Update: Speed, Chicago, Hosting, and Hooze
Ethan, Lewis and John just had our weekly Wagn meeting. Justin will be joining us next week. We intend to send out an updates like this after each meeting [or two], as part of focusing more attention on the Wagn community (that would be you!).
- Recently we've made a *lot* of progress on performance (server- side averages down from 2-3 seconds to ~300 milliseconds on connectipedia.org!). And browser compatibility will be greatly improved in 0.10.3, bringing IE6, IE7 and Safari up to nearly par with Firefox (we're also starting to look at Chrome; anyone know how we're doing in Opera?).
- When the three of us were together in Chicago earlier this fall we got clear that we want to put a lot of attention on Wagneers -- to grow a community of people who build stuff in Wagn. This remains important to us, and, we've realized that a good end-user experience is just as important. So in the near term we will focus on fixing bugs and polishing up things that will make Wagn smooth and wonderful for regular users.
- By the time we release Wagn 1.0 we certainly want it to be easy for people to download and install. But for now, we're going to focus more intently on our hosting and consulting, both to build up our own Wagneering chops, and to get some income flowing.
So, new draft pricing is up at Hosting and Consulting. We want to make sure this works for current and potential Wagneers, so if the prices seem prohibitive in general, or for you in particular, let us know! We are open to adjusting the pricing to get the right balance, as well as to making special deals with people whose work we want to support.
(There will be no rate changes for existing users - and we would never do that without consulting with people first.)
Tangential Tidbit - Justin will be focusing on Wagn now. After he spent a few months working hard to secure funding for Hooze, we have made the sad but we think good decision to let Hooze go. We may come back to a project like that later, but it would be a fresh start.