Hi all, I'm writing to bring you a long-overdue update. The Insoshi founders (including me and my cofounder Long Nguyen) have been busy the past several months working with potential investors to make a software-as-a-service business social network. As anyone who has done it will tell you, dealing with investors is a huge time-sink; moreover, since our proposed enterprise-focused product wasn't built directly on the Insoshi open-source project, we haven't had much time for continuing development. But we have been paying attention, so I'd like to take this chance to address some issues that have been coming up in the discussion group.
Several people have asked for some sort of groups functionality in Insoshi. Unfortunately, after an initial burst of enthusiasm and some brief attempts to implement groups, development and interest waned. We did get one groups contribution, and I'm grateful for that, but the feature came without tests, which means that it has never been merged into Insoshi core. If anyone wants to pick up the groups feature and test it, I'd be happy to accept the patch. There has also been some discussion of Haml and Sass. I'm a big fan of both, and will actually be talking about them at the Silicon Valley Rails meetup next week, but I feel that porting Insoshi to use them would be too big a change at this point. Switching to Haml would break the application for any forks that have made changes to views, and it would also add an extra dependency, which I'd rather avoid. Finally, deviating from plain ERb might present a barrier to anyone looking at Insoshi for the first time, and I'd rather err on the side of caution. If we ever subject Insoshi core to a thorough refactoring, I might reconsider, but for now we'll stick with ERb. In development news, as of today we're releasing a version of Insoshi compatible with Rails 2.2. Our releases are conservative by design; though Rails 2.3 recently came out, we're going to delay a Rails 2.3 Insoshi upgrade until the newest version of Rails has proven its stability in production. Eventually, I hope to update the code to take more advantage of Rails 2.1+ features, especially named scopes, and keeping basic compatibility is a good first step. As usual, you can get the update at GitHub (http://github.com/insoshi/insoshi). Finally, I'd like to close off the open loop from my discussion above about raising money from investors. The venture capital (VC) firm we've been working with looked likely to invest as recently as last month, but a couple weeks ago they told us that, given the continuing turmoil in the markets, they would fund us only if we had a mature product and could show some traction---which, in VC-speak, is a polite way of saying "no". After taking some time to think over our options, Long and I have agreed that we are both better off pursuing other opportunities at this time. We are therefore in the process of winding down the business side of Insoshi, including making some changes (such as merging the demo and developer sites) to streamline our web presence. Where does this leave the Insoshi open-source project? The software as it stands is rock-solid and proven in production for many months. I therefore would feel OK about just leaving it as-is. On the other hand, I understand that many people would like to see Insoshi continue to improve. After working on this project intensely for over a year, I am depleted both financially and physically, so over the next few months I'll be focusing on select consulting and contract work before taking an extended break; if any of you would like to retain my services for Insoshi/Rails consulting or for the implementation of custom features, please contact me off-list to work something out. In the longer run, I have several exciting projects planned, and one in particular will benefit the Insoshi community. Stay tuned for an announcement about that some time in the fall. Cheers, Michael --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Insoshi developer site: http://dogfood.insoshi.com/ Insoshi documentation: http://docs.insoshi.com/ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Insoshi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/insoshi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
