Making Roon Faster
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Last night, I deployed some changes to Roon that made things a lot faster. Drew told me I should write about it, so here we are. I did three things:
Our assets were taking awhile to load because S3 is a tad slow. We use the fantastic asset_sync to serve assets off of S3 instead of Heroku. This is a big performance (and cost) win by itself since Heroku is expensive and is better suited serving dynamic requests.
The main problem here is webfonts. Users can't see any text on our pages until the font loads for the first time. This is kind of a big deal for a blogging app. Even worse, due to iOS security, if you hit Roon in Tweetbot (or any other app using UIWebView), it will have to download it since it doesn't share the system HTTP cache for security reasons. All of this made Roon feel super slow—especially on mobile.
Tearing Up the Carpet
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Someone asked what Markdown parser we use for Roon. Roon uses Redcarpet.
I figured it was worth expanding a bit about this though. Mainly two things Roon does that's sorta unique made possible by the fabulous Redcarpet folks.
We have underline support. As far as I know, we are the only people that support this right now. Here's how you write it:
Parting Ways With Cheddar
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I made this thing called Cheddar last year. I'm pretty proud of it. I wrote why I stopped working on it here. I talked about this whole process at length in Founders Talk episode 38, episode 39, and little in episode 40. (Episode 41 isn't about me. Could have sworn I took over that show.)
Anyway, I posted that I was selling Cheddar a few months back. This has been a very interesting process. I learned a lot and met some really cool people. My biggest take away is most people just wanted to find out a lot because they were curious and were just wasting my time.
Today, the money from the Cheddar sale cleared in my back account. It's official. I don't own Cheddar any more. My good friend Josh Long owns it now. He has some big plans for it. He'll be posting about it soon. I'll tweet it out when he does.
Let’s Hope
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In case you've been living under a rock, you know that iOS 7 isn't beautiful. Everyone is talking about how bad it is. Jony Ive Redesigns Things and Episode 1 of Mother Futon News are my favorites.
Anyway, there are countless quotes just like this one:
iOS 7 is so far from done that maybe there is a story here, in that Apple has a mountain of work ahead to get iOS 7 ready for actual release this fall (presumably, coincident with the release of new iPhone and iPad devices). But to judge iOS 7 beta 1 as you would a release version is silly.
New Homepage
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Last night I updated my blog website. Now that I'm using Roon for my blog, I wanted to update soff.es to pull in my latest post and show off some of the stuff I'm working on.
We have big plans for developer stuff on Roon, but for now I'm just using a little Ruby script to pull my latest post.
Pretty simple. We'll be rolling out real documentation and such soonish.