A few days ago, we took a break from developing our own products and participated in SocialText’s Widget Wednesday, a “distributed hackathon for widgets and mashups.” All this means is that SocialText invited companies to participate in a day of coding micro-applications that would make use of their newly released OpenSocial Widget API. SocialText Widgets are simple tools that sit on your SocialText Dashboard, a personalized homepage for your corporate life, and are analagous to Google Gadgets which sit on your iGoogle homepage — in fact, they leverage Google’s gadgets.* API.

The hackathon was “distributed” in that all the participating teams stayed at their respective company locations and communication was done via an IRC chatroom and dedicated conference calls. For goodwill, SocialText organized it as a competition in which the winning team would win a gift certificate toward kiva.org.

After the opening conference call shenanigans, we dove right into coding. Now, I love what I’m currently working on for Backboard, but getting to work on a miniature side-project was very refreshing. I got to play with technologies I hadn’t yet explored and learned how to make and deploy widgets. One of the tricky things about creating a widget is that it doesn’t sit on your site, so we had to do some refining of our own API in order to format and grab the data we wanted to display. After that, the rest was fun and easy: it turns out that making a widget is as simple as wrapping a little HTML and JavaScript in XML file.

At 4:30 pm (the “deadline” to turn in our projects) we dialed back into the conference call to join the show and tell session and presented our three completed Widgets. “My Backboards” is simply a listing of your backboards with recent activity. “Get Feedback” allows you to upload a document, set permissions, and create a backboard all within the widget. “LOLPirates,” Jim’s masterpiece, cycles through incredibly cute pictures of cats dressed up as pirates. Like Fluffy-beard here.

For young ambitious companies, it’s often hard to be the treated as the underdog, but at Increo we draw confidence from the supportive startup community and believe in giving back in any way we can. Our participation in Widget Wednesday was just one example of our philosophy — we fostered relationships with other startups and simultaneously strengthened Backboard and SocialText Dashboard.

This weekend I sat down and tackled the RAM problem: the amount of memory it takes the server to generate a single page of a website.

For Backboard, we have our server set up to allocate just 16 MB of RAM to PHP for the execution of each request. This allows us maximize the number of Apache processes we can run on a single server and thus maximize the number of users we support. To do this, though, means that the site has to be pretty light on its memory requirements.

Backboard, as a CakePHP application, has a theoretical minimum requirement for RAM: namely, the amount needed to execute a base installation of Cake. In our testing, this falls between 4 and 6 MB. The goal, of course, is to minimize anything above and beyond this.

Here are some concrete steps you can take to limit the RAM needs of your site:

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Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to provide an occasional window into the more technical side of Increo’s products and share some of the more interesting challenges we’ve faced and problems we’ve solved with the greater web developer community.

The topic this week is Flash 10, but please let us know if there is another technical aspect of Backboard that intrigues you and you want to know more about!

Now, to the story:

Starting a few weeks ago, we began hearing some intermittent reports from users that they could no longer create a Backboard by uploading a file. They said they kept clicking the “Select File” button and nothing happened. 

We were understandably disturbed, as the ability to create Backboards is rather critical to the site… but despite numerous attempts, we were unable to reproduce the problem. We were busily working on brand new Backboard functionality, and the reports were infrequent enough that we chalked it up to a potential incompatibility with another browser plugin. Or maybe they just had Flashblock installed and didn’t realize it? Yep, that had to be the problem.

Flash matters because we use the excellent open-source SWFUpload package to handle document uploads on Backboard. This allows us to not only customize the appearance of the upload buttons themselves, but also display informative progress bars as the file is transferred. Being a tight-knit combination of Flash and JavaScript, SWFUpload takes a bit of work to configure and integrate, but the results are well worth it.

A week ago, we located a computer that exhibited the problem, and it was immediately clear that it was an issue we could no longer ignore: the other Flash that we use on the site worked fine, but the Select File button did nothing when clicked.

After a quick check on the SWFUpload forums for news of recent incompatibilities, the cause was immediately apparent. Unfortunately, the solution was anything but…

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We’re excited to announce a new release of Backboard with features suggested by the Backboard community.

Leave markup directly on a document
Now you can mark up Backboard documents just as you would a paper draft or proof. The tried-and-true red pen makes it easy to suggest the author move a diagram “just a little bit to the left”.
Learn more about document markup

Email Integration
Copy Backboard (create@getbackboard.com) on your next team email, and attach the file you’d like feedback on. We’ll create a Backboard and reply all to your email with a link. Your whole team can leave feedback in one central location. If your team member is slow to get the hint and replies to the email thread, we’ll capture his response as well.
Note: Backboard-by-Email will only work if you have signed up for an account on Backboard.

