16bugs

I’ll improperly use this page to announce a new product we just launched. ;)

Yesterday, we launched “*Pagety*”:http://pagety.com/.
We opted for a stealth launch during the week-end and will try to get some good coverage at the start of the week.

*What is Pagety?*
To put it simply, Pagety is a cross between a CMS and a hosting platform.
There’s no reason to uncouple those two functionalities which are vital to every business: a way to easily manage your website and a reliable place to host it.
What’s better than managing both from the same place?

You can read the “full announcement”:http://blog.wonsys.net/posts/4-launching-pagety/ on our “company blog”:http://blog.wonsys.net/.

In other news, “16bugs”:http://16bugs.com/’ first birthday is nearing — just a couple of days away — and there’ll be a present for all our premium users.
So if you haven’t upgraded your plan, yet, this is the time! :)

I’ve just got an email from our data center saying our server will be down for a period spanning from 15 minutes to 1 hour on April 14th.
No clue was given as to the time the downtime is scheduled at.

Meanwhile, you can add 16bugs to “your Twitter friends”:http://twitter.com/16bugs and you’ll be notified about scheduled and unscheduled downtime in the future.

During the past few days 16bugs has seen two long awaited additions concerning attachments:

# we all know how inconvenient it was to being able to attach a file only when submitting a new bug. You can now attach a file to a comment, too!
# To make sure you enjoy this new feature, upload limits have been bumped a bit for those of you on paid plans. These will definitely be upped again in the near future, so don’t worry and indulge as you see fit.

In other news, 16bugs’s first birthday is just around the corner. I can’t say much, except this could be the right time to move to a paid plan…

Just a quick update to let you all know that we’ve added support for time zones.

Many of you have got developers spanning different time zones, plus it’s much more convenient to see the time a bug was submitted in your time zone rather than UTC.
So you can now select a time zone in “your profile”:http://user.16bugs.com/profile and have times displayed using it.

Also, you can now decide wether or not to display the white border around the logo.
Just go to your company’s administration page and change that option to suit your needs.

We know “job boards”:http://jobs.16bugs.com/ are all the rage lately, so I thought: “Why not add a job board to 16bugs?”

16bugs has thousands of developers who signed up for the service, so this seems like the right place to have a job board. Isn’t it?

So here is “*16coders*”:http://jobs.16bugs.com/, 16bugs’s “job board”:http://jobs.16bugs.com/.
Postings are as low as $75 for 30 days and until the end of the year, if you submit a job and then send an email to support at 16bugs dot com referencing to your transaction and your 16bugs company name, an extra month will be added to your subscription. And if you’re on a free plan, you’ll get a month free.
So 12 jobs sent = 12 free months on 16bugs, not bad, right?

During the past months, PayPal has had occasional issues like, for example, not notifying the app after a payment is made. Overall, it works fine, but every now and then, it happens.
No biggie, of course, I simply had to manually renew the account being affected by this problem. But you know, it’s always better to have everything run smoothly.
This is why I started looking for alternatives.

PayPal is very popular and most people feel safe about using it, so I had to look for an equally _trustable_ alternative.
No wonder I started thinking about the recently launched “*Google Checkout*”:https://checkout.google.com/.

“Google Checkout”:https://checkout.google.com/ seems to be a great choice: has a lot of great features, low fees and it’s from Google, which makes it feel a tad more secure.

So the whole point of this post is: would you feel comfortable using it?
Should we switch to Google Checkout, we wouldn’t go cold turkey, so you’d still be able to use PayPal, but we’d rather not have two gateways running at the same time.
Unless, of course, PayPal stop forgetting about pinging our app… ;)

It’s been a while since this blog was last updated and about the same amount of time since a new feature was announced, but let me asure you 16bugs is up and running and doing very well.

In the past months, as I said, there hasn’t been any new announcements, because, instead of working on _big_ features, the focus was on small improvements that should make your experience better.
For example, 16bugs now sports nicer URLs, there’s a new category (Testing) which was requested by a few people in the forum, you can now view bugs by developer and see the last news from this blog in “your dashboard”:http://user.16bugs.com/user. And more changes were made under the wood.

Now, I’d like to focus on a few new features that will make 16bugs much more valuable to you. And I’d also like to know what you think about the features I have in mind and/or if you have any requests to make.

Some of the features I’ve been thinking about for quite a long time are:

* *custom domains:* instead of company.16bugs.com, you can use bugs.mycompany.com
* *SSL:* use HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to make you feel more comfortable about 16bugs
* *RSS in a river-of-news flavour:* a user suggested to have a list of activities in the feeds, instead of a list of bugs (i.e. _bug X was updated_, _new comment on bug Y_, etc.)
* *better attachments management:* at the moment, you can only submit an attachment when submitting a bug. You cannot update it or upload it after the bug is created
* *API:* the API is there and a few people are already using it, but it’s still not official and I think it would need some more work to be done before announcing it

So, what do you think?

BTW, you can now subscribe to 16bugs News by email.

A feature that was highly requested soon after launch and that was recently requested again is to show the bug’s ID to allow easy tracking and communications.

I’ve just deployed an update to do just that.
Should you see some strange things, just refresh the page a couple of times to get the new version of the CSS.

After quite a long time, anonymous submissions have just landed.

If you’re on a paid plan, you’ll now be able to set submit permissions to allow anyone to submit a bug.
Users will still be allowed to login/signup right from the submit page and they’re encouraged to do so, but it’s not mandatory if you don’t want to.

Generally speaking, it’d be much better to sign up, since you’re then able to follow up and track all the bugs you submit on “16bugs”:http://16bugs.com, but I’ve noticed on a “project of mine”:http://noted.finotto.org, that a few people prefer not to send a bug, if they have to signup.

We haven’t had an update in quite a long time, so this is just a quick post to let you know that today I deployed a couple of little updates and that I’m working on some new, quite juicy features.

The quick updates regards email notifications:
* The email that is sent when a bug is updated now contains a bit more informations (just like the RSS feed)
* An email is sent when a new comment is submitted and, of course, it contains the comment

Plus a couple of bug fixes were included in this update.

And now for the new and juicy features: I’ve been toying a bit with this idea of adding a new plan: the Enterprise plan.
As the name implies, it would be a plan aimed at bigger development teams which needs just a bit more. And as the name implies, it’s gonna cost quite a bit more (it’s *enterprise*, it oughta be pricey ;) ).

Another new feature that is coming quite soon (on paid plans only, sorry) is anonymous submission of bugs.
It’s been quite a highly requested feature and it’s one I think we’d all benefit from.