All hands on deck

I just read in Wired magazine that TextDrive is shutting down again. TD is where the ActionsForge and FreeCounter applications live, and on March 14th, they will be no more.

Remember that fundraiser I was trying to rally interest in to pay for development of a new ActionsForge? We need to get serious about that and figure out how to fund this sooner, rather than later. I have a daughter in college, another about to graduate high school, and can’t really afford my own time to build something like this for the community. If I can be compensated for the effort, naturally I will build it and maintain it.

Please spread the word about http://actionsforge.com/next and if anyone has any bright ideas (not Kickstarter) about how we can get people to put their money where their mouth is, I would love to hear about it.

Thanks,

Walter


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I must admit i am feeling very helpless on this issue, I like a lot of people owe a lot to Walter and other for the work they have done to support this forum and Action Forge.

I maybe wrong, yes money is important but with only 9 days to go i suspect “free” manpower to get things done is also a key ingredient in this. I was expecting this thread to be bombarded with responses, but nothing… so i assume there is something going on in the background!!!

I Hope!

I will increase my pledge.

Thx Walter,

John


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so i assume there is something going on in the background!!!

There may well be but please lets not everybody assume this.

Be vociferous with your offers as much help is required to make sure that we are not left ActionsForgeNext-less. BTW I know that is bad grammar!

David


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BTW I know that is bad grammar!

As an American - who are the undisputed Masters of the english language -
I’d say that’s unpossible!


Ernie Simpson


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Walter,

What does TextDrive provide? I’m not sure what needs to be done to “recreate” it - or if they would provide a transition.

Would any of the open source venues work? Or any special hosting? What’s needed?

Thanks


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As an American, and an Anglophile, I have often nodded my head in agreement at Churchill’s summation of the situation: “Two countries, divided by a single language”.

Thanks for your encouragement, folks. I’ve had some discussion with Softpress off-list, and we are working on a plan. The real issue here is that the server we were on was seriously legacy, and the entire code base of the application needs to be rewritten to support a modern version of PHP, even if we don’t go with the all-singing, all-dancing Rails version this time. Hard to say what would be more work.

Walter

On Mar 5, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Ernie Simpson wrote:

BTW I know that is bad grammar!

As an American - who are the undisputed Masters of the english language -
I’d say that’s unpossible!


Ernie Simpson


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TextDrive provided industrial-quality hosting on Solaris servers, backed by the ZFS filesystem for zero data loss ever. Basically, they took a bunch of smaller machines, bonded them together into a supercomputer, then virtualized that out into bite-sized chunks, one per account. Imagine if you had a tenth of a percent of a Cray, but if your site got busy, you could “burst” into a much larger percentage of the total computing power for minutes or moments at a time.

I can still access my databases and disk, so I have an off-ramp. It’s just a real pain, because that server had been running great for years and years, and now I find out (with days to spare) that I have to move. No note from the host, no warning, just read about it in Wired, for crying out loud.

There’s a separate issue, in that the entire site is based on MyActiveRecord, which was written in 2005, and has only been patched and bug-fixed since then. It doesn’t run without spewing a zillion errors a minute (to the point that the error log rotates because it gets too large several times a day) under anything later than PHP 5.2.x. I have a new PHP framework, but it is not a drop-in replacement for MAR, more of a “spiritual cousin”. It’s a lot of work to put this site on another server that is running the current version of PHP.

Walter

On Mar 5, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Thane Hubbell wrote:

Walter,

What does TextDrive provide? I’m not sure what needs to be done to “recreate” it - or if they would provide a transition.

Would any of the open source venues work? Or any special hosting? What’s needed?

Thanks


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It’s a lot of work to put this site on another server that is running the current version of PHP.

So get your pledges made!

D


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I’ve bumped my pledge up and tossed together a piece about this on my blog.

Any chance we could get Softpress to send an email out and highlight this issue? When they briefly mentioned and linked to Backdraft in their last newsletter, my sales doubled during that month. There are a lot of people who use Freeway and ActionsForge who may not frequent Freewaytalk.


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I was about to say deepest pockets and suggest that Softpress get involved. I can’t offer any technical help but good for a pledge.

As a diversion, Walt, two nations divided by a common language goes back to at least Oscar Wilde—about whom I’m something of an expert as you can see from web site (built with Freeway of course).—the Churchill attribution is the most tenuous:


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Thanks for the kind words and urgency, Caleb. That’s well said!

Walter

On Mar 5, 2014, at 4:09 PM, John Cooper wrote:

I was about to say deepest pockets and suggest that Softpress get involved. I can’t offer any technical help but good for a pledge.

As a diversion, Walt, two nations divided by a common language goes back to at least Oscar Wilde—about whom I’m something of an expert as you can see from web site (built with Freeway of course).—the Churchill attribution is the most tenuous:
Language


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Thanks for the kind words and urgency, Caleb. That’s well said!

It’s the least I could do.

Not to get all emotional, but I can’t imagine what my life would be like without Freeway and the community here. I wouldn’t be doing this web design as a career, that’s for sure. :slight_smile:


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Some discussions need a bad guy (probably). So let me be the one just for a second.

There are round-about 300 Actions in the forge. For my actual project (using FW to develop a WordPress Theme) I use 5 of them (like in my other projects, too):

  1. CrowBar
  2. HTML5
  3. (not sure at the moment) Advanced Inline Style Mover/ID to class
  4. Template Helper
  5. Remove Paragraph (if using annoying internal MarkUp)

which will end up in 2% of available ones.

So if 300 actions will have a total cost of 25k, this is 85$ for each of them. My total pledge should be then 450$ which is possible (am not sure 200 at the moment?).

Let’s go through my list again:

Why do I need

  1. CrowBar

To prevent me from wrapping p-TAG. Why is this not part of the FW core?

  1. Remove Paragraph

Above written.

  1. HTML5

Are we still in the past? Part of the core as well? Yeahh.

So Template Helper and Inline stuff manipulating left, correct?

Both actions are not necessarily part of the core - so external stuff to pay:

170$ correct?

I wonder what your calculation would be if you go through your current project? I know some that have more actions then items in it. You now know why they avoid the forge like the plague?

Summary

Tell me your plans and strategy, start to take the inventory, let me know what you need (graphics, illustrations, images) and do it best off-list to avoid any misconceptions.

If this all is not true, then allow me a last question:

Why is it the lone wolf left alone with it?

Cheers

Thomas


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Hi Walter
For what it’s worth, I’ve just doubled my pledge.

I’m virtually retired these days but I find ActionForge so useful, I’d hate to be without it.

Wild Cottage


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In my mind, anyway, the real value of ActionsForge is having a single point of reference to find Actions, rather than saying "was that Tim’s Action, at freewayactions.com, or Paul’s at actionsworld.com? Or Weaver’s, at the rug shop? (Where is Weaver, anyway?) It’s the network effect in action: one fax machine is worthless, two fax machines are priceless (or Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network rises as the square of the number of its nodes).

I built ActionsForge the first time (for free) at a time when I was building my first framework in PHP, and learning more about object-oriented programming. I was scratching an itch (see above) and teaching myself as I went. I spent hundreds of hours on the project, and built something I am still quite proud of.

The whole point of doing a Kickstarter was to try to afford my own time (which has gotten steadily more expensive) to do this over again in a modern way without cheating myself by spending hours that I couldn’t bill for. I have invested thousands of hours in this community, and I felt like it was only fair that I not be taken for granted if I stepped up again to raise the tide for all boats.

We don’t need the Forge, strictly speaking, at all. We all got along without it until I built it. I had my own “bit bucket” full of Actions, so did anyone else who built them (Tim and Paul have really nice, professional sites for their offerings, Max has an extraordinary amount of tooling around WebYep). It’s just that there isn’t any central place for anyone to look (unless you count asking the list, once again, “where’s that Action that does that thing…”). The same problem may be solved lots of different ways, and if you only look in one or two places (if you know where those places are) you don’t get the whole picture.

That’s the whole value, not in the individual Actions themselves. If everyone drew a line under their own Action usage, I am sure they could do the same sums that you have. But the key is that they wouldn’t all place value on the same set of Actions, even if their list of “core” Actions was as short as yours. And without a central repository, there’s no way they could get that list together except by chance.

Walter

On Mar 6, 2014, at 4:05 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

Some discussions need a bad guy (probably). So let me be the one just for a second.

There are round-about 300 Actions in the forge. For my actual project (using FW to develop a WordPress Theme) I use 5 of them (like in my other projects, too):

  1. CrowBar
  2. HTML5
  3. (not sure at the moment) Advanced Inline Style Mover/ID to class
  4. Template Helper
  5. Remove Paragraph (if using annoying internal MarkUp)

which will end up in 2% of available ones.

So if 300 actions will have a total cost of 25k, this is 85$ for each of them. My total pledge should be then 450$ which is possible (am not sure 200 at the moment?).

Let’s go through my list again:

Why do I need

  1. CrowBar

To prevent me from wrapping p-TAG. Why is this not part of the FW core?

  1. Remove Paragraph

Above written.

  1. HTML5

Are we still in the past? Part of the core as well? Yeahh.

So Template Helper and Inline stuff manipulating left, correct?

Both actions are not necessarily part of the core - so external stuff to pay:

170$ correct?

I wonder what your calculation would be if you go through your current project? I know some that have more actions then items in it. You now know why they avoid the forge like the plague?

Summary

Tell me your plans and strategy, start to take the inventory, let me know what you need (graphics, illustrations, images) and do it best off-list to avoid any misconceptions.

If this all is not true, then allow me a last question:

Why is it the lone wolf left alone with it?

Cheers

Thomas


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In my mind, anyway, the real value of ActionsForge is having a single point of reference to find Actions …

Not only the actions need to be bundled. Thousands of cool written advices here in FWT, numerous examples from the workbench, Tutorials, Videos and even templates which are helpful as well are waiting for a home base.

I have invested thousands of hours in this community, and I felt like it was only fair that I not be taken for granted if I stepped up again to raise the tide for all boats.

The bad guy theory was never meant to blame you or anyone on this planet and believe me or not:

I am the one who knows what you did for us all.

We don’t need the Forge, strictly speaking, at all.

What I could think of is a home base which allows the author to easy maintain the written actions and a clever connection (interface) what ever kind of technique to FreewayPro which informs the user that there are new versions available.

This interface proper developed and integrated into FWP would be worth to introduce as a:

Special, Super Duper Sonder paid small upgraded FreewayPro which we all pay and will be thrown back into the developing of the storage-core.

Those that are asking why a paid upgrade version?

Easy answer:

You don’t have to purchase but it helps you to maintain your own stuff - do it or leave it.

I simply can’t accept anymore that only a handful people are trying to bring a product further while the rest is sitting somewhere behind the bushes.

Enough so far from the bad guy :slight_smile:

Cheers

Thomas


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I managed to get the site running on a Digital Ocean “droplet” server, and it seems to be holding up nicely. I haven’t tried to upload anything yet, but clicking around doesn’t show any egregious errors.

I have about 3 months of free hosting left there on the strength of other Freeway folk signing up under my referral code, so we have some runway before we have to think about what to do next. I still want to put this site on a modern footing, and add some features to make new versions easier to find (imagine if every time you download something, that relationship to you is noted, so a new version of that Action would trigger a ping to you, telling you to upgrade). I don’t want to add features on top of the aging foundation that we have now.

Walter

On Mar 5, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Thane Hubbell wrote:

Walter,

What does TextDrive provide? I’m not sure what needs to be done to “recreate” it - or if they would provide a transition.

Would any of the open source venues work? Or any special hosting? What’s needed?

Thanks


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Did you collect the pledges? I know art the time I pledged you weren’t collecting yet?

Bob


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No I didn’t. I have been looking for a way to do that with the least impact in terms of fees and taxes.

Walter

On Mar 6, 2014, at 4:47 PM, Robert B wrote:

Did you collect the pledges? I know art the time I pledged you weren’t collecting yet?

Bob


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Yeah. That’s the fun part!

Bob


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