Backboard Express
Backboard Express is a lightweight desktop application that allows you to create Backboards from your desktop. Just drag the file you would like feedback on to the application icon, and we’ll walk you through the process of customizing and sharing your Backboard. Backboard Express is available for Mac OS X and Windows platforms.
Get Backboard Express

Every time I find a bug in our development version of Backboard a little parade goes on in my head.  Or I’m at the circus and I’ve just knocked over an impossible milk bottle pyramid.  I’ve found a flaw that one of our users won’t have to.  It feels great.

As the Business Analyst intern here at Increo, it’s been a wild ride.  I’ve marketed and promoted, I’ve made a screencast video for the Backboard homepage, I’ve represented the company at a marketing forum, and I’ve written about Backboard in blurbs and pieces like this.  That’s all been a blast—but most new and maybe most rewarding has been helping develop Backboard through bug testing.  I’ve joined my co-workers in the eternal struggle to root out errors by hitting the different browsers (cough…IE) with all I’ve got.  And like a fine wine, my appreciation for the process has matured as I’ve realized just how much of a team we really are.  None of us are done until everyone has completed their assigned tasks—and tasks are passed around because of the varying experience and expertise of our team.  All the while I sit, wide-eyed, and hope to feed the Backboard team more and more bugs to seek and destroy.

Beyond finding bugs, I get to partake in our discussions about what we want for the site and for our users.  And it’s cool to think that my suggestions and opinions might touch the lives of people around the world.  Before I start dreaming big though, I should get back to the grind because we have a release to put out.  And I’ll promise this: It’ll be a great one.

The Backboard team has been hard at work on a new set of Backboard features based on your feedback. The new Backboard allows you to do more than the original, but we have done our best to ensure your experience is still so easy you could create Backboards and leave feedback in your sleep.

Enhanced Security
We understand that some documents are more confidential than others, and may need additional measures in place to ensure their security. Now you can specify one of three different security levels for your Backboards.

1. Open to anyone who knows the URL (Standard security) - This security level makes it quick and easy to get feedback from collaborators. We protect your Backboard by locating it at a difficult to guess URL–so difficult that today’s computers would require thousands of years to break in.
2. Requires a secret Access Key - We protect your Backboard by including a secret Access Key in the invitation email. Each viewer must enter the Access Key before he or she can see your Backboard.
3. Restricted to people I invite - We protect your Backboard by requiring all viewers to log into their own confirmed, password-protected Backboard accounts, and then allow access to your Backboard only to the people you’ve authorized. This security level provides the maximum security for your Backboards and requires a nominal monthly fee.

Better Sharing Support
Sharing a Backboard shouldn’t be difficult. Check out Backboard Groups, which make it easy to share multiple Backboards with the same project team and Address Book Import to get your contacts from Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Multiple Versions
After getting feedback, it is often important to make changes to your file and request thoughts on the new version. Backboard now supports multiple versions of the same document–as many as you need to get your work just right.

Request Approval
Select this option while you’re creating your Backboard, and the contacts you share with will be asked not only to provide feedback, but also to approve your document. This allows you to make sure you have the go-ahead from your team before proceeding.

Premium Plans
While Backboard will always make its basic functionality available for free, we are making certain features (maximum security and larger file uploads) available for a low monthly fee. A premium account also grants you the license to use your Backboard for business purposes. Need your entire team to create secure Backboards or Backboards from large files? Simply choose a Team or Office account.

Since our launch just over a week ago, we have received a lot of great feedback on Backboard, with most people excited by the idea, but left wanting more. More security, more file support, more tightly integrated comments, and more moderation options for Backboards.

We agree, and are working to deliver on these requests over the coming months.

Today, I’m excited to announce the first round of feature improvements to Backboard.

More file support - Along with JPG, GIF, and PNG, we have added support for three popular image file formats: BMP, TIFF, and most importantly, Photoshop files (PSD). Many graphics designers have requested the ability to directly upload their source files, instead of having to Save them For Web, first. This is now supported!

More moderation support - Addressing what was by far our most common request, it is now possible to delete Backboards that you have created and no longer need. Click on My Backboards and then click the X next to the Backboard you want to delete. 

This release also brings many small changes and bug fixes to all parts of the site, so your Backboard experience should be much smoother.

What else do you think we should add or change? Let us know by posting a comment below, or getting in touch!