with a few hundred potential users for the STOIC platform. Their feedback on the product and our website has been amazingly consistent: great idea, beautiful user interface, nice website, but where are the use cases?
We heard you loud and clear and spent this afternoon crafting a few use cases based on what our early adopters are doing or planning to do with our product. As projects go live, we will add more details and a few success stories. The list of use cases is now on our home page and includes:
If you have other uses cases in mind, drop us a line!
Thanks to our marketing campaign, we’re managing to keep our momentum, and the feedback we’re getting from registered users is nothing short of amazing. We’re starting to collect some quotes that will eventually be published on our website. If you have some you’d like to share, please send them our way. Here are some samples of the ones we got so far:
“Sounds great!”
“Very nice idea!”
“This sounds like a great idea.”
“Looks awesome!”
“Congrats! Looks awesome.”
“Cool!”
“That’s pretty cool looking.”
“What you guys are doing looks very, very, very cool.”
“Wow that’s really cool. Great name, nice concept. Congrats.”
“One thing is certain, this is a very ambitious idea, I hope you nail it…”
“Keep up the good work!”
“In the future, everyone will be making apps in some way or another.”
