tiinker blog

Goodbye

Alex — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:08:45 +0000

We’re sorry to announce that tiinker will be shutting down in the next few days.

It’s been great fun and we’ve learnt a heap, but it seems that there just isn’t space for a personalising news aggregator to grow large. We still think personalisation is the future, but the eventually successful implementation will probably be at the news sources, the online faces of the newspapers and media companies, or possibly a large content aggregator. The power of the news brands is strong, with good reason. Future combinations of trusted editorial with intelligent personalisation will provide a very compelling source of information, but for now the traditional media seem reluctant to pursue this approach.

Thanks to all our users for joining us thus far.

The tiinker team.

Moving home

Alex — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:07:30 +0000

We’re back online. Flexiscale eventually recovered our server, but we took the opportunity to move tiinker to Slicehost, something we were mere days away from doing anyway. We’ve recently re-implemented tiinker’s data storage with an object database, rather than the traditional relational database. The move was a bit of a rush so we haven’t finished performance tuning yet, but already tiinker is more responsive.

We’ve learnt a lesson with tiinker’s various hosting infrastructures. When moving to Flexiscale we thought the ability to switch instances on and off on demand (and not pay for switched-off instances) would be really useful, but we far overestimated how much we’d be doing that. tiinker experiences a fairly stable load so there’s no need for quick scaling with demand. In particular, there’s no call for scaling back down. We now prepay slicehost monthly, but similar hardware is about half the cost, more than offsetting any amount we could have saved by switching off Flexiscale instances in quiet periods.

Sorry for the outage, folks

Alex — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:43:49 +0000

Our apologies that tiinker has recently been unavailable. We’re having trouble with our hosting provider and a timezone difference plus the weekend is making resolution a slow process.

We’ll update here when tiinker is back online.

BarCamped

Alex — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:30:36 +0000

BarCampSydney3 was a great success. Two days of engaging presentations, discussions, networking and fun. Oleg and I both went along. Highlights for me included the paper airplane workshop/fight, a sweet demo of the Arduino platform from Marcus (control your lights via IM!), and people enjoying the speed dating networking session I ran.

Great photos of the weekend from many photographers at flickr.

BarCampSydney 3 — April 5/6

Alex — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 04:38:13 +0000

BarCampSydney v3 is on next weekend, April 5 & 6, at the UNSW Roundhouse.

BarCamp is an intense community event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate.

I went along to Sydney’s second BarCamp last year and had a fantastic time. It’s great for meeting bright and adventurous Sydney technologists.

More info at the BarCampSydney blog, and you can register your interest here (it’s free).

P.S. Jobreel is a proud sponsor.

Aussie tech jobs — a brief diversion

Alex — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:53:14 +0000

We took a brief detour down at Deep Grey Labs these past two weeks. We’ve been hanging out a fair bit with other entrepreneurs and technologists in Sydney and noticed that almost every time a group of entrepreneurs and technologists get together there is much complaining about how hard it is to find good people (especially for short gigs), and whenever talented people are seeking cool places to work they complain of the avalanche of boring, faceless job ads in the traditional places.

So we decided to do something about it: enter Jobreel.

Jobreel is a targeted job board, aimed squarely at the top end of the Australian technology industry. Anonymous recruiter ads are not allowed – every post on Jobreel names the employing company so job-seekers know exactly what’s in store (inspired by Joel). This hugely reduces the number of ads that will be posted, compared with somewhere like Seek, so ads will be better able to stand out from this small crowd. Jobreel will be promoted to the cream of Australian talent at conferences, interest groups and other places good techies hang out. (Read more on the FAQ).

We hope Jobreel will help innovative Australian technology companies and great technologists come together, and make the Australian tech industry a little more discoverable. Advertising is currently free while we get started, and it will stay free for early birds for a limited time.

Feedback breeds feedback

Alex — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:52:32 +0000

We pushed out another update today in response to some of the feedback we’ve been receiving — specifically to give you more feedback. Next to each story you see on tiinker you’ll now find a little orange bar indicating how interesting we think the story is to you; a little insight into what tiinker is thinking. You can can use this to guide your ratings and help tiinker learn.

You’ll probably notice that you don’t see all the top-rated articles first; a few more lowly rated stories will be scattered around. We do this on purpose to provide some variety between the various topics that have different levels of interest. If we didn’t, you might get all the stories from one topic area in a huge monotonous bunch, followed by a bunch from a second, and so on. We found it to be much more engaging to have stories from a range of (personalised) topics on each page, as discussed earlier.

We also made a great improvement to the look and feel of stories sent by email, and you can now choose to have stories emailed to you daily, weekly, or not at all.