Behind BigNumbr

Standing by…

Fred B. — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:00:48 +0000

Activity on the project has been on hold for some time now. We didn’t make a lot of buzz around the service and it remained silent.

I don’t know yet if I want to put more energy on Bignumbr but I’m more and more thinking about open sourcing to give it for free to the Rails community. There are few open source Rails projects out there, so maybe that could be a good idea…

NEW: BigNumbr General RSS Feed

Fred B. — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:10:13 +0000

I’ve just added a RSS feed for “all numbers”. You can subscribe to at the following address: http://beta.bignumbr.com/feed/.

For the moment, you can’t get a feed on user’s numbers. That will come in time.

Public Beta is Live

Fred B. — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:34:54 +0000

We just decided to go for a public beta and launch the site. It has been kept back stage too long time.

www.bignumbr.com is a new web service and collaborative portal that uses “big” numbers as an intuitive way to search, index and share information.

How many teeth an elephant has during it’s life? Even such a trivial information can be found on many places of the internet… but it is usually lost in large pieces of prosaic blurb. By republishing this information on www.bignumbr.com, anyone can make it entertaining for others and much easier to find and compare. Simplified factoids are nothing new but the bignumbr service makes it even easier to use any kind of available numeric data by allowing users to link back any number to it’s original source (web address, news source, book, you name it).

This Bignumbr makes only a small portion of all the functionalities available. The main goal for the beta 1 of this new service is to record opinions and search for proofs of usefulness. We are pretty sure that a place full of carefuly evaluated data can meet a lot of attention from professional, scholastic and individual users. Please give it a try and report to us.

The product is not finished and we have a lof of axes of development in mind. Enjoy.

Private Beta is On Going

Fred B. — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:32:23 +0000

We decided to start with a private beta before launching the service. We asked some people to test the service and get early feedback. We’ll be launching right after that private beta

Stay tuned.

Performance Improvements with Mongrel

Fred B. — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:30:42 +0000

Today, I switched BigNumbr from a SCGI-based deployment to Mongrel and the performance boost is just amazing.

Mongrel is the deployment architecture of choice for Rails applications. It’s more than recommended!

Beta is Getting Close

Fred B. — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:27:56 +0000

We’re getting close to a public beta now. We’ve been working today to cut any feature that didn’t work and that is not essential to the beta.

We also worked on the front page of BigNumbr. A fun and addictive one. The front page simply shows a random number every 5 seconds. It’s like watching a TV feed.

More interesting, this design is already webclip compliant!

Clone, clone

Fred A. — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:02:49 +0000

I just spent half an hour adding numbrs found on the french national statistics bureau. The CLONE feature that we have designed proved to be an amazing way to post a lot of data. THIS IS A KILLER FEATURE.

just add numbrs

Fred A. — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:39:16 +0000

Now that the Alpha runs quite smoothly, we are going to spend July on so-called “content” by adding numbrs to our existing database. As expected, the interweb is filled with sources for digital data but they will have to be carefully selected because they will “shape” the style of the full service. Did I say “boring”?. The number of ambulances registered in Albania from 2000 to 2005 is a good example: we all have fun with Albania (or Elbonia, depending on your comics references) but will those value prove to be useful? We are not exactly targetted to ambulance specialists. Let’s balance between the land area of Bolivia and the duration of the sexual intercourse of slugs. BTW, we are going to promote the alpha from July 15…

Getting Real

Fred B. — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:00:13 +0000

This blog is a great place to talk about our development strategy. Our objective was to produce the app very quickly. Since we’re both have day jobs, time is a constraint. So we had to find a way to go forward very quickly.

A couple of month ago I read the e-book Getting Real from the folks at 37signals. It summarize perfectly the good way of working on that kind of projects. And if I was already applying most of their recommendation that was a great reading that gave me the will to do the project.

Needless to say that BigNumbr is written with Ruby on Rails — the productive framework. And it’s not a myth, according to my time tracking sheet, the cumulated time I’ve already spent on the app is… just 31 hours.

That’s just incredible.

The First Alpha Screenshot

Fred B. — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 21:46:18 +0000

What a month… It’s the first time I’m writing an entry to the BigNumbr blog. Actually, I’ve been quite busy to work on the app so the other Fred had more opportunities to write something here.

But anyway, the app is going well and we’re slowly getting close to a public beta version. The alpha version is running quite well and I’m happy to show you one of the first screenshots of the app.

I’m sure the design will evolve in the future and not all feature we have in mind will be release for the beta. We want to be public as soon as possible to get feedback from users.