Entries for December 2008

My current eCommerce system has been a total failure. I've been watching it with Clicky, and noticed that a lot of people were trying to buy, but couldn't. This is no good, so I decided to take it down today.

This was basically a half-assed system. I took a DNN module and integrated the licensing system with custom code. The main issues that I had were that I could not change the fields that were requested to something more reasonable. Also a lot of people were confused by its navigation. I'm yanking it today, rather than allow it to create even more frustration for me and potential customer.

I'm going to try my hand with FastSpring. Hopefully, this will allow me to outsource this part of my business. This will allow me to concentrate on making my products better, and not having to fiddle with stuff that I'm not familiar with. One feature that I'm looking forward to, is the ability to allow potential customers to pay in their own currency.

I'm going to be resetting the 30 day trial for PainlessSVN 1.1, so everybody will get another 30 days to play with it.

Frustrating, but good learning experience.

I had an interesting day yesterday. I had a bad migraine that lasted until around 7 PM, and that was after taking 6 Excedrin Migraine during the day. I was wide awake by the time the pills took effect, so I just went and worked on furthering PainlessSVN along.

I got the realms working at the level I want at this stage. This version is taking a lot longer than I expected, so I'm only going to show what realms are available. I'll add editing in the next version or so. Here's what I got:

The most interesting part of the night was when I was tracking down a bug when deleting a repository. It appears that some hook scripts try to fire when the repository gets created, or when it gets deleted. On top of that, the hook scripts that fire are different with different versions of Subversion. I ended up just showing a dialog, when one of the hook scripts is locked by another process. Here's the dialog:

In order to get this to work, I had to go and refactor SVNManagerLib, which is basically the "kernel" for a lot of my Subversion related utilities.

I've extended the 50% off sale for PainlessSVN until December 6, 2008. Use the code "black_friday_2008", without quotes, at checkout to get your discount.

Just wanted to let everybody know what I've been working on...

I'm almost done with Realms. A repository uses its Unique IDentifier when there is not an explicit realm. The UUID is basically a GUID.

I've also done some prettifieying of the server info view. Just some subtle UI touches, nothing fancy.

I'm also adding a new action to the server node. I'm adding the ability to set svnserve.exe as a Windows Service.

These things will be released with version 1.1. I just wish I could work on this full time, but PainlessSVN doesn't pay for bills just yet. This means that I have to keep my day job for a while longer. ;